"Man, woman or vegetable growth?" Rediscovering Marlow Moss
Howarth, Lucy (2023) "Man, woman or vegetable growth?" Rediscovering Marlow Moss. In: Modern Women Artists at the Last Tuesday Society, 17/07/2023, Live online lecture.
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The Last Tuesday Society hosted weekly lectures from the authors of the Modern Women Artists series, published by Eiderdown Books, to reveal an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists, introduced by Harriet Olsen. I followed Lotte Crawford on Tirzah Garwood, Ami Bouhassane on Lee Miller, Isabella Smith on Lucie Rie and Alicia Foster on Nina Hamnett – and then after me, Alice Strickland on Laura Knight, Laura Smith on Eileen Agar, Katy Norris on Sylvia Pankhurst and Sara Cooper on Eileen Mayo.
As new books are added to the Eiderdown series, it makes more-and-more sense, and a stronger argument – the diversity of the art practice of women in modern times is demonstrated – these artists have nothing in common, bar their exclusion from the canon, and the dismissal of their practice as a result of their perceived female identity. As part of this series, Moss is framed as a ‘Woman Artist’ – as she often is now – a fraught term always, and increasingly problematic in the case of Moss.
Marlow Moss, constructivist artist, was born in London in 1889, and died in Penzance Cornwall in 1958, she lived in Bohemian Paris and hinterlands of various sorts: rural France; west Cornwall; and Zeeland in the Netherlands; and, through her work and the way she lived her life, she explored gender constructs and the language of modern art – and is now used to interrogate and destabilise these spheres, by academics and cultural commentators.
Moss was part of the inner-circle of Abstraction-Création – a group of artists in the interwar period, around Jean Arp, Theo van Doesburg, Auguste Herbin, Georges Vantongerloo etc. Piet Mondrian himself recommended Moss as a founder member, and she is the only British artist to appear in all 5 issues of their cahier, and 1 of 3 women to do so (the other 2 being Irish artists Mainie Jelett and Evie Hone). Other women on this first list are: [Katherine] Dreier; [Sophie] Taeuber-Arp – and [Sonia] Delaunay.
In a photograph, only recently resurfaced, and now in the collection at the National Portrait Gallery, bequeathed by Moss’s great great niece, we see Moss in Lamorna Cove. I’m unofficially calling it “Moss on the Rocks” partly in honour of our hosts this evening (although I’m afraid I’m not drinking absinthe yet!) – partly to underline Moss is no ‘Virgin of the Rocks’ feminine archetype – and to begin to address the very-silly question "Man, woman or vegetable growth?". It is also an apposite title, as, at the point I believe this photograph was taken, when Moss was ‘washed up’ on the shores of Cornwall, after having fled the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands at the start of the war, by boat – and her career as an avant-garde artist might well have been “all washed up” or indeed “on the rocks”.
Photography can be an extraordinary means of self-presentation and gender performance, as is explored in the fantastic 1997 Guggenheim exhibition and accompanying book Rrose is a Rrose is Rrose by Jennifer Blessing. This image, by an unknown photographer, could be a fortuitous snapshot, capturing Moss unaware in a casual moment – I don’t think so though – I think it is as consciously constructed as the gender-bending series of Moss portraits by Stephen Storm.
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