Paule VézelayForms on Grey 1935

Paule Vézelay lived in Paris between 1926 and 1939, changing her name from Marjorie Watson-Williams to obscure her gender and nationality. In 1934 she joined and exhibited with Abstraction-Création, a loosely knit organisation of artists in Paris dedicated to the defence of non-figurative art. Although the objects depicted in this painting suggest abstracted objects from a still-life setting, such as vases or bowls, Vézelay consistently denied that the forms in her paintings were derived from nature but were instead wholly invented.