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<\/p>\nOver half a century on from her last London commercial gallery show in London, the British artist Marlow Moss (1889-1958) is the subject of an extensive exhibition opening today at Ward Moretti at 12 Duke Street, St James\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Marlow Moss: Space, Movement & Light (14 September-30 October) brings together 30 paintings, works on paper and one sculpture by the Constructivist and Neoplastic artist. A Jewish non-binary lesbian, uncompromising and exacting in her practice, Moss was before-her-time yet remains little known today. But that is fast changing, as critical and commercial attention turns to her work.<\/p>\n
Born Marjorie Jewel Moss in London in 1889, the daughter of a textile manufacturer, Moss studied at the Slade School of Fine Art before moving to Cornwall in 1919. It was there that she cut her hair short, changed her name to the more gender-neutral Marlow, and started dressing in riding clothes. \u201cI destroyed my old personality and created a new one,\u201d she later said. <\/p>\n
In 1927, after a few years of back and forth between London and Cornwall, Moss relocated to Paris, then the centre of the avant-garde. She studied at the Acad\u00e9mie Moderne, alongside the Cubist Fernand L\u00e9ger among others, and became friends with the Constructivist and founding member of the De Stijl Movement, Georges Vantongerloo who would become a champion of her work. At the Caf\u00e9 de Flore in 1929, Moss also met the Dutch writer Antoinette \u2018Netty\u2019 Nijhoff, who would become her lifelong partner.<\/p>\n
It was through Nijhoff that Moss met Piet Mondrian in 1929. Mondrian\u2019s studio was only a few doors down from Moss\u2019s, and over the next decade (until Mondrian departed Paris for New York in 1938) they forged a close friendship, both advocates of Neoplaticism. \u201cThey were a pair of extraordinary lone wolves,\u201d Nijhoff said of the pair.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Marlow Moss, White, Black, Yellow and Blue (1954)<\/p>\n
Courtesy Ward Moretti<\/p>\n
But the legacy of one lone wolf has long overshadowed the other; the older male artist presumed to have moulded the younger Moss. However, recent reassessments suggest that Moss\u2019s ideas had a profound impact on Mondrian too: it was Moss who, in 1930, came up with the concept of the double line (two straight lines running either horizontally or vertically across a canvas). We know that Mondrian wrote to her, asking about this visual device, in 1932. She replied, explaining that \u201cthe double line or a multiplicity of lines renders \u2018a continuity of related and inter\u2013related rhythm in space\u2019 possible, which makes the composition dynamic instead of static.\u201d Mondrian responded that he \u201ccouldn\u2019t quite follow\u201d her letter, yet he started to incorporate the double line in his works on the 1930s. Many presumed it was his invention, and Vantongerloo urged Mondrian to correct this assumption and give credit to Moss. It appears Mondrian did not, and there was a falling out for several years\u2014according to the catalogue introduction, it was not until 1936 that Mondrian wrote to fellow painter Jean Gorin: \u201cI am back to usual with her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moss and Nijhoff were treated with condescension by some. Ward Moretti\u2019s scholarly catalogue, edited by the Moss expert Lucy Howarth, quotes Frank Elgar in his 1968 Mondrian biography: \u201cOne of [Mondrian\u2019s] pupils, a young English woman, was a colourful figure among the dubious client\u00e8le of the Montparnasse cabarets. Flanked by an excessively corpulent Dutch woman [Netty], she went about, summer and winter, dressed like a jockey.\u201d<\/p>\n
They split their time between Paris, Normandy and Zeeland, before Moss, being of Jewish heritage, fled the Nazis in 1940, returning to Lamorna in Cornwall on what turned out to be the last passenger ship from the continent to England. \u201cIt was the SS Bodegraven, the same ship that had Jacques Goudstikker on it, the famous Amsterdam art dealer who died after falling into the ship\u2019s hold and breaking his neck,\u201d says Emma Ward, the co-founder of Ward Moretti, who has curated the show.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ve really chosen one of the hardest topics to do as a subject for a show because her output was so small, she didn’t do more than about 65 or 70 paintings over her whole life,\u201d Ward says. \u201cOf those, maybe about a third have been destroyed or disappeared, and a third are in museums.\u201d<\/p>\n
The destruction of Moss\u2019s Normandy home in the Second World War resulted in the loss of much of her pre-war work. Add to that the fact that she would destroy anything she was not entirely happy with and her technique involved meticulously painting layer upon layer of oil paint, waiting a week between each while the paint dried, and it is easy to see why the work is so scarce.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Marlow Moss, White, Yellow and Black (1956)<\/p>\n
Courtesy Ward Moretti<\/p>\n
Erica Brausen of London\u2019s Hanover Gallery picked up on Moss\u2019s talent towards the end of her life, holding solo shows of her work in 1953 and 1958, the year Moss died. Others followed after her death\u2014a solo exhibition at Amsterdam\u2019s Stedelijk Museum in 1962, one at the Gimpel & Hanover gallery in Zurich in 1973 and then their London gallery in 1975.<\/p>\n
It was after an exhibition of her work at the Carus Gallery in New York in 1979 that the New York Times critic, John Russell, wrote that Moss had \u201cthe will to find a mode of expression that was peculiar to herself; and it can be argued that at one point \u2013 around 1932\u2014Mondrian may have taken something from Miss Moss.\u201d Russell points to a 1932 \u201cwhite relief with rope and string\u201d, a work that \u201cis not at all the work of a mere follower. Nor, for that matter, are the many untitled drawings, in which pure energy finds expression of a kind that Mondrian would never have put his hand to.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the past decade, museums have been snapping up works by Moss\u2014the Rijksmuseum acquired three of her works in 2023, the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia bought one last year and, Ward says, so has the Centre Pompidou. Earlier this year, Moss received her first retrospective in Germany\u2014Creating Space: The Constructivist Marlow Moss\u2014at the Georg Kolbe Museum<\/a> in Berlin. Her auction prices have been leapfrogging too. Ten years ago, the occasional Moss might sell for a triple estimate \u00a3100,000 or \u00a3150,000. But this June, White, Yellow and Black (1953) sold for \u00a31.1m at Sotheby\u2019s<\/a> London, more than doubling the previous record of \u00a3609,600 set a year before in the same room. (To put that in sobering context, the auction record for Mondrian is $51m).<\/p>\n White, Yellow and Black (1953) is included, on loan, in the Ward Moretti show, alongside Sculptural Form (around 1946), a marble infinity loop made by Moss for Nijhoff when they were reunited at the end of the war after six years apart. Nijhoff\u2019s son Faan had it placed on her grave after her death, and it remained there until last year when Moss\u2019s estate removed it due to security and conservation concerns. Beyond the loans, other works by Moss are for sale, at prices from \u00a320,000 to \u00a32.5m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over half a century on from her last London commercial gallery show in London, the British artist Marlow…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":847532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[6185,228,226,227,6188,229,88,9543,358550],"class_list":["post-847531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art-market","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-commercial-galleries","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-marlow-moss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/847532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}