Major show to celebrate UK’s forgotten female trailblazer of abstract art

Britain’s “first” abstract artist, whose legacy has mostly been obscured because of a combination of sexism and the second world war, is to have her first major exhibition in more than 40 years.

Paule Vézelay, born in Bristol in 1892, moved to Paris where she moved in the same circles as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and created one of the first British abstract works in 1928, a few years before Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore began their experimentations.

Vézelay, who changed her name from Marjorie Watson-Williams upon moving to France in 1926, will be the subject of a retrospective in her home town that will include 60 works spanning her six-decade career.

Simon Grant, the curator of Paule Vézelay: Living Lines at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, said that because she moved to Paris, Vézelay was away from the gaze of the British art world, while the war stymied her ascent and sparked a swift departure from the French capital in the 1930s.

“She struggled because she’d been away for so long … if the second world war wouldn’t have happened, she’d have been in a completely different position. It was just bad timing,” Grant said.

Vézelay moved back to Bristol during the war and painted abstract work that depicted the damage of the Luftwaffe’s bombs, but as she struggled to gain traction in the UK she eventually moved into the world of textile design to earn a living, though she continued to produce abstract work.

There is some debate as to whether Vézelay was the first British abstract artist: her friend Marlow Moss also created work in 1928, and the Vézelay painting from the same year was lost. But Grant said regardless she was a trailblazer.

During the war she helped establish one of the first women’s home guards, and while in Paris she wrote a surrealist film script at a time when she was in a relationship with the French artist André Masson.

“She stands alongside Moore and Hepworth in Britain, but she was also good friends with Taeuber-Arp, who is a major international artist now, and Vézelay has a similar versatility in what she did: paintings, sculpture, textiles, illustrations and poetry. She was dextrous and constantly reinvented herself,” Grant said.

Just before her death at 91, Vézelay did have a moment of recognition: she was interviewed by Germaine Greer for a BBC documentary that billed her as one of the “women of our century”, which came just after a Tate retrospective in 1983.

But in comparison with Moore and Hepworth, who each have institutions named after them and are among the best-known British artists of the 20th century, Vézelay’s work is still relatively unknown.

Grant said art world sexism was one of the factors that limited Vézelay’s career, although she did exhibit in Britain during the 1950s. In a Guardian profile to mark the Tate exhibition, Vézelay said: “Of course, you have to be twice as good as the men to get recognition.”

Grant said: “Vézelay always felt that she wasn’t heard and her position wasn’t established … she did lose out because of a misogynistic atmosphere from certain artists and in the art world. She really did it on her own, she had no assistance. She was a force of nature.”