MARLOW MOSS

MARLOW MOSS: an article in The Guardian on 26 August 2014

The Guardian ‘G2’ on 26^th August included an article about the artist Marlow Moss. 

This is a brief summary of the article.

Marlow Moss

Marlow (born Marjorie) Moss was born in London in 1889: she died in Cornwall in 1958. 

Marlow was a child of prosperous Jewish parents, she studied at The Slade, she disappeared to Cornwall after a nervous breakdown, and she returned as a ‘crop-haired, jockey-clad lesbian’. 

In 1927 Moss moved to Paris and apprenticed herself to Fernand Leger.  Soon afterwards she saw her first Mondrian and transferred her allegiance to him.  The Swiss abstract painter Max Bill described a meeting with Moss and her partner Nettie Nijhoff – wife of the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff - at an opening of a Paris gallery in 1933.  He wrote that both were dressed in flat hats with broad brims: ‘they could have been Don Quixote and Sancha Panza’.  Bill pointed to two works on the wall and expressed gratitude that Mondrian had submitted them.  Moss replied that these were her paintings. 

In 1956 Michael Canney – newly-appointed as curator of Newlyn Art Gallery – met Marlow and perceived her as a ‘diminutive figure’ driving a pony and trap who ‘strode around in a rather alarming manner, tapping its leg with a riding crop’. 

Bill and Canney saw Moss as an oddity – and a footnote.  This reputation is shown by the current exhibition at Tate Britain to be unworthy of Marlow Moss.

Moss is shown to have been the only English artist who influenced Mondrian in his neoplasticism in 1931 / 32 – specifically in the use of double lines.   

In 1940 Moss talked her way onto a boat and escaped from the Netherlands to Cornwall.  Mondrian urged Moss to contact Ben Nicolson.  She wrote but he did not reply.  Moss is described as having kept herself apart from other artists resident in Cornwall in the 1950s.  Moss continued to work in abstraction, and she also moved into sculpture: she had two shows in London, in 1953 and 1958. 

An exhibition of Moss’ works is at Tate Britain from 29^th September to 2^2nd March.