Paule Vézelay Women of our Century

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Specially chosen programmes from the BBC Archive.

GERMAINE GREER: Paule Vezelay was born in Bristol in 1892.

75 years ago, she decided that she'd become a serious painter

and she's worked virtually every day ever since and still does,

despite increasing frailty, deafness and arthritis.

Some French artist historians have recognised her contribution

to the development of modern art,

but in her native land, Paule Vezelay is still relatively unknown.

She's had only four exhibitions in England since the war.

In 1983, her work was shown in a retrospective at the Tate

that showed how Paule Vezelay gradually abandoned

representational work in the late 1920s

and committed herself totally and irrevocably to the abstract movement.

Benedict Nicolson,

who's usually thought of as the first British abstract painter,

had barely begun to experiment with abstraction at the time.

Paule Vezelay spends her time on developing her work,

rather than promoting herself or competing for public attention.

Her intense fastidiousness has kept her out of the marketplace

and the public eye altogether.

Her work is her life

and she keeps it about her as the living oyster keeps its pearl.

The arbiters of contemporary British taste knew nothing about her.

Some of the many words they used to praise Henry Moore

and Barbara Hepworth could have been spent on her.

Her chosen isolation makes it difficult to talk of influence,

but Paule Vezelay was the most modern, the least provincial,

British artist of her time.

Paule Vezelay lives in London.

She has never married.

She changed her name in homage to the Romanesque church of Vezelay

and in order to identify herself with the Ecole de Paris.

She was born Marjorie Watson-Williams.

When you were exhibiting in England,

you usually exhibited as M Watson-Williams, didn't you?

- Yes. - Did you do this on purpose?

I... It was my family name.

GERMAINE: But you only used the initial mostly and when you wrote,

you signed M Watson-Williams.

And sometimes in the pieces that you wrote,

you refer to yourself as if you were a man.

- I don't think so. - You used...

I've never pretended to be a man.

- Never. - But...

It certainly would have been easier for me as an artist

if I had been a man. It would have been much easier.

You were exhibiting as M Watson-Williams

- and then you changed your name... - Yes, I did.

- ..to Paule Vezelay. - Yes.

And if somebody hears that spoken, it sounds like a masculine name.

And you generally signed P Vezelay,

- didn't you? - Yes.

Was this because you didn't want the question of your sex

- to come into it at all? - I don't see why it should,

but I didn't do it deliberately to avoid the question of sex.

I put Paul with an E on the end,

which was a hint that it was feminine - Paule -

but all that's not important, to my mind.

What is important is the work.

Is it original, is it well done, is it good?

That's what matters.

GERMAINE: Marjorie Watson-Williams went to a private school.

She distinguished herself there. She played hockey and was good at art.

Even then, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

PAULE: I always wanted to draw

and, later on, I wanted to paint, of course.

GERMAINE: And then you went to the Slade

- and left almost immediately. - Yes.

I'd already studied in art schools for two solid years

and I didn't want to be treated as a beginner at the Slade

and they were very old-fashioned, I thought.

They expected you to measure up how many times a man's head

went into his body and all this nonsense

and I was bored to death, so I asked my father if I could leave

and go to study under George Belcher

who was then quite an unknown young artist.

He hadn't even got onto the staff of Punch,

but I saw his drawings reproduced

and they were sensitive and, to my mind, excellent,

and I wanted to be his student.

GERMAINE: But already, at this time, when you were still so young,

you were very independent, making an independent judgment.

PAULE: I wasn't all that young.

- I was sort of about 17 or 18. - That strikes me as very young.

It does now I'm old, but it didn't then.

GERMAINE: Belcher encouraged her to draw from the life

that was going on around her, rather than from studio models,

but even then, hers was not simply an interest

in recording events of everyday life.

Her real concern was with the rhythm of line and mass.

She produced distinctive work in which the influence

of Aubrey Beardsley is rather apparent.

Then the Great War closed the art schools

as her fellow men students went to war.

PAULE: I belong to the generation, all the young men I'd ever known

or danced with, they were all killed in the First World War.

It was a generation of young men, who were wiped right out of my life.

All the students I'd met at the art school, they all joined up.

GERMAINE: Do you think that if they...

that hadn't happened, you would've had a conflict

- at some point? - Oh, I expect I should!

