“Her time has come”: Does Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist living in Corniche Bay? | Art and design

IIn 1972, the great Kunstmuseum in The Hague purchased three paintings by a little-known British artist named Marlowe Moss. The prestigious art gallery was keen to show the enormous influence of Piet Mondrian – the famous Dutch painter famous for his black grids illuminated by deep blues and bright yellows – on humble paintings like Moss.

However, if you visit the Kunstmuseum today, you’ll find Moss’s works placed front and center, while a similar piece by the great Mondrian, who later became the toast of New York, is hidden behind a column. Why the changing face? Because it is now widely acknowledged in the art world that it was Moss who influenced Mondrian as much as the opposite, at least when it comes to the double or parallel lines he began using in the 1930s to add tension to his harmonious abstract paintings, one of which reached last May for $48 million.

Seven decades after her death in Cornwall at the age of 69, Moss is enjoying a major revival and reappraisal. In addition to the current exhibition of her paintings and drawings at the Kunstmuseum, her sculpture will be displayed at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin in April. Last year, her 1944 work Black, Black, Blue and Red sold for £609,000 at Sotheby’s in London, double its estimate and auction record. Not quite in Mondrian territory, not yet anyway.

It is an extraordinary transformation for an artist who was shunned by much of the art world during her lifetime. Tate wasn’t interested in her. When Moss moved to Cornwall, settling in beautiful and remote Lamorna Cove near Penzance, she made repeated efforts to contact the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and her husband, the painter Ben Nicholson. They ignored her.

“Moss’s time has come,” says Florette Dijkstra, author of Leap into the Light, a biography recently published in Dutch. “Art history is a weird science. The landscape can completely change. The buzzwords today are inclusivity and diversity. Women artists are promoted, as are gay artists. This explains – in part – why Moss gets so much attention.”

Marjorie Jewel Moss, as she was first called, was born in London in 1889. Initially drawn to dance and music, she went on to study art before moving to Cornwall, where she cut her hair and changed her name to the gender-neutral Marlowe, although she was still known as “she”. In the late 1920s, Moss moved to Paris, where she became part of the avant-garde scene and a member of the Abstraction et Creativity Group, which favored abstraction over figurative work or surrealism.

Her entry into the group came through an early admirer, Mondrian, who was a few years older than her and Dutch. Moss was introduced to him through her partner Nettie Nijhoff, a writer from Zealand. Moss and Nijhoff met at the Café de Flore in Paris. When Niehoff asked her son to take a note to the lady sitting at the nearby table, the boy asked, “Which lady?” Moss was, as usual, dressed in men’s clothing. After they became a couple, they both walked around Paris in men’s suits and hats. Niehoff remained married to her husband, the Dutch poet Martinus Niehoff, for years to come, although they both had other lovers. Sometimes, Moss and Nijhoff had other partners as well.

The reaction elicited by this unusual duo was not evident, even in the so-called liberal art community in Paris, Dijkstra says. “Some have accepted it,” she says. “The others didn’t.” Mondrian did this to some extent, but he was more interested in Moss’s art than in her love life.

“He admired her experimentation with ‘tumors’ components – how she used materials other than paint, such as cork and wood, and her use of the ‘double line,’ which allowed for more dynamic compositions,” Dijkstra adds. Since then, Mondrian has gone down in history as the father of Art, which was about reducing art to its basic components, using only lines and shapes with minimal colors.

When Mondrian saw Moss using the double line in a new way—and not using it to cross other lines—he was intrigued and wrote to ask her what she meant by that. When she told him that she considered the one-line grid he had been using for more than a decade to be a “deduction and limitation” of composition, he replied that he couldn’t quite follow what she meant.

However, Mondrian became famous for the double line. Claire Houndtung, curator at The Hague Gallery, believes its use evolved from exchanges between the two, rather than as something created by Mondrian and then borrowed by Mauss, as early art historians believed. “For a long time, it was seen as the instigator – but although it is unclear who used it first, we now know that Mondrian was fascinated by Moss’s use of double lines.”

The sand has certainly changed over the years. Going back to 1972, the assumption was that artists such as Moss were influenced by Mondrian’s use of it. Then came the discovery that Moss had used it too, and that smart feminist money was behind his theft. But now, Houndtung says, there is a new approach. “Many museums have placed Moss at the forefront of the debate about authenticity, but we are moving away from the ‘Who did it first?’ narrative, focusing instead on sharing knowledge.

