Paule Vézelay (1892-1985), born in England as Marjorie Watson-Williams, produced a rich and varied body of work and made a decisive contribution to the development of abstraction. She took the name ‘Vézelay’, echoing the graphic purity of the town's cathedral, when she lived in Paris from 1926 to 1939. She played a decisive role in the avant-garde groups and, through her relationship with the painter André Masson, became close to Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans/Jean Arp, whom she accompanied in the Abstraction-Création group. She became involved in non-figurative art, which she exhibited at the ‘Réalités nouvelles’ Salon. On her return to England, she chose to develop paintings, reliefs and textile-based works.
Wednesday 18 December, at 6:30PM
At the Giacometti Lab and live on Youtube
Lecture in French
Guitemie Maldonado is an art historian and art critic who teaches contemporary art history at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her early work on biomorphism between the wars led to monographic studies of artists from the modern period, including Hans/Jean Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Joaquín Torres García, Sonia Delaunay and Henry Moore. She is particularly interested in the notion of the in-between (art-nature, art-science, abstraction-figuration) and has published Mondrian (Hazan, 2005), Le Cercle et l'amibe (CTHS, 2006), and Nicolas de Staël (Citadelles & Mazenod, 2015).
Videos