Are you glad you escaped that conflict?

Oh, I'm not glad about anything.

I think it's very nice, if you love a man, to marry and have babies,

very nice for a woman - most women want babies.

There was a time when I would love to have had a baby to cuddle.

I had opportunities to marry,

but it was what my nurse used to call "Mr Right Man".

I wasn't in love with the several people who wanted to marry me

and I didn't want to marry without that element.

GERMAINE: In 1918, when the war was ending,

she held several exhibitions in London.

- Did you get encouragement? - One or two people encouraged me.

- But, otherwise, no. - What about your parents?

My father did, he was quite a good draughtsman himself.

He was a doctor, specialist - nose, throat and ear specialist -

but he drew quite well and he used to go fishing

and if the fish didn't rise, he would take out his sketchbook

and draw the trees or something like that.

- And he was proud of you, was he? - Well, I hadn't done anything

to make him proud of me, but he wanted a bit...he did encourage me.

GERMAINE: Not so her mother, who wanted her attractive daughter

to be done with art schools and come home to Bristol.

Instead, in 1921, Paule Vezelay went to Paris.

She was completely bowled over by what she saw in the Paris galleries.

Her father gave her a small allowance.

I was very hard up in Paris, but I learnt a tremendous lot.

I used to see a period of Braque and Picasso

and various other important people in modern art,

which were almost unknown in England at that time.

GERMAINE: So you really...

Do you think that when you were 17, 18,

going to art school, that you were already looking

for something different from the English provincial type?

Not consciously, I wasn't, but English art then

bored me almost to tears.

There wasn't anything outstanding, to my mind, at that time in England.

GERMAINE: What was wrong with it, do you think?

I don't know, lack of encouragement probably for original work.

English don't like originality very much in art, you know.

GERMAINE: She was already 34 when she made the decision to leave Britain

and work in Paris. Paris filled her with excitement.

She wrote...

ACTOR AS PAULE: "Below my open window lies Paris.

"Paris who draws to her side at one time or another

"every artist of the world.

"What man who ever spoiled clean canvas can escape the allure,

"and who among them all can explain her fascination?

"Outside Paris, it is hardly an exaggeration to say

"that modern art is treated more hardly than an illegitimate child.

"In Paris, by people who should know of these things,

"it is regarded that likely, if wedded with sincerity,

"to give birth to everything of value in the art of the future."

GERMAINE: The stylisation she had always favoured

became more and more extreme.

At first, like Picasso's in the Pink Period,

and then almost Expressionist and then Matisse-like.

More and more, she felt herself free to approach in her paintings

the qualities of music and dance.

She withdrew more and more,

to follow the inexorable progress of her own work.

In 1926, she took the plunge and executed her first abstract drawing.

PAULE: You've got to do a lot of thinking

before you invent something that is just rather new.

GERMAINE: Where you are aware that you were looking

- for your own visual language? - No, I think I wasn't aware.

I just... It just happened that way.

But it's very difficult to say that you must go on looking for something,

- when you don't know what it is. - Things happen in art, I think.

You don't want them to happen,

you don't look for them, but they do happen.

- What sort of things? - Well...

art develops - the more you think about it, the more it changes.

GERMAINE: But then once you'd developed those shapes,

they become unmistakably yours.

No-one else uses shape the way you do.

PAULE: You've got to work hard at art to be an artist.

It takes a long time to control your hand

and make your hand obey everything you want in a line.

A line's very extraordinary.

It can be dark or light or curved or straight...

..and it can be a lively line, it can be a dull line,

but you've got to be able to control it with your hand

and that takes years of practice, I think.

GERMAINE: Does that mean that when you sit in front of a canvas

and you're going to draw your line

that the line must be right before you draw it?

PAULE: It must be exactly as you want it,

so that you can draw it exactly as you intend to be

and that takes some doing.

You can draw a line on paper in two dimensions,

but it's more interesting if you put it into space.

GERMAINE: But does it float in the space or does it advance

and recede in the space?

- What is its relation to the space? - Well, I made use of wires,

you see, and... cos I could curve them

and first of all I used straight lines.

GERMAINE: But you're supposed to be among the first,

or perhaps the first person,

- to suspend these lines. - Yes, I think I was the first.

GERMAINE: Paule Vezelay's manipulation of pure line is

now seen as an important innovation in the development of modern art.

