Remembering Moreen Moss 1927 - 2012

As I glanced through the obituary section of The Guardian on a Saturday in March, my attention was drawn to a son’s tribute to his mother, Moreen Moss. While her name was familiar to me from my work as an editor of the Cornwall Artists Index, I could find only one image by her online – a painting entitled ‘The Trawl’. The Digital Museum of Cornish Ceramics revealed that Moreen’s husband Bernard was a potter of renown, based in Mevagissey.

And so I set off on a stormy April morning towards east Cornwall for a meeting with Bernard Moss. I was greeted warmly at the door by his son Daniel, who lives nearby – the second eldest of their seven children. I learned that the obituary had been written by Aryeh, their eldest son, who lives in London. A daughter, Anna, has settled in France, but all the other children are in east Cornwall and visit their father regularly. In fact, Bernard’s daughter Sarah lives just across the road. Once Daniel had taken his leave, Bernard began to tell me the story of Moreen’s life.

She was born Moreen Grace Davies in 1927 into a working class family in Woolwich, south-east London. Her only sibling was a brother, thirteen years her senior. When she was ten, her father died, and her mother had to go out to work, so life was far from easy. From an early age, Moreen showed considerable aptitude for needlework. After she left school, her mother expected her to get a job. She did repair work for a tailor, and secretly enrolled at Sidcup School of Art, knowing that her mother would not have approved of her becoming a student. Her dressmaking skills were such that she soon progressed to designing and making haute couture clothes – an occupation which her mother assumed was a full-time job.

Moreen and Bernard met in Soho in 1948. Abandoning her studies, she ran off to Paris with this young man who had swept her off her feet. Their whirlwind romance was followed by marriage later that year, and in 1949 the couple moved to Cornwall. Their first home was in Heligan Woods. The medieval cottage which they rented was surrounded by ancient trees and cycads. (This was fifty years before the rediscovery of the ‘lost gardens’.) After life in the city, Moreen loved the peace and simplicity of this rural idyll, despite the lack of electricity, mains drainage and running water. With a baby son to look after, life presented considerable challenges.

After a few months, the family moved to Mevagissey. Here they were welcomed into a small community of artists, and Bernard was able to develop a career as a potter. While coping with the demands of a rapidly expanding family, Moreen found that her talent as a graphic artist was in demand, so she began to decorate her husband’s pots. In 1955 British Pathe shot some newsreel footage of the couple at work together in the studio – a testament to their growing reputation. Moreen continued in this role up until 1960. Somehow she found the time and energy for her own artwork as well. Bernard remembers her painting on the beach at Gorran Haven with a baby under one arm.

The Trawl © The Artist’s Estate

To Moreen, family was all-important. ‘The Trawl’ is an image which is intensely personal, depicting the mother with each of her seven children, but to me it is also endowed with an epic quality, celebrating the universality of the experience of motherhood. Many of the artworks which Bernard showed me commemorate significant family occasions, including their golden wedding anniversary in 1998. Her creativity was engendered by love for those around her, unmediated by current artistic trends or the desire to establish her own reputation. In an interview after her mother’s death, her daughter Leah said that if she hadn’t put others first, she would have become more highly acclaimed. She described Moreen as ‘inspirational, fair and generous’. Her natural empathy for others made her a champion of the dispossessed, with a firm belief that nobody should be judged. ‘More than once, I returned from school to find a tramp or a man of the road enjoying tea and sandwiches in our front room’ wrote Aryeh. Perhaps this explains why she was drawn during her student days to the work of the painter David Bomberg (who suffered from artistic isolation and extreme poverty) whom she met while he was lecturing at Borough Polytechnic.

