“SPACE, MOVEMENT AND LIGHT”
Having devoted her life to the artistic pursuit of ‘space, movement and light’, Marlow Moss left England for Paris in 1927. Her studies at various English institutions, including St. John’s Wood School of Art and the Slade, had left her dissatisfied with their preference for more traditional modes of representation, and so she departed for the French capital: the centre of modernism and radical experiments in art, music, and theatre.
“I destroyed my old personality and created a new one”
As a queer female artist, Paris afforded her freedoms that England could not. She left behind the stiflingly conservative world of her upper-class family and friends in pursuit of a new outrageous bohemian lifestyle and identity. She had long since stopped using her birth name of ‘Majorie’, preferring the more androgynous Marlow, and now changed her appearance to match. Her short hairstyle and more masculine style of dress was in radical opposition to the expectations for a young woman of her particular background. It was also in Paris that she met Antoinette ‘Netty’ Nijhoff-Wind, a writer from the Netherlands who was also somewhat scandalously a divorcée and a single mother. The two embarked on a passionate affair and remained life-long partners until Moss’s death in 1958.
“One of [Mondrian’s] pupils, a young English woman, was a colourful figure among the dubious clientèle of the Montparnasse cabarets. Flanked by an excessively corpulent Dutch woman, she went about, summer and winter, dressed like a jockey”
Paris was a revelation for Moss’s art. She enrolled at the Académie Moderne, where she studied under Fernand Léger and Amadée Ozenfant. Her true breakthrough however came upon her exposure to the paintings of Piet Mondrian. The two artists met in 1929, and she remained at the heart of the Neo-Plasticist group until it was forced apart by the events of the Second World War. Working alongside Mondrian and artists such as Jean Gorin and Georges Vantongerloo, she was the only female Neo-Plasticist and soon emerged as a major innovator within the group: indeed she has been credited with inventing the motif of a double-black line in 1930, before Mondrian himself used it.
Moss was fascinated by the scientific and cultural developments of the day. Like other Neo-Plasticist artists, she was inspired by discoveries of new subatomic particles and the idea of an invisible, universal order. She was particularly influenced by the writings of Matila Ghyka, a Romanian mathematician who proposed that the Golden Ratio guided not only the appearance of organic natural forms, such as spiral shells, but also the behaviour and energy of all living organisms. These ideas of the universe being in a constant state of flux and becoming guided her approach to painting, as she saw to represent this constant state of movement in her work.
After the Second World War forced the group apart, Moss turned down Mondrian’s invitation to join him in New York, choosing instead to return to Cornwall in 1940, where she remained a forerunner of the avant-garde. White, black and red is emblematic of the shift in her post-war work, from colourful geometric grids to isolated rectangular units and a more restrained colour palette, doing away with it completely in works such as Composition in Black and White Number 4 (1949), on display at the Moma (fig. 1).
Moss, Marlow (Moss, Marjorie Jewel 1890-1958): Marlow Moss, Composition in Black and White Number 4, 1949. Oil on canvas, 25¼ x 25¼in. (63.7 x 63.7 cm.) including painted wood frame. The Riklis collects ion of McCrory Corporation. Inv.: 1054.1983. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2020. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Filled with a desire to convey movement and flux within her art, Moss experimented with compositions that would not allow the viewer to focus on a single point within the work. The use of red here is particularly striking: typically used to signal attention to a singular detail, here it is divided between three rectangles, defying the viewer’s efforts to focus on only one of them, and forcing their gaze to travel around the painting. These later works represent an apex of Moss’s quest for ‘space, movement and light’ in her art.
“Our task is to expand our awareness of the universe so as to be able to achieve the balance of the relations which must mutually exist between the visible forms and the invisible. Once you have created a mental image of the universe, you can no longer use natural forms to express that image because these natural and limited forms only have a relative value which attests to the truth without expressing it in its totality. So the painter is obliged to create a new form of visualisation and this is what non-figurative art aims to achieve. Its goal is to construct the pure visualisation which can express the artist’s awareness of the universe in its totality.”
It is interesting to note the way in which this pursuit of liminality in art is reflected in her personal life. Her sense of style somet.mes
s left onlookers unsure as to whether she was male or female, and although she was a British artist who spent most of her career in England, her work was more aligned with artistic developments on the continent than with those in Britain. Moss's interest in dynamism mirrored her opposition to essentialism and conformity. Her refusal to be shaped by societal expectations and instead, to embrace authenticity and vitality in both her art and life, or rather, as she wrote: ‘Art is as – Life – forever in the stat.mes
nt of Becoming’