But that was too limited, so I used plastic wires that I could curve

and fix at one end in little boxes. They were lines in space.

GERMAINE: But your interest in curves is one of the things

that distinguishes you from many other abstract artists, so-called,

and from the constructivists

- in particular. - Yes.

What attracted you so much about curves?

They exist in nature and they exist in life.

And why limit yourself

- to straight lines and angles? - Well, you see,

what the straight-line people might say

is that they love straight lines because they don't exist in nature.

Well, they're welcome to their own ideas,

but why limit yourself when you can have curves and straight lines?

GERMAINE: In the '30s, Paule Vezelay was exhibiting in Paris,

Holland and Italy.

She was recognised among her peers and respected by them,

Giacometti, the Arps, Miro - all came to see her work.

Ernest Hemingway bought a painting.

It is now assumed that she was a minor artist

merely imitating painters like Miro.

I admired his work,

but I don't think he had any real influence on me

because I was already formed, you know,

in my own work, in my own style, before I knew his work.

GERMAINE: Well, we have found his name, you know,

in one of the visiting books of the Bucher Galerie.

- He came to see your work... - Yes.

..and it seems rather likely that, in fact,

it goes the other way round,

- that he was influenced by you. - I...

I don't know. You see, a lot of interesting people

- came to the Galerie Bucher. - Yes.

She had a great following

because she was always sharing young artists she thought were interesting

and the better-known artists came...

..which was rather an honour for them.

She gave quite a few exhibitions of my work

and she always made me welcome when I went there.

GERMAINE: One of the artists her name is constantly associated with

is the French surrealist painter Andre Masson.

People who have done research into the late '20s and 30s in Paris

have persistently told us

that your name is to be linked with the name of Andre Masson.

They even told us that you were known

as a Madame Masson, at one stage, in Paris.

PAULE: I never called myself Madame Masson.

We were engaged to me married and we went both of us together

to make a declaration of intention to marry...

..but, unfortunately, or fortunately, I had reason to change my mind...

..and I changed it, which was very painful.

I was very fond of him at one time.

GERMAINE: Another artist with whom her name is often linked

is the sculptor Jean Arp.

- Was Arp supportive of you? - Yes, he did.

He liked my work and I liked his work and his wife's work.

It was splendid, I think.

They became, both of them, very friendly with me.

GERMAINE: And did you find that that...

the contact with the Arps was exciting,

- was fruitful, for you? - Yes, it was pleasant.

I met him at a party... a little gathering and they...

Somebody, the host, said, "Who knows Arp's work?"

Arp, of course... Years and years ago, Arp was almost unknown.

I said, "I do, teacher..."

..like this, you know.

And he said, "That's very nice, come and meet my wife

"and have lunch with us."

They...he lived in Meudon

and that was the beginning of a very good friendship with them both.

GERMAINE: Paule Vezelay went on several holidays

in the South of France with Jean Arp and his wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Back in Paris in the mid-'30s under Jean Arp's influence,

she began creating sculpture, which, in turn, influenced him.

It's been said by someone that you influenced Arp

- as well as Arp influencing you. - I think I did a little bit.

GERMAINE: Perhaps the most important group that you belonged to

- was Abstraction-Creation. - Yes, that was a good group.

Of course it contained a good many interesting artists.

That was the reason

and they had a great struggle, Abstraction-Creation.

They had the same struggle as the Impressionists.

You couldn't find a dealer who'd give them a show.

GERMAINE: Was it a help to you to be identified with that group?

I don't know if it was a help or I perhaps helped them,

mutual sort of help.

But it was interesting to meet other people

with more less the same ideas about art,

although we didn't discuss it much.

- You didn't discuss it? - No, no, we didn't.

To a layman, you would think that the group was the thing

that helped you to define what you were doing.

Well, our work was supposed to do that, you see.

Well, then, why do artists, and, in particular,

abstract artists, keep forming these groups with different names

and different magazines and different manifestos?

Because it's interesting to see what other artists are doing...

..and, after all, you draw and paint

because you can't put into words

- what you want to say. - So do you think you communicated

- with each other without words? - Yes, I think

up to some extent we did that.

Of course, words are easy to write, not easy to choose,

but easy to write, and to draw a line is very difficult.

