Marlow Moss

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Marjorie Jewel "Marlow" Moss (born May 29, 1889 in Kilburn , † August 23, 1958 in Penzance ) was a British painter and sculptor of constructivism .

Life

Marlow Moss, born May 29, 1889 in Kilburn , a borough of London , was the daughter of Lionel Moss, a master garment maker and textile manufacturer, and his wife Fannie Jacobs.

In her childhood she was very interested in music. But when she got tuberculosis , she had to interrupt her music studies for several years. Later she turned her attention more to ballet . Against her family's wishes, she decided to pursue an artistic career and studied at St. John's Wood School of Art from 1916 to 1917 and later at the Slade School of Fine Art . After an emotional shock, Moss dropped out of Slade School to live alone and secluded in Cornwall . Instead of Marjorie , she only wanted to be addressed as Marlow and took on a masculine appearance around 1919.

Inspired by a biography of Marie Curie , she returned to London in 1923 and began studying in the British Museum Reading Room . She later continued her studies in sculpture at the Penzance School of Art , began painting in 1926 and founded a studio in London. From now on, Moss permanently assumed a masculine appearance in her life with short hair, tie and breeches and changed her first name to Marlow in a document.

A trip to Paris in 1927 induced her to continue her life there. Here she met her future partner, the Dutch writer Antoinette Hendrika Nijhoff-Wind , the wife of the poet Martinus Nijhoff . She studied under Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne and her style was particularly influenced by Piet Mondrian . Here she made the acquaintance of Georges Vantongerloo and Jean Gorin , became a founding member of the Abstraction-Création association and exhibited her works in the Salon des Surindépendants .

At the beginning of World War II , Moss left France to live near Lamorna Cove in Cornwall. She studied again here at the Penzance School of Art, but this time in architecture. She worked here for the rest of her life and made frequent trips to Paris. A neighbor in Lamorna described her as a “dear little soul” who gave all the children in the village a Christmas present. The neighbor, who as a child used to look into her studio to marvel at her work, said:

“... we saw them walking up and down, up and down, up and down. And then she would draw a straight line. Their work consisted of straight lines and cubes. Then she paced up and down again and then - uh, a square would be drawn. "

Moss joined Group Espace's London office and had solo exhibitions at the Hanover Gallery in 1953 and 1958 . She died of cancer on August 23, 1958 at West Cornwall Hospital Penzance , and her ashes were thrown into the sea near Lamorna.

Act

Moss' work included fine art painting, sculpture and reliefs. Before World War II, she was mainly concerned with painting, creating very abstract compositions using simple black lines and grids , very similar to the neo-plasticism of Mondrian, whose work she admired. Later in the 1930s she made white reliefs out of wood, rope and cord without any color. Her French studio, along with most of this pre-war work, was destroyed by German bombing raids in 1944.

Erica Brausen staged solo exhibitions of her work in the Hanover Gallery in London in 1953 and 1958. Further exhibitions took place in 1962 in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and in spring 1972 in the Stadhuis Middelburg .

During Moss' architecture studies after the war, she created sculptures and reliefs such as the Balanced Forms in Gun Metal on Cornish Granite (1956/57) and began painting again. She developed a structurally similar style, but it is more colorful than earlier works.

Despite the innovative nature of her work, her earlier life in Paris and her later withdrawn lifestyle in Cornwall resulted in an unremarkable reputation as a British artist. Until the 1980s, she was considered an insignificant imitator of Mondrian. Moss' work is now in the Tate Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute .

Collections

“Marlow Moss' works are in private and public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem . It is mainly represented in Dutch collections, including the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and Kröller-Müller in Otterlo . "

- Lucy HA Howarth

Web links

literature

  • Florette Dijkstra: Marlow Moss: Constructivist + the Reconstruction Project . Patten, Penzance 1995, ISBN 1-872229-26-3 .
  • Margaret Garlake: Moss, Marlow [formerly Marjorie Jewel]. In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of 2004
  • Lucy HA Howarth: Marlow Moss (1889-1958) . Plymouth 2008.
  • Riet Wijnen: Marlow Moss . Kunstverein, Amsterdam 2013, ISBN 978-94-90629-10-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Andreas Oosthoek: Marlow Moss (1890-1958): Constructions, drawings, paintings . Zurich 1973.
  2. ^ A b Antoinette H. Nijhoff-Wind: Marlow Moss . Amsterdam 1962.
  3. ↑ Charles Darwent: Marlow Moss: forgotten art maverick. The Guardian News and Media, August 25, 2014, accessed December 23, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Hazel Hockin: Some Voices Lamorna . Lamorna 2000, p. 13-18 .
  5. ↑ Lucy HA Howarth: Marlow Moss: Space, Movement, Light. Tate, accessed December 23, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Moss, Marlow
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Moss, Marjorie Jewel (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British painter and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH May 29, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Kilburn
DATE OF DEATH 23rd August 1958
Place of death Penzance