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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jan/12/piet-mondrian-crossdressing-lesbian-artist-marlow-moss-cornish-cove>
"In 1972, the mighty Kunstmuseum in the Hague bought three paintings by a
little known British artist called Marlow Moss. The prestigious art gallery was
keen to show the enormous influence of Piet Mondrian – the famous Dutch painter
acclaimed for his black grids lit with bold blues and brash yellows – on such
lowly also-rans as Moss.
Yet, should you visit the Kunstmuseum today, you’ll find the Moss works
positioned front and centre, while a similar piece by the great Mondrian, who
would later become the toast of New York, is hidden behind a pillar. Why the
volte-face? Because it is now widely recognised in the art world that it was as
much Moss who influenced Mondrian as the other way round, at least when it came
to the double or parallel lines he started using in the 1930s to add tension to
his harmonious abstract paintings, one of which hammered last May for $48m.
Seven decades after her death in Cornwall at the age of 69, Moss is enjoying a
major revival and reappraisal. As well as the current exhibition of her
paintings and sketches in the Kunstmuseum, her sculpture will go on show at the
Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin in April. Last year, meanwhile, her 1944 work
White, Black, Blue and Red fetched £609,000 at Sotheby’s in London, double
its estimate and a record for her work at auction. Not quite in Mondrian
territory, not yet anyway.
It’s an extraordinary turnaround for an artist who was shunned by much of the
art world in her lifetime. The Tate wasn’t interested in her. When Moss moved
to Cornwall, settling in the beautiful and remote Lamorna Cove near Penzance,
she made repeated efforts to contact sculptor Barbara Hepworth and her painter
husband Ben Nicholson. They ignored her.
“Moss’s time has come,” says Florette Dijkstra, author of
The Leap into the
Light, a biography recently published in Dutch. “Art history is a strange
science. The landscape can totally shift. The buzzwords today are inclusivity
and diversity. Women artists are being promoted, as well as queer artists. This
explains – partly – why Moss is getting so much attention.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
