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Contrasted Curves by Paule Vézelay

Contrasted Curves by Paule Vézelay

© the Artist’s Estate. All Rights Reserved 2019/ Bridgeman Images

Paule Vézelay was the adopted name of Marjorie Watson-Williams who was born in Bristol in 1892. She studied painting and etching in Bristol, later moving to London where she attended the Slade School of Art, the London School of Art and Chelsea Polytechnic. She exhibited with the New English Art Club and in 1922 became a member of the London Group which had turned away from naturalism, giving rise to the first British forays into abstraction and futurism. In 1926, she moved to Paris where she adopted the name Paule Vézelay and in 1934 she was invited to join the group 'Abstraction-Creation'. She returned to England in 1939. In 1958, the Tate Gallery put on a retrospective exhibition of 'one of the first British artists to commit themselves totally and irrevocably to the abstract movement.