Major show to celebrate UK’s forgotten female trailblazer of abstract art

Exhibition in Bristol, the city of her birth, celebrates Paule Vézelay whose ascent was stymied by sexism and war

Britain’s “first” abstract artist, whose legacy has mostly been obscured because of a combination of sexism and the second world war, is to have her first major exhibition in more than 40 years.

Paule Vézelay, born in Bristol in 1892, moved to Paris where she moved in the same circles as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and created one of the first British abstract works in 1928, a few years before Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore began their experimentations.