‘Her time has come’: did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?
The article “‘Her time has come’: did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?” published by Joanna Moorhead on January, 12th in The Guardian highlights the British artist Marlow Moss and her long-overlooked contributions to abstract modernism. Once overshadowed by contemporaries such as Piet Mondrian, Moss is now recognized as a pioneering figure whose work influenced Mondrian’s use of parallel lines in the 1930s.
Born Marjorie Jewel Moss in London in 1889, she studied art before moving to Lamorna Cove in Cornwall, where she adopted a short hairstyle and a gender-neutral name. Despite repeated attempts to engage with prominent artists like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Moss’s work was largely ignored during her lifetime.
According to Moorhead, recent exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and planned displays at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, along with record auction prices for her work, signal a growing recognition of her importance. Biographer Florette Dijkstra attributes this revival to the contemporary art world’s increased focus on inclusivity and diversity, allowing previously marginalized women and queer artists to receive overdue attention.