Paule Vézelay (née Marjorie Watson-Williams) studied at Bristol School of Art, London School of Art and Chelsea Polytechnic. In 1926, she adopted the name Paule Vézelay and moved to Paris, becoming an active member of the Parisian avant-garde and associating with Sophie Tauber-Arp, Jean Arp and André Masson.
Vézelay was one of the first British artists to turn fully to abstraction in the late 1920s, when it was still out of favour in Britain. In 1934, Vézelay was invited to join Abstraction-Création - a collective of abstract artists founded in Paris in 1931 with the aim of promoting and legitimising non-representational art. In 1953 Vézelay joined Le Groupe Espace, an association of geometric abstract artists and architects founded in Paris in 1951. Le Groupe artists were concerned with space in art and were influenced by the pre-war movements of Constructivism and Neo-Plasticism. Vézelay exhibited with them multiple times and presided over the British branch.
