For Catherine Marciniak

Who doesn’t know the famous grids - yes, those ones: black lines dividing fields of red, blue, and yellow. Mondrian. The genius of order, the father of De Stijl, the very personification of modernist purity. His name has become a code for clarity, balance, and rational beauty - reproduced endlessly in fashion, advertising, and design. We see it in Yves Saint Laurent’s fall-winter 1965 collection, where six Mondrian-inspired dresses became iconic, we also see echoes of it in L’Oréal’s commercial campaigns, in architecture and packaging. We see it everywhere. We don’t need to be an art specialist to recognize Mondrian’s grids. His aesthetic has become part of everyday culture, accessible to the mainstream and endlessly reproduced. Few artists have achieved such visibility or commercial afterlife; Mondrian is not only a painter but a brand, a visual shorthand for order, intellect, and modernity itself.

But behind the system we call “Mondrian” stood also another mind - one that worked with the same discipline, principles, and geometric method that defined De Stijl. Marlow Moss, one of the few women and openly gender-nonconforming figures whose practice shared the movement’s pursuit of order, proportion, and minimalism, developed a precise visual language of her own. Her introduction of the double line - a subtle yet radical modification - disrupted the grid’s perfect symmetry, transforming static equilibrium into tension and movement. Though her work reflected the very ideas De Stijl claimed to embody, Moss herself was never granted equal visibility within its narrative.

Art historians such as Lucy Howarth and Michael White have argued that Moss’s use of the double line preceded and may have influenced Mondrian’s later compositions. Howarth’s writings such as Marlow Moss (2019) and The Double-Line of Miss//Moss, Marlow Moss: A Forgotten Maverick (2017) provide documentary evidence that Moss was exploring this structural motif as early as the late 1920s till 1931. Moss met Piet Mondrian in Paris, initiating a correspondence that lasted several years. 1932 Mondrian began integrating the double line into his compositions, such as Composition with Double Line and Yellow (1932) - after Moss had already been using the motif.

While the extent of her influence cannot be proven definitely, the temporal sequence and visual parallels indicate a dialogue in which ideas moved both ways - a reciprocity long obscured by the mythology of individual genius. Yet history did not treat the two participants equally: one became celebrated as a master of modernism, reproduced endlessly across fashion, advertising, and design, while the other was largely forgotten - her contribution absorbed into his legacy.

From Marjorie to Marlow (© of the original picture belongs to Stephen Storm)

From Marjorie to Marlow: The Origins of a Constructivist

Marlow Moss (born Marjorie Jewel Moss, 29 May 1889 - 23 August 1958) stands as one of the most rigorously disciplined, yet least acknowledged figures in early modernism. Born in Kilburn, London, to Lionel and Fannie Moss, she displayed a precocious sensitivity to structure and rhythm through music - she showed an early aptitude for music - her first field of study - until a long illness with tuberculosis interrupted her training. What followed was a long period of isolation that would later echo into the solitary focus of her artistic practice. When she turned from music to ballet, and later to painting, the underlying concern remained the same: the search for order within movement, precision within flow.

Moss started to study painting at the Slade (School of Fine Art in London), one of the most prestigious art schools of the time. Around 1919, after what she described as “a shock of an emotional nature”, Moss suddenly withdrew from formal study, stopped attending the traditional, institutional path toward becoming an artist. She stepped into a personal identity-related crisis that marked a profound turning point in her life. It marked the beginning of her transformation into Marlow Moss. She left London for the Cornish coast. She moved alone to Cornwall. This relocation represented a retreat from society and the London art world. Cornwall was (and still is) a remote, rugged landscape - a space associated with reflection, artistic inquiry, and solitude. Moss entered a period of isolation, a creative reconstruction, turning inward to (re-)construct her identity and artistic path.

She cut her hair short and began dressing in tailored men’s suits - she changed her name from Marjorie Jewel Moss to Marlow Moss. They began presenting and living in an androgynous way - consistently for the rest of their life. There is no surviving record of Moss’s preferred pronouns or self-identification; no letters, diary entries, or statements where Moss declared her gender identity. However, given Moss’s lifelong androgynous presentation, their adoption of a gender-neutral name, and the absence of evidence that they identified within the binary framework of “woman” or “man”, from this turning point forward, they/them pronouns will be used to reflect the androgynous way Marlow Moss lived and presented themself. At this stage, Moss was not yet a constructivist or a modernist. They were still exploring their identity, independence, and artistic direction - experimenting with art and self-definition. This period was essentially a personal and existential retreat, not yet a stylistic shift. It was the first Cornwall period.

