Marlow Moss

Marlow Moss (1889-1958) was a Constructivist painter and sculptor. As a Pythagorean, a ?biological realist? and a bachelorette, she is a unique figure in British art history. In Paris she was at the centre of avant-garde activities, working alongside Piet Mondrian and co-founding the Abstraction-Création group in 1931, yet in Britain, where she was born, and where she lived and worked for the last eighteen years of her life, Moss is almost entirely unknown.

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This exile is partly self-imposed. Moss chose not to go to New York with Mondrian. She did make an initial attempt to acquaint herself with Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, but did not pursue it. She did not attach herself to the much-celebrated St. Ives School. Earlier Nicholson had excluded her from his ?International Survey of Constructive Art? (Circle, 1937), despite the fact that she was intimately involved with the Constructivist movement, and a close associate of Mondrian, their spiritual leader.

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At first glance Moss?s output could be characterized as an imitation of Mondrian. However this immediately invites the question of originality; it is substantiated by Mondrian himself that it was Moss who introduced the double line to Neo-Plasticist compositions. It becomes clear that the development of this genre is an organic collaboration between Moss, Mondrian, Gorin, Vantongerloo, Vordemberge-Gildewart, and others. Superficially there isn?t much to distinguish some of her early compositions from Mondrian?s iconic abstractions, but, in fact, they derive from a quite different mindset. Moss was fascinated by the geometry of Matila Ghyka, and her works are based on Pythagorean formulas, the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Series. It is known that Moss did a great deal of research in the British Library on such mathematical theories, but the exact nature of her employment of these ideas in the design of her compositions is, as yet, not fully documented. This is clearly in contradistinction to Mondrian?s intuitive approach and involvement in Theosophy.

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Moss is an incredibly enigmatic figure, with her dandy appearance, taciturn character and open lesbianism, her tendency for isolation and her life-long commitment to her work. Her oeuvre includes painting, sculpture, relief collage and construction, and rotates around the expression of ?space, movement and light?. Little is known of her early work from her time at the Slade, and nothing remains to track her development to ?pure plastic art?. Her known interests range from Van Gogh and Rembrandt, to Rimbaud and Nietzche. She also studied architecture in her later years.

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I am currently engaged in PhD research on Moss, at the University of Plymouth, England. I intend to produce a complete account of Moss?s contribution to Modernism, contextualizing her within European thought of the early twentieth century. Amongst my output will be a collation of her works, a critical appraisal, and a bibliography of all documentation relating to her. I wish to engage with her work formally, in the manner that she herself did, via natural and sacred geometry, aiming on a thorough analysis of her employment of Pythagorean systems. I will also examine why she has vanished from art history, this will inevitably involve an exploration of the impact of gender and sexual orientation within Moss's work, and ultimately on the formation of history.

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Lucy Howarth

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Please contact me at lucy.howarth100@plymouth.ac.uk

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