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English painter and printmaker, born Majorie Watson-Williams. She studied from 1909 to 1912 at Bristol School of Art and from 1912 to 1914 at the London School of Art. She first became known as a book illustrator and printmaker, producing mainly lithographs and wood-engravings. In 1926 she settled in Paris and adopted the name Paule Vezelay. From 1929 to 1932 she lived with André Masson. Her work began in 1929 to be abstract, with lines and shapes floating in a cloudy, atmospheric space. In 1934, partly through friendship with Arp, she joined the Abstraction-Création group, and most of her later paintings were more classical, with clear-cut forms. Her most original contribution to the abstract movement, however, was probably the Lines in Space that she began in 1936: shallow wooden boxes with a spatial network of threads or curving wires. Vézelay returned to England in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of war, and spent her later years in London, working in growing isolation until her work was rediscovered at the end of her life.

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