Bomberg’s use of Hebraic imagery found an echo in several of Moreen’s paintings. Brought up in a conventional Church of England household, Moreen herself had no strong religious convictions. Bernard’s parents were Jewish, and were forced to flee their native Russia at the end of the nineteenth century in order to escape persecution. They settled in London, where Bernard was born in 1923. His was a childhood dominated by the observation of Jewish rituals. Moreen was fascinated by her husband’s faith and embraced its traditions. ‘Wailing Wall’ was painted following a visit which she and Bernard made to Jerusalem.

Wailing Wall © The Artist’s Estate

Described as ‘allegorical rather than figurative’, Moreen’s work can be charged with a high emotional intensity. A painting such as ‘Isolated’ suggests that the artist was possessed of a strong social conscience. This canvas was produced in response to political controversy surrounding the wearing by Muslim women of the burka.

Isolated © The Artist’s Estate

Moreen’s involvement in Bernard’s pottery did not prevent her from exhibiting her work. From 1977 she became a full member of the Newlyn Society of Artists. She also exhibited in St Ives, as an associate of the Penwith Gallery. Further afield, Moreen’s work was shown in galleries in London. During the 1980s she became involved in adult education, demanding a high standard from the students in her local art classes.

Some years after Bernard’s retirement, Moreen returned to life as a student of Fine Art, this time at Falmouth College of Arts. She graduated in 2002, at the age of 74. A work from this period entitled ‘Haircut’ was described by a critic from The Times as ‘utterly without sentimentality’. This is one of several double portraits produced over the years depicting Moreen and Bernard. In this canvas, she portrays herself as a considerably younger woman, and her husband as much older than his years. The prominence of the scissors gives the work a disquieting edge.

Haircut © The Artist’s Estate

Encouraged to explore different media at Falmouth College of Arts, Moreen began to incorporate a variety of materials into her work, such as plaster, wax, latex and embroidery. A good example is ‘Moving On’ which, like much of her later work, manifests her early talent for needlework.

Moving On © The Artist’s Estate

Another stitched piece, ‘King Fish’, is one of several allegorical works employing nautical imagery in a ‘naïve’ style.

King Fish © The Artist’s Estate

When Bernard told me that another source of Moreen’s inspiration was Marc Chagall, I was not surprised. Chagall was an East European Jew who survived the Russian revolution and both world wars, and celebrated his faith by incorporating religious motifs into beautiful dreamlike paintings. ‘The Betrothal’ pays homage to his visual imagery, conjuring up a world of innocence and joy in glowing colours. This watercolour happened to come up for auction shortly after Moreen’s death, and Bernard was delighted to have the opportunity of purchasing it. It is a source of great pride to him that this fine painting is once more back in the family home. Her works have always sold well, and many are in private collections in Europe, Israel and America.

The Betrothal © The Artist’s Estate

The sense of a life of shared artistic endeavour is very much in evidence in the house where she and Bernard settled after his retirement. Alongside a wonderful selection of Moreen’s paintings are examples of Bernard’s distinctive pots, many revealing evidence of his wife’s skillful brushwork. A small self-portrait in oils rests on an easel, close to hand. This is an uncompromising, moving image of Moreen in later life. Each brushmark testifies to a life of integrity, lived to the full. Moreen continued to paint until shortly before her death, aged 84, in February 2012. After 64 years of happily married life, Bernard feels his loss deeply, but is sustained by the love of his children close at hand.

Late Self-Portrait © The Artist’s Estate

Their grandson Jacob is the eldest of their 18 grandchildren. (There are also 12 great-grandchildren.) After studying Fashion, Jacob obtained an MA in Curating. Now aged 35, he is a curator at the Fan Museum in Greenwich (incidentally, the only one of its kind in the world). Bernard is very proud of him. It would not be surprising if the Moss’s unique artistic partnership were to leave its legacy in other ways, in generations to come.

© 2012 Helen Hoyle

Grateful thanks to Bernard Moss for the wealth of biographical information, and for granting permission for the reproduction of images by Moreen Moss.

The Digital Museum of Cornish Ceramics can be found at www.cornishceramics.com

British Pathe newsreel with footage of Bernard and Moreen