After this initial withdrawal and identity reformation, Moss moved to Paris in the mid-1920s. This move was the defining turning point in their artistic life - the moment that shifted them from personal introspection and identity reconstruction to active participation in the international avant-garde. Constructivism, Purism, and Neo-Plasticism were flourishing there. In Paris, Moss studied under Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne. Here they absorbed the rigorous, geometric visual language of Purism and Constructivism, which valued proportion, order, and clarity over expressionism or ornamentation. Their focus on structure over expression aligned naturally with the principles of De Stijl, which sought balance through reduction and proportion. It was here that Moss’s work began to move decisively toward geometric abstraction, guided by an ethical precision that would come to define their practice. During this period, they initiated an exchange with Piet Mondrian, whose nearby studio on the Rue du Départ became a site of ongoing correspondence and dialogue about composition, rhythm, and equilibrium.

By the late 1920s, Moss had developed a distinct visual system - rigorous, minimal, and relational - that challenged the static harmony central to De Stijl. Their introduction of the double line, a quiet yet radical disruption of the grid, replaced symmetry with vibration and order with tension. This formal innovation would later reappear in Mondrian’s work, absorbed into the broader mythology of modernist genius.

The onset of World War II forced Moss to leave France. They returned to Cornwall, settling near Lamorna Cove, where they enrolled at the Penzance School of Art to study architecture. This period is described as one of severe simplicity and discipline in both lifestyle and artistic practice. Neighbors later recalled them pacing their studio in silence, drawing one measured line at a time - a working method that reflected the precision and control guiding both their art and their life. The 1940s were a time of both isolation and continuity. Moss lived quietly, largely cut off from the continental avant-garde they once engaged in. Despite this, they continued to produce abstract works: reliefs, paintings, and small sculptures characterized by strong linearity and geometric rigor. Some of these works reintroduced the double line motif and are now held in collections such as the Tate and the Stedelijk Museum.

Moss continued to live and work in Cornwall until their death in Penzance in 1958, aged 69. Their later works reveal a stripped-down precision - a synthesis of architectural study and painterly rigor that art historians have described as Moss’s phase of architectonic abstraction. In these compositions, structure itself became expression: lines functioned as load-bearing elements, and balance was engineered rather than composed. Despite the originality, uniqueness, clear vision, and structural rigor that characterized their oeuvre, Marlow Moss died largely unacknowledged by the institutions that celebrated their male contemporaries. Where Mondrian’s name entered history as the emblem of pure abstraction, Moss’s was often reduced to a footnote - or worse - dismissed as imitation.

A Statement by M. Moss 1931 (Published: 1932, in Abstraction-Création: Art Non-Figuratif, Issue 1, Paris, © of the original picture belongs to Lucy Howarth)

De Stijl and Constructivism

But let’s go back to Paris - to the years when something subtle happened to the line. Between Moss and Mondrian, its authorship grew uncertain, and its history quietly rewrote itself. In the late 1920s, Piet Mondrian relocated from the Netherlands to Paris, Montparnasse, bringing with him the principles of De Stijl - an avant-garde and design movement founded in the Netherlands in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszár, and others - reduction, equilibrium, and the search for universal order. De Stijl was deeply influenced by Dutch Neoplasticism, a term Piet Mondrian used to describe his vision of an art that transcended the personal and the material. In essays such as “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art” (1937) and earlier writing in De Stijl journal, Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg argued that abstraction could reveal universal harmony by removing all subjective or representational content - a kind of visual equivalent of natural law or divine balance.

Geometry was a universal language. Vertical and horizontal lines represented the fundamental forces of nature - a system of balance between opposing axes symbolizing cosmic order. De Stijl artists believed that abstract geometry - lines, rectangles, and primary colors - was universal. Unlike figurative art (which shows recognizable people, cultures, or symbols), pure abstraction supposedly speaks a shared visual language that doesn’t depend on where we are from, or what gender or cultural background we have. A horizontal line symbolized calm or rest, a vertical line symbolized energy or spirit - principles they thought applied to everyone. By removing personal expression or national style, they believed they could reach a form of collective truth or universal harmony - a kind of Stardust Dignity - the longing for a shared, borderless existence based on equilibrium and equality. For the Stijl, achieving equilibrium on the canvas symbolized the possibility of harmony in human society - a world beyond conflict, difference, and inequality.

When Marlow Moss came to Paris in the late 1920s, they came to study and to rebuild. After withdrawing from the Slade School of Fine Art and living in Cornwall for several years, Moss sought a more rigorous and international environment for modern art. Back then, Paris was the epicenter of Constructivism, Purism, early abstraction at the time, and the place for De Stijl. As mentioned before, Moss enrolled at the Académie Moderne, founded by Amédée Ozenfant and Fernand Léger, both central to the Purist and Constructivist movement. During this time, Moss also encountered the ideas of De Stijl, which circulated widely in Paris through journals, exhibitions, exchanging manifestos and letters. So, constructivism was born in post-revolutionary Russia, emphasized building - art as engineered structure, tied to material, mathematics, and real-world function. While Constructivism was concerned with the material world itself - reality was constructed through material, engineering, and design - art should be integrated into modern life (architecture, furniture, clothing) - De Stijl was concerned with the ideal order behind matter. De Stijl, like quantum physics, sought to describe the invisible structure underlying visible reality.

