In 1926, Paule Vézelay invented herself. Born Marjorie Watson-Williams in Bristol, she moved to Paris and became the artist she had always imagined being, brand new name and all. She thrived at the centre of Paris’s swirling avant-garde currents, quickly building a rich community for herself among the hotbed of artistic radicalism and experimentation. She exhibited regularly and found solace in her friendships. But when she returned to Britain at the onset of the second world war, she found herself out of step with its art world and found neither the fame nor the success she had been working towards in Paris.
The RWA in Bristol has brought Vézelay home, hosting the largest exhibition of her work since her death in 1984 at the age of 91. It is only two rooms, but it’s packed with paintings, prints, sculpture, textiles, letters and photographs from her own collection. Moving chronologically through her life and work, the show gives a powerful sense of Vézelay’s fierce, prickly personality.
Even in her very earliest paintings and prints, made while a student at the RWA itself, then at the Slade in London, Vézelay’s style is clear. She was already interested in volume and line, depicting bodies and spaces that spring off the page with dramatic modelling and cross-hatching. Her early paintings are made with a heavy impasto and, although they depict the classic modernist subject of the crowd, they are much more interested in shape and colour than in social commentary.
When she arrived in Paris for the first time in 1920, Vézelay was struck by what was happening there. People including Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder were pushing against the boundaries of visual art, creating new ways of depicting the world abstractly. Vézelay eventually met them all and joined Abstraction-Création, the group that exhibited works grappling with the interplay of abstraction and surrealism.
The RWA’s exhibition includes two sculptures by Vézelay’s peers, one by Calder, one by Marlow Moss. Even though they are only two of the 60-plus works in the exhibition, they give a strong sense of the aesthetic questions Vézelay’s circle was addressing. The echoes of their lines, particularly those of the Calder mobile hanging from the ceiling in the first gallery, are eerily visible in the Vézelay painting hanging below it. Construction. Grey Lines on Pink Ground, 1938, is a large pink colour field with a map of 11 straight lines crisscrossing it. Some lines end in spheres, others have little flags planted in them, and the seemingly random composition comes together to look perfectly balanced – just like Calder’s mobile. There is no record indicating that the two works are related, but both artists were members of Abstraction-Création, so they certainly knew each other.
The letters and photographs add to the sense of Vézelay’s rich community in Paris. One letter, from Sophie Taeuber-Arp, describes the difficulty of doing art with one arm while the other is being pulled into the kitchen, or to the telephone, or off on errands. The challenge of being an artist and a woman was always present for Vézelay, although she was outspoken in her desire to be seen as simply an artist, not a female artist.
She wrote to the British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, saying she had chosen a somewhat androgynous name to avoid “this question of sex [being] dragged into discussions about my work”. Playing in the exhibition is an interview she did with Germaine Greer the year before her death. She pushes back against Greer’s suggestion that she wanted to be mistaken for a man. It was, she said, just the work she was concerned about – making good work regardless of her gender.
When she returned to Britain, Vézelay took an active role in the war effort in Bristol, drawing harsh, dramatic scenes of destruction in the city that marked a brief return to figurative art. She then went back to painting largely abstract work and eventually began designing textiles, some of which are in the exhibition. The curtains that hung in her apartment are there, looking slightly faded around the edges where the light hit them. It’s an intimate, tactile element that, like her letters, evokes a tangible sense of who Vézelay was, in all her complexity.
Her Lines in Space series spanned her time in Paris and her return to England. These works combine sculpture and painting, often featuring threads strung across a canvas to create a sort of relief sculpture that hangs on the wall. At first glance, they look like her other abstract paintings, but a closer examination shows their three-dimensionality. The phrase “lines in space” seems to nicely sum up Vézelay’s artistic ethos: her works all return to this fundamental idea.
The RWA is the perfect venue for this renewed examination of Vézelay’s rich life and work, in the very building where she began to pursue a career as an artist. The exhibition illuminates the dramatic differences in aesthetic sensibility between Paris and Britain in the mid-20th century. Vézelay’s work is distinctly Parisian, fostered and formed in the melee of avant – garde personalities that made Paris the centre of modernism. It’s tempting to wonder how her legacy would have evolved had she returned to Paris after the war, but we must take her as she is: a cosmopolitan 20th-century woman who constructed her identity, and her art, exactly as she wished.