It takes years before you can draw the exact line you want

in the exact way, in the exact place, that you want it to be...

..with its modulations of tone and curves and so on.

It's not all that easy.

GERMAINE: The distinguished English landscape painter Paul Nash

was a contemporary and friend.

He wrote the introduction to the catalogue of one of her exhibitions.

I want to read you a quotation from Paul Nash.

He says, "To my mind, Paule Vezelay's talent is unmistakably genuine.

"For that reason, it has an especial value, a peculiar charm.

"It is unnecessary to point out, of course,

"that it is altogether lacking in that intractable efficiency

"of the mannish female artist

"or the brutal technique of the male impersonator."

Now, I find that rather difficult to take from Paul Nash.

That remark worries me, that in order to praise Paule Vezelay,

he has to say nasty things about unnamed women artists.

- He doesn't name, though. - Thank goodness.

In the '30s, you went through a period of enormous creativity.

You were doing a lot of work which was highly respected,

you were a member of the group Abstraction-Creation

and then what happened?

- Nothing that I was responsible for. - The war, I suppose?

- The war. - Did the war change everything?

More or less. I lost a lot of work, I had to leave France, or be interned,

which I shouldn't have liked at all.

And, erm...

The thing was to get out of France

because the Germans were advancing rapidly,

to get out of France while I could.

- Then you came back to England... - Yes.

..and you found it very difficult to work.

Yes, I did. I lived with my parents.

My mother wasn't at all interested in art, my father was...

..but I had to look after both of them

as well as I could for various periods.

It wasn't at all an easy time for me.

So, you came up against the old female problem

that the family is your responsibility?

Well, I don't know whether it was a female problem exactly.

I was an affectionate daughter and I tried to help them both

and they helped me.

It was a very difficult period for everybody in England.

We had these terrible air raids.

GERMAINE: Paule Vezelay's parents were still living in Bristol

which took a heavy pounding from German bombers.

She could no longer concentrate on the refinement of her inner vision,

but went out into the shattered streets

and drew the images of devastation.

She was never named an official war artist,

but she asked for, and got, permission

to draw the barrage balloon centre in Bristol.

It was manned, so to speak, by women, the balloon section.

- The barrage balloons? - Yes, barrage balloons,

so I went out there and made drawings of the barrage balloons

and talked to the women...

..and one man was officer there,

he was almost in tears.

He said, "We've had gale warnings and gale warnings

"and no gale has come,

"and I had...yesterday I had a gale warning and I ignored it

"and it came, the gale came and I lost a balloon."

Of course, they were very valuable, you see, these balloons.

GERMAINE: They were made of silk, were they?

- What were they made of? - I don't know

what they were made of, but the women had to hold them down

when they were being inflated

and then, just at the right moment, let them go up.

And one silly girl, she didn't let go quick enough, she got carried up.

GERMAINE: That happened to somebody last week here in England,

a professional balloonist got carried up.

- Oh, yes. - Silly fellow.

But, er, fortunately,

she had the wit or panic to let go pretty quickly, as you can imagine,

and she fell onto some concrete and she wasn't hurt much, fortunately.

GERMAINE: Now, you have a drawing upstairs,

- a pastel, of a barrage balloon. - Yes, I have,

and I've got two nice drawings of these girls in the balloon...

what they call the balloon shed, when they were taken down, you see.

GERMAINE: What did you like about the balloons?

I liked...

They rather fascinated me, because they were balloons,

they were up in the air, tossing about.

- They were form without volume. - Yes.

They rather fascinated me and they were quite useful.

GERMAINE: And when they were being inflated, your drawing shows it

- like it's some great... - Yes, a monster coming to life.

It was extraordinary.

And that shape, it seems to me, that shape, the balloon shape, for you,

ties in with the shapes that you loved to manipulate

- on the canvas. - Up to a point, yes.

- Yes, they did. - Because, it seems to me

always in your work, or nearly always,

the ground against which the shapes float is resonant.

The shapes seem to be capable of moving forwards and back.

It's not flat, this space.

- It's full of caverns. - I hope...I hope it's full of air.

I think a painting wants to be, or a drawing,

wants to have air indicated.

I think a great many artists cram all kinds of forms and lines

into their paintings which would be much better with half the number.

Do you think that after the war you were able to pick up

- where you left off? - No.