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to admire Moss’s use of this technique in her 1932 work Black, Black, Red and Grey. They will also be able to compare it with Mondrian, in his 1937 book Composition of Lines and Colors.

Some LGBTQ+ commentators have suggested that Moss’ use of double lines may have been her response to a world that did not make room for a lesbian woman who dressed in masculine clothing. Because her double lines did not intersect with other lines, she effectively opened up a new space on the canvas—a space she might have longed for in the real world. “Maybe it was an expression of her search for freedom,” Houndtung says. “It can be interpreted as an authentic response to people outside binary spaces.”

How does Moss fit into today’s transgender discussion? “If she were alive today, would she be classified as trans? We can’t know — and we don’t want to put words in her mouth. It’s definitely great that she’s seen as a pioneer and inspiration for gay artists today,” Houndtung says.

In 1940, Mondrian moved to New York. Moss, who had been living in the Netherlands with Niehoff, returned to Cornwall because her Jewish origins made life impossible in the territories now occupied by the Nazis. Mondrian urged her to follow him, but she did not. He died there in 1944 and they never met again. In La Morna, Moss seems to have found acceptance and a niche for her work. After the war, she reunited with Niehoff and the pair remained lifelong companions until Moss’s death in 1958. They divided their lives between Cornwall, Paris and the Netherlands, sometimes living on a houseboat in The Hague.

New York, whose gridded streets mirrored the work of Mondrian, helped catapult him to international fame, and he became a giant in art history, one of the three greatest Dutch painters – along with Van Gogh and Rembrandt – of all time. He is considered a central pioneer in the journey from figurative to abstract art, and in the United States his work was associated with the jazz and dance music of the time. In 2022, his piece “Composition No II” sold for $51 million, a record for Mondrian.

By contrast, Moss became marginal in art history, a situation exacerbated by the destruction of much of her work when the Allies bombed a house in Normandy where she and Nijhoff were living in 1944. It was the discovery of a suitcase full of drawings that prompted the Hague exhibition. “The case was left in the Netherlands,” says Houndtung. “Acquired by Kunstmuseum in 2025.” Many of the works were undated, but some are believed to date from the early 1940s. There are rare examples of her drawings that reveal a lot about her thought process.

“We see her using mathematical calculations to plan her geometric paintings, which is very different from Mondrian,” says Hundtung. “She was very precise and her works were carefully planned, whereas Mondrian worked more intuitively.” Also included in the bag are spontaneous drawings that reveal another layer of Moss’s work.

Houndtung hopes the suitcase’s contents will lead to a new chapter in the artist’s legacy, focusing on her work rather than her life story — an ambition supported by Lucy Howarth, author of the only English-language book about Moss, a short biography bearing her name. “Moss has a fascinating story. For most people, the way to get to know her is through the Mondrian link. But she deserves to be explored in her own right. Mondrian scholars have downplayed her importance for years, but she is one of the few first-rate British non-figurative artists from the wars, and she was the only Briton and the only artist to appear in all five journals of abstract creativity.”

Howarth, a historian at the University of the Creative Arts in Canterbury, has been researching Moss since the early years of the 21st century, and says a lot has changed. “In those days, I would look for her work in warehouses and back rooms. Today, Moss’s works hang on the walls and are in high demand for exhibitions.” Howarth is co-organizing the upcoming Berlin Sculpture Exhibition. “Moss has worked in metal, stone and wood, and we will have about 10 pieces,” she says. “But we will also have photos of the missing sculptures.”

Unlike Mondrian, who was a painter, Mauss was a constructivist using a range of materials and methods. It is hoped that the new presentation will shift the focus to that. Niehoff once described her partner as an artist whose work was about space, movement and light—and that applies just as well to her sculptures, Howarth says.

Perhaps most interesting is the idea that the current focus on Mauss is reshaping art history. For centuries, it has been the story of singular men, geniuses who labor brilliantly alone to change the direction of the canon. “We realize that art history is much more interesting than that,” Howarth says. “Mondrian was a great artist, but he was not the only one who practiced oncophilosophy. It is interesting to find lesser-known artists and study their influence – and it is not surprising to find that many of them were women and/or queer. Their presence complicates the story. But it also enriches it – for all of us.”