Schlagwort-Archive: The Guardian

TIPP! Literature

‘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.

Read Joanna Moorhead’s full article in The Guardian for a detailed account of Marlow Moss’s remarkable life and legacy.

TIPP! Literature

Overlooked female modernist artist Marthe Donas dazzles in Belgium

A new exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp brings attention to Belgian modernist Marthe Donas, an artist whose contributions to early 20th-century abstraction were long overshadowed by her male contemporaries. Titled “Donas, Archipenko & La Section d’Or: Enchanting Modernism“, the exhibition runs from October 4th 2025 to January 11th 2026 and presents 55 works that trace Donas’s artistic evolution and situate her within the wider European avant-garde.

Working under the gender-neutral pseudonym “Tour Donas” Marthe Donas achieved early recognition in the years following the First World War. Critics at the time praised the “charm” and “kind of gentle timidity that seems to reveal a feminine sensitivity” of her paintings, unaware that the artist was a woman navigating the male-dominated circles of Cubism and abstraction.

Donas’s biography reveals both persistence and disruption. After early studies cut short by family disapproval, she resumed her artistic training following a serious accident and the upheavals of World War I. Her encounters with Archipenko in Nice in 1917 marked a turning point; their professional and personal relationship led to a period of intense creativity and mutual influence. Curator Adriaan Gonnissen and art Co-Curator Peter Pauwels emphasize Donas’s independent contributions during this period, arguing that “she wasn’t ‘a young pupil’ when she met Archipenko, but a 32-year-old artist in her own right”.

Despite early acclaim, Donas withdrew from public artistic life by the late 1920s after becoming a mother unexpectedly at the age of 45. Only recently has her work been reexamined within the broader narrative of modernism. The exhibition forms part of a wider curatorial effort to recover the histories of overlooked women artists.

Learn more about Marthe Donas’s remarkable life in Jennifer Rankin’s full article for The Guardian here.