I wasn't able.

I went back to Paris, there was nothing I could afford.

A tiny studio, about the size of this room, was £7,000.

I hadn't got that money.

So I didn't want to work in a hotel bedroom,

which is absolutely impossible.

I did go back for some time, er...

the Bucher Galerie, Madame Bucher, she was a friend of mine,

and she let me sleep there in a room packed with masterpieces by Picasso

and Braque, and goodness knows who, all stacked up against the wall

and I was allowed to sleep underneath these...

in a little sort of dressing room.

GERMAINE: Paule Vezelay was more than 50 years old.

Her creative life in Paris was a thing of the past.

She had no choice but to struggle to pick up the threads

of her artistic development in the alien atmosphere of post-war Britain.

Abstraction was not widely understood in Britain

and Vezelay had played no part in the development

of the militant modernist movement.

So, you said to me before and I was really fascinated by it

that, really, abstraction is impossible.

It's ridiculous to talk about abstract art,

but the idea is, I think, that you abstract from objects

what you find pleasing in their form and lines and so on.

- You abstract that. - You also talked about a language

which spoke directly to the emotions...in your painting,

that instead of having to tell yourself a story,

you look at a picture

and say, "This is this and that is that and I recognise them,"

that the language of the painting is the pure language of emotion.

I found that very interesting because one of the things

I find in your painting is an emotion

- that I would have to call joy. - I'm glad you said that,

because I dislike sad art.

There's enough real sadness in real life.

I think an artist might create something joyful

or happy or pleasing, as they used to do, after all.

They used to paint beautiful nude women,

which gave certain people great pleasure.

Now, if they paint a nude,

it looks like somebody who's been under a tramcar for about 10 minutes,

you know - nothing's left.

I wrote a book once about women painters

and I said one of the worst things that could happen to you

if you were a young woman, working very well in a class,

under a painter who impressed you,

one of the worst things that could happen

was that he would fall in love with you.

It was understood that you would be in love with him

if you're 17 years old and he's your teacher

and you think he's wonderful, and you were safe

as long as he didn't fall in love with you and marry you, because then

- you were more or less sunk. - Yes, quite sunk,

but I don't think you can make rules about...

what is the right sort of husband.

If you're very much in love with a man who loves you,

I don't think it matters all that much whether he's a painter

- or a plumber. - But what about your work?

Ah, yes, but you don't think of that in advance.

Most married women, it fades out, they haven't the time

and the energy to go on with their work seriously

and I think it's a great mistake for a woman to marry

if she wants to be an artist.

GERMAINE: Paule Vezelay was a significant figure in Paris

during one of the most vital periods in the development of European art.

She herself is unselfconscious about fact that she's a woman,

nevertheless, many of the factors which limited her freedom to live and

work as she wished were inevitable concomitants of her femaleness.

I wanted to ask you about some of the wives, women artists, whom you

would have known or heard of or whose work you would have seen in Paris.

Obviously the one you were closest to

- was Sophie Taeuber-Arp... - Mmm...

..and I've always wondered, do you think

she would have been a greater artist if she hadn't been married to Arp

and if she'd worked the way you had?

She would have had much more recognition

if she hadn't been married to Arp.

Arp was good company, he was very gifted.

People came to see Arp, they didn't come to see her,

but she was very gifted and very modest

and very nice, Swiss woman, very gentille.

She said, "How can I be an artist with one hand in the kitchen

"and one hand in the studio?"

Like most wives, she was expected to make beds and serve meals

and cook and housekeep.

It's most unfair, really.

GERMAINE: Sophie Taeuber-Arp died in a car accident in 1941.

Some people expected Paule Vezelay to marry Arp, instead, their spiritual

and intellectual collaboration was carried on across the Channel.

They have exchanged prints, sculptures, poems

throughout their long lives.

In the 1950s, Paule Vezelay bought a new sophistication

to British commercial textile design.

And somebody who produced textiles asked me

would I design a textile for him, which I did with great pleasure.

And then another firm, a Dutch firm, asked me to do some designs for them

and then in England, Heal's asked me to design for them,

and I enjoyed it very much.

It's got to be decorative, it's got to be printable and the design,

if it's well done, when the curtains are drawn, it's lovely.

It breaks up the design in a most interesting way.

Which period of your career have you enjoyed the most? Which kind of work?

