Marlow Moss

British artist Marlow Moss (b. 1889 in Kilburn, London, d. 1958 in Penzance, Cornwall) was one of the few female representatives of constructivist art during its beginnings. As a rebel against traditional notions of art and gender, she gave up her female given name Marjorie Jewel in 1919 and called herself Marlow from then on. She cut her hair short and began to mainly wear jodhpurs and shirts. Her art was initially oriented toward Piet Mondrian’s neoplasticism, which she then however extended autonomously and transferred to reliefs and sculptures. One of her most important inventions was the so-called double line, a dynamizing compositional element consisting of two thin parallel lines, which she started to use in her paintings in 1930. Mondrian incorporated this element into his own compositions, but did not point out that Moss was its initiator.

The intention of this exhibition is to draw attention to the oeuvre of Marlow Moss, as it has been overshadowed by the famous male constructivists for far too long, and to prompt a more in-depth reception thereof within art history.

9.2.–7.5.2017
curated by Lucy Howarth and Sabine Schaschl

In London, Marlow Moss attended the St. John’s Wood School of Art from 1916 to 1917, followed by the Slade School of Fine Art, which she left because of its conventional, naturalism-based way of teaching art. In 1919, she withdrew to Cornwall for some years, intensively studied subjects such as Marie Curie and, in her own words, destroyed her old personality and created a new one. In 1927, she moved to Paris, where she studied at Académie Moderne under Fernand Léger and Amedée Ozenfant. In Paris, she came across Piet Mondrian’s neoplasticist paintings for the first time – a key moment, which would steer her further development as an artist. At the start of the 1930s, her paintings could easily have been mistaken for Mondrian’s: Moss had also begun to use only the primary colors red, yellow and blue, along with the non-colors white and black, to set up a framework of straight lines and rectangular color fields. From there, she gradually developed her own style. In 1929, she met Mondrian in person. Moss was also part of an ongoing lively exchange with Georges Vantongerloo and Jean Gorin, who, like her, were among those who co-founded the artists’ association Abstraction-Création in 1931. It was in this association’s gallery space that she first met Max Bill in 1933. In Paris, Moss was also active in the artists’ groups Les Surindépendants, Groupe Anglo-Americain, Association 1940 and Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. At the start of the Second World War, together with her partner Antoinette Hendrika (Netty) Nijhoff, a Dutch writer, she left her residence in Gauciel (Normandy) and fled to Holland. There, however, it was also too unsafe for her as a Jew in those times, so in May 1940 she fled again, this time for good, taking a fishing boat to England, where she settled down in Lamorna, Cornwall. A 1944 bombardment destroyed all of her works that were stored in Gauciel.

For the conceptual design of her paintings, which were composed of numerous thin layers of paint, Moss prepared precise sketches. In so doing, she oriented herself toward mathematical models that she had encountered via the writings of mathematician Matila Ghyka. Like Mondrian, Moss also structured her works with the aid of black compositional lines, but in contrast to his intuitive method, she proceeded on the basis of mathematical principles and searched for possible ways of transcending the black compositional lines. In some works, she replaced these with cords or ropes, which she painted over in white. Later, white painted strips of wood also appeared in her reliefs. The wire sculptures that she made from the early 1940s onward can also be seen as spatial extensions of the black compositional lines. From 1956 to 1958, Moss developed color-field paintings without a framework of black lines. Her artwork revolved around the aspiration to break out of the image’s boundaries. Thus, space and light constituted two essential components in her understanding of her work.

The most important exhibitions by (or about) Marlow Moss have taken place at the following institutions: Kunsthalle Basel (1937); Hanover Gallery, London (1953 and 1958); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1938/1962); Middelburg Town Hall (1972); Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2013); Tate St Ives (2013); Leeds Art Gallery (2014); and Tate Britain, London (2014).

This exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive monograph (in German and English) with articles by Lucy Howarth, Ankie de Jongh-Vermeulen and Sabine Schaschl.