Marlow Moss stands exactly at the crossroads between Constructivism and De Stijl, absorbing elements of both and transforming them into a personal, original system - one that can’t be neatly classified as either. They used the discipline and method of Constructivism but aimed for the visual purity and order of De Stijl - translating both into a language that also mirrored their own search for identity, structure, and coherence.

While living in Paris, Moss also spent intervals working in Normandy - a rural counterpoint to their academic life in Paris. Normandy offered what Paris did not: low living costs, the solitude necessary for concentrated study, and a quiet contrast to the intellectual and social intensity of the Parisian art scene. It is during that time, between 1927 - 1929, that Moss developed the conceptual foundations of their Constructivist abstraction and began experimenting - blending Constructivist and De Stijl ideas together. Normandy and Paris together form the transition zone between their early representational experiments and the emergence of their distinct abstract language. As Lucy Howarth notes in Marlow Moss: this period marks the conceptual emergence of Moss’s “measured system of rhythm and interval”, the early foundation of what would become the double line. By 1930 - 1931, Moss had completed their first fully realized compositions using those specific lines.

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow, 1932 (© of the original picture belongs to National Galleries of Scotland)

The Mondrian Correspondence

After their time in Normandy, where they had been experimenting in relative isolation, Moss relocated permanently to Paris to immerse themself in the avant-garde environment. Normandy had served as a kind of transitional studio period - a space for early experimentation and introspection - but Paris was where those ideas crystallized into a coherent visual language and where the dialogue with Mondrian began. By the early 1930s, Marlow Moss and Piet Mondrian were living within walking distance of each other in Paris. Their studios - both located in Montparnasse at 26 Rue du Départ and possibly on Rue du Cherche-Midi - became sites of dialogue and exchange.

Although never a formal member of De Stijl, Moss worked in direct dialogue with its leading figures and embodied its most rigorous ideals. Georges Vantongerloo - a Belgian painter, sculptor, and designer and member of De Stijl - after WWI, he settled in Paris, becoming a central connector between Dutch De Stijl artists and the French avant-garde. Moss and Vantongerloo moved in the same Parisian circles in the early 1930s, where Vantongerloo introduced or reconnected artists working on similar geometric principles. Moss’s path into the De Stijl network likely ran through Vantongerloo. Both shared an interest in mathematical proportion and constructed order - ideas that positioned them within the same intellectual current of abstract thought in Paris. Through this shared focus, and Vantongerloo’s role as a bridge between Dutch, British and French avant-gardes, Moss was likely introduced to Piet Mondrian.

Their connection deepened during the early 1930s, when Moss and Mondrian began an active exchange of letters and studio visits in Paris. The surviving correspondence between Marlow Moss and Piet Mondrian is limited, but curators and researchers - especially Sophie Howarth and Michael White - have reconstructed its themes from both letters and contemporary writings. The letters reveal a shared preoccupation with compositional structure - specifically how line, interval, and proportion could generate rhythm within a seemingly static grid. Moss wrote about the importance of “relation” - how visual balance should arise from the dynamic interaction of elements rather than fixed symmetry. Mondrian’s replies reaffirmed his commitment to absolute equilibrium - the idea that every element should resolve into universal harmony.

They also exchanged reflections on musical analogy: both used musical language - “counterpoint”, “interval”, “rhythm” - to describe spatial relations in their paintings. In the 1910s - 1930s, abstraction was often justified by comparing it to music, which was considered a “pure” art form. Painters used musical terms in general to explain visual relationships. For De Stijl artists, harmony and rhythm weren’t just aesthetic choices - they were ways to express universal balance, like the mathematical order found in music.

Marlow Moss, White and Yellow, 1935 (© of the original picture belongs to Christie’s in London)

De Stijl Grid - A Mutual Influence

When we look back at what is documented - the letters, the artworks, and later essays and retrospectives - the details of their collaboration or dialogue are unclear, because not much was preserved. However, the surviving letters and dated works make one thing clear: Moss had already begun adding a second, parallel line to the single dividing lines typical in De Stijl and also in Mondrian’s compositions in the late 1920's. In Mondrian’s work, for example, one black line separates two colored planes. Moss doubled it - creating two closely spaced parallel lines. This changed the visual and conceptual logic of the grid. The space between the lines became active - a zone of vibration and tension. The grid was no longer static or perfectly balanced; it became dynamic, almost rhythmic. It was a deliberate structural shift.

The historical record shows, and scholars today generally accept that Marlow Moss originated the double line before Mondrian. Moss’s first surviving works featuring the double line - in 1929, they created their first Neo-Plasticist work, which featured two intersecting lines on a white background. The device - two parallel black lines crossing a white field - appeared years before Mondrian’s comparable use and redefined the grid’s visual rhythm. Before 1931, Mondrian - then a leading figure of De Stijl - worked within the movement’