That's very difficult.

I've enjoyed each period, I think.

I've worked through it into something else.

Generally speaking, you paint a picture which is good or perhaps bad,

but it leads on to something which you hope will be more complete.

GERMAINE: Have you never had anything like writer's block?

You know, writers get to the stage

- where they can't write anything. - Oh, yes, quite often.

And I start work at my easel and I know it's bad,

and I know it's quite bad,

but I think it will lead on to something better,

so I go on and I can always tear up the bad work I've done.

It often does lead on to something more complete and better.

Bad work can lead to good work, like sketching.

You know, you enrich a sketch and you change things

in the composition perhaps,

but I think bad work's quite important

as long as you realise it's bad

and let it lead you on to something better.

GERMAINE: One of the most frightening things I've ever seen is what happens

when a painter who was neglected is taken up,

because the art market is so stupid

that where it ignored good work for years and years, then suddenly

- every piece of paper... - Yes.

..that artist made a mark on is sold for £17,000.

- Yes, yes. - This has happened to Gwen John.

In some ways, she makes me think of you

because she's a very concentrated, self-possessed painter,

- in her way, very arrogant... - Yes.

..at not taking anybody else's judgment.

I think you would enjoy her work.

Perhaps we should make sure that you see some.

- I don't think I'm arrogant. - Oh, you must be, mustn't you?

- It's important. - Arrogant isn't the word

- I would choose. - Proud?

Arrogant leaves a nasty taste in your mouth, I think.

I don't feel arrogant at all about other painters,

even the bad ones, and I know them to be bad.

I don't feel at all arrogant.

GERMAINE: Paule Vezelay still works almost every day.

Nowadays, the line has receded in importance as she works on fields

of hue and light and shade, still following confidently, doggedly,

wherever the work should lead her.

I would like very much to have a qualification as master of the line

or something of that sort,

- because I am a master of lines. - Would you like to be a dame,

like Dame Laura Knight?

I would like to have any recognition.

I don't particularly want to be a dame, I think it is

a terrible thing to be created a dame.

It's very stuffy and it's very Victorian

and it's quite out-of-date to my mind.

But any sort of recognition is rather nice to have.

I don't know how it is that an artist decides upon a value for his work.

I mean, how do you decide

that your painting is worth this or that amount of money?

- What criterion do you use? - I never...

To tell you the truth, I never know what price I should put on my work.

I just make a sort of guess, what I think it's worth.

Do you have any idea what

- other people's work is worth? - More or less, yes. More or less.

We were told by one dealer that one of the problems

with Paule Vezelay's work is that it's much too highly priced

- and no-one will buy it. - I don't think that's true.

They can't tell that they can't sell it till they try.

GERMAINE: But you wouldn't advise anybody, for example,

to lower prices in order to sell more?

Not unless they're very hungry, I wouldn't.

I think an artist should put the price he thinks the work is worth.

- And insist on those prices? - Yes, I think so.

Otherwise...

..however low your prices are, people will want you to sell them

for half the price or two for the price of one as they do in America.

No, I think that if the painting is good, it's worth a good price.

What percentage of your work

- have you still got? - Oh, quite a lot of it.

GERMAINE: And does that mean you'd rather be with it

- than without it or... - I would rather be with it

than sell it very cheaply for the sake of selling it. Yes, I would.

I like my work.

Strange as it may seem, I like my paintings.

I like to keep them. I'm never in a hurry to sell them.

GERMAINE: It argues a great faith in yourself

that you've never been shaken.

I have a certain amount of faith in myself, of confidence in myself.

Do you ever doubt? Do you ever think perhaps it's all been a mistake?

- No. - Never?

I know some things are much better than the others

and I've probably painted my share of bad pictures...

..but I've worked seriously and people whose opinion I value

have liked my work very much or written about it.

That gives me a certain amount of confidence.

Would you say that yours has been a happy life?

I don't know what you mean

- by happy. - Neither do I.

I did what I wanted to do.

I wasn't obliged to go and work

as a typist in an office or as saleswoman or as a children's nurse.

- I've been very fortunate. - Has it satisfied you,

the work? Has it?

- Up to a point, yes. - And what lay beyond the point?

Well, it's very fascinating, painting,

cos you learn as you go along,

always making new discoveries and things.