Join the Club: Marlow Moss in the WIAC and the feminism/constructivism conundrum
Howarth, Lucy (2023) Join the Club: Marlow Moss in the WIAC and the feminism/constructivism conundrum. In: “Sheer Verve”: The Women’s International Art Club Ben Uri Gallery, live zoom lecture, 04/10/2023, Live online lecture.
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Marlow Moss (1889-1958) exhibited with the Women’s International Art Club annually 1951-1956 becoming a member in 1953, and was posthumously included in the 1963 show. It was not the only club she was a member of – throughout her career, beginning in the late 1920s, she was keen to connect with other artists professionally and exhibit her work – but it is the only one defined by gender. This is of particular interest in light of Moss’s ambiguous gender presentation – an aspect of her identity certainly pertinent to her historical exclusion (social and artistic) and now a significant catalyst of her re-emergence.
Moss’s legacy might have been different if she had followed Piet Mondrian to New York during the War, as he suggested, or even returned to France afterwards. Instead she went to Penwith in Cornwall, and, apart from sojourns to the Netherlands, stayed there. This was of course not exactly a backwater, but a thriving enclave of modernism – to a certain extent. Ben Nicholson, however, ignored her attempts to introduce herself by letter in the first few years she lived nearby in Penwith; was this rudeness, misogyny or homophobia? Or was it that Nicholson wasn’t inclined to welcome an artist his senior, arriving from Europe, more closely associated with Mondrian than he, and committed to Constructivism. Barbara Hepworth, occasionally at the WIAC, whom Moss had met in Paris, showed strong prejudice against queer sexualities, even in the case of her close friend the potter Jane Leach – not an uncommon attitude of course. Whatever the reason, Moss was bereft of professional allies upon her return to England, and therefore sought out connections where she could; unlike the modernists of St. Ives, the WIAC was a club that would have her as a member.
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