Her time has come': did Mondrian owe his success to a crossdressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?

"Why the volte-face? Because it is now widely recognised in the art world that it was as much Moss who influenced Mondrian as the other way round, at least when it came to the double or parallel lines he started using in the 1930s to add tension to his harmonious abstract paintings, one of which hammered last May for $48m."

"Seven decades after her death in Cornwall at the age of 69, Moss is enjoying a major revival and reappraisal. As well as the current exhibition of her paintings and sketches in the Kunstmuseum, her sculpture will go on show at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin in April. Last year, meanwhile, her 1944 work White, Black, Blue and Red fetched 609,000 at Sotheby's in London, double its estimate and a record for her work at auction."

"It's an extraordinary turnaround for an artist who was shunned by much of the art world in her lifetime. The Tate wasn't interested in her. When Moss moved to Cornwall, settling in the beautiful and remote Lamorna Cove near Penzance, she made repeated efforts to contact sculptor Barbara Hepworth and her painter husband Ben Nicholson. They ignored her. Moss's time has come, says Florette Dijkstra, author of The Leap into the Light, a biography recently published in Dutch."

Marlow Moss is undergoing a major revival and reappraisal decades after her death. Museums now place her works prominently and credit her influence on Piet Mondrian's use of double or parallel lines in the 1930s. Her paintings and sculptures are entering exhibitions in The Hague and Berlin, and her 1944 painting White, Black, Blue and Red sold for 609,000 at Sotheby's in London, doubling estimates and setting a record. Moss faced neglect during her life, being overlooked by institutions such as the Tate and ignored by contemporaries Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Renewed scholarly and market interest is reframing her art-historical importance.

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