‘Her time has come’: did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?

In 1972, the mighty Kunstmuseum in the Hague bought three paintings by a little known British artist called Marlow Moss. The prestigious art gallery was keen to show the enormous influence of Piet Mondrian – the famous Dutch painter acclaimed for his black grids lit with bold blues and brash yellows – on such lowly also-rans as Moss.

Yet, should you visit the Kunstmuseum today, you’ll find the Moss works positioned front and centre, while a similar piece by the great Mondrian, who would later become the toast of New York, is hidden behind a pillar. 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.

The smart feminist money was on him having stolen from her

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. Not quite in Mondrian territory, not yet anyway.

View image in fullscreen ‘She’s now getting attention’ … Marlow Moss. Photograph: Nijhoff/Oosthoek, Literatuurmuseum, Den Haag

It’s an extraordinary turnaround for an artist who was shunned by much of the art world