Marjorie Jewell Moss was born in 1890 to an upper-class English family whose values and ease of life were to conflict with her own tastes and temperament. Her adolescence was marked by a series of difficulties and emotional tensions, particularly her family's strong opposition to her serious involvement in the arts. She spent one year at St John's Wood School of Art (probably 1916-1917) then transferred to the Slade School. She was more interested in controversial Post-Impressionist and Cubist art. Frustrated and suffering from the rejection of her work she left the Slade School in 1919 and shut herself away in a cottage in Cornwall. A fortuitous encounter with a biography of Marie Curie helped to revitalise her energies. She began a period of emancipation attempting to purge herself of emotion and to develop the broadest intellectual capacities. From 1927 she based herself permanently in France. After seeing the work of Mondrain Moss she sought a formulae by which to choreograph on canvas the essential relationships of space, movement and light. In 1929 she produced her first Neo-Plastic paintings. Moss returned to Cornwall in 1940, where she stayed until she died. She studied architecture that was to serve as the inspiration for her three-dimensional metal constructions. During the last years of her life she worked toward an economical and increasingly reduced use of form while maintaining tight compositional structure. In 1953 and 1958 she had solo shows at the Hanover Gallery, London. Posthumous exhibitions of her work were held in Amsterdam and in Germany. (Details taken from 'Women Artists: 1550-1950 by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin). She died in 1958.
From the guide to the Marlow Moss Collection, 1989-1994, (The Women's Art Library (MAKE))
