Marlow Moss returns to London in 30-work St James's show
Moss is back in London after more than half a century away from the city's commercial galleries.
Ward Moretti at 12 Duke Street, St James's, opens Marlow Moss: Space, Movement & Light on 14 September. It runs to 30 October.
The show brings together 30 paintings, works on paper and one sculpture, according to The Art Newspaper. The works are drawn from private collections, Ward Moretti says. That private loan route matters. Much of Moss's work is hard to see in public.
Moss was British. Born Marjorie Jewel Moss in London in 1889, she died in 1958. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and later at the Académie Moderne in Paris.
Paris changed her direction. She moved there in 1927 and met Dutch painter Piet Mondrian in 1929. In 1930 she devised her double line, a system of paired lines used to structure abstract compositions. Mondrian wrote to her to ask about it in 1932.
Loss shaped what survives. Moss lost much of her work in a studio fire in 1944. So a 30-work gathering is substantial.
The gallery calls Moss a leading British Geometric Abstractionist, shorthand for art built from line, shape and colour rather than people or places. It also describes her as a 20th-century Constructivist and pioneering Neoplastic artist, terms linked to the spare, grid-based language she shared with Mondrian's circle.
To support the show, Ward Moretti has produced a scholarly catalogue edited by Moss expert Lucy Howarth.
What makes this stand out is access. For most people, Moss is a name in a footnote to Mondrian. This is a chance to walk into a small St James's room and follow the lines for yourself.
