In November 2019, in a video dedicated to LGBT+ icons and published by the London museum Tate Britain, the American drag queen and artist Sasha Velor evokes the British painter Marlow Moss, a major figure of modernism, who has long remained on the fringes of dominant narratives. She comments on the painting Composition in Yellow, Black and White (painted by Marlow Moss in 1949) and insists on his life breaking with gender norms, a non-conforming identity, a trajectory reread through the queer prism.
“I like the fact that the subject of the painting is not a human figure, someone with an identity, but represents colors and geometry, describes Sasha Velor when explaining her choice. As a queer and non-binary person, it’s sometimes more accessible, because I find geometry and color to be more infallible categories than a male or female figure. In a way, I find that I can see my reflection more in a yellow square!”
The recent rediscovery of Marlow Moss is indeed part of a broader movement to rewrite art history, where certain figures re-emerge from the closet not for their formal contribution, but rather because of their identity. For around ten years, Marlow Moss, a recognized and respected member of the European avant-garde in the 1930s, has been branded above all as a non-binary pioneer, before being recognized as an important theorist and practitioner of abstraction.
Ghost artist
It’s an undeniable part of his identity. We realize, however, that Marlow Moss’s work was disturbing much more than his appearance. More particularly the determination and rigor with which she decided to enter a territory then dominated by men and to successfully change the rules. But she was not systematically marginalized by her more famous male colleagues, on the contrary.
How then did it end up as a footnote in the biography of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, to the point that in 1997 an art critic expressed, half-heartedly, a doubt about its real existence? Perhaps, in part, because Marlow Moss herself liked to cover her tracks, especially her own.
From Marjorie to Marlow
“I am not a painter, I do not see form, but only space, movement and light”Marlow Moss said of herself. The British artist was a queen of reinvention, but also cultivated a taste for mystery and rarity. Marjorie Moss was born in England in May 1889 into a wealthy Jewish family. Music and then dance have been part of his world since childhood. Family ties weakened when she left to study at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, one of the most demanding schools in the United Kingdom.
At the end of the First World War, it made an even clearer break. Marjorie becomes Marlow. She cuts her hair very short and adopts a strictly masculine wardrobe. At a time when the figure of the “boy” was beginning to emerge in Europe, popularized by the new fashion of Coco Chanel and her jersey clothes inspired by the sailor suit or in the cinema by the American actress Louise Brooks, Marlow Moss went further. With her androgynous silhouette with almost shaved hair and her rider’s appearance, she creates an identity that ignores all conventions.
In 1927, at the age of 38, she left London for Paris and engaged in the most radical of modernity: that of geometric abstraction. A student at the Académie Moderne, she met its co-founders Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. Two years later, the discovery of the neoplasticism of Piet Mondrian, whose workshop she frequented in the Montparnasse district (XIVe district of Paris), marks a decisive turning point.
The death of the figurative
Formulated within the Dutch De Stijl movement in the 1910s, neoplasticism is an artistic theory that proposes an extreme reduction of pictorial language. For Mondrian, painting must be freed from all figurative expression. Curves and diagonals disappear; the composition is based exclusively on vertical and horizontal lines. The palette is limited to “pure” colors (red, blue and yellow for movement and variation) and “non-colors” (black, white or gray stabilize the compositions).
This visual grammar extends beyond painting. Around 1917-1918, the spectacular (and wonderfully uncomfortable) Red and blue chair by fellow Dutchman Gerrit Rietveld translates these principles into real space with his orthogonal geometry and brightly colored planes.
At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, Marlow Moss adhered to this modernist vocabulary and joined the international circle of European abstract artists. In 1931, she participated in the founding of the artist collective Abstraction-Création, alongside Hans Arp, Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian.
The following year, in 1932, she published a theoretical text in the journal Abstraction, creation, non-figurative art (in French and signed “Marjorie Moss”), in which she explains the reasons for her commitment to abstraction. “Until today painting has used as a means of expression the forms already made by nature, yet the aim of the artist has never been to give a simple representation of these forms.” Non-figurative art seeks to construct, she explains, a “pure form capable of expressing the artist’s consciousness in the face of the universe”.
A gap line
Marlow Moss then lived between France, London and the Netherlands with his partner, the Dutch woman of letters Nettie Nijhoff, and exhibited in the major events of European abstraction. It is in an extremely codified system that Marlow Moss introduces his most decisive contribution. In 1931, she replaced the single line of neoplasticism with two parallel lines very close together. The change seems so small that it might make you smile.
In reality, she has just introduced a small revolution in the history of art by modifying the balance of the entire composition. The line that previously separated the planes now creates an autonomous space between them. Piet Mondrian doesn’t miss a beat. In 1932, he painted Composition with Double Line and Yellow. Art history will often present this work as the inaugural appearance of the famous double line (sometimes called the “tram line”), which became emblematic of his style, leaving Marlow Moss’s earlier experiments in the shadows.
The divergence between the two artists is also theoretical. Piet Mondrian claims to work by intuition, while Marlow Moss develops an almost mathematical approach. In a letter, she explains her calculations and proportions to him. The Dutch artist’s dry response to Marlow Moss remains famous: “Numbers mean nothing to me.” At the time for those generations of mathematicians who wanted to see it as the manifestation of a genius for scholarly calculations…
Piet who rolls does not collect Moss
There did not seem to be any real animosity between the two artists. In 1940, Piet Mondrian even asked Marlow Moss to leave Europe with him, as the Second World War began. He is preparing to head for the United States and suggests that she follow him. “You can either come with me or stay in England and be condemned to obscurity and failure.”he wrote to her. He lacks tact, but perhaps not instinct.
Marlow Moss chooses to stay in Cornwall. More precisely in the village of Lamorna, located in the tip of the southwest of England, where she took refuge with Nettie Nijhoff after the invasion of the Netherlands by the Nazis. The years that followed proved Piet Mondrian right. Her Normandy studio having been bombed during the D-Day landings in 1944, the British lesbian artist was then reduced to exhibiting locally in the village of Mousehole (Cornwall), literally “the mouse hole”.
Finally prophet in his United Kingdom
It was not until the early 1950s that Marlow Moss achieved significant recognition in the United Kingdom, thanks to two solo exhibitions at the Hanover Gallery in London and his participation at the Royal Festival Hall in 1955. At the same time, an attempt to structure a British abstract network failed, hampered by rivalries and resistance from artists such as the famous sculptor Henry Moore.
By a chain of circumstances rather than by choice, Marlow Moss then worked in isolation, continuing her research in painting, constructions and reliefs (she studied architecture and produced numerous sculptures), until her death on August 23, 1958. Her recognition was stronger in the Netherlands, where several retrospectives were devoted to her in the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s (a novel, a ballet and an opera were even dedicated to her life there. with Nettie Nijhoff), while some of his works enter public collections in various countries (as far as Australia).
It is only very recently that the work of Marlow Moss has found resonance in his native country. Lucy Howarth, curator of the retrospective which was finally dedicated to her in 2014 at the Tate Britain in London, then shared a telling anecdote in the columns of the British daily The Guardian. While the exhibition was traveling to Leeds (northern England), Lucy Howarth says she, during a queer guided tour, mentioned the problematic fact that the work of Marlow Moss was only ever approached through that of Piet Mondrian. “Who is Mondrian?”asked two visitors. “Art, like life, is constantly evolving”Marlow Moss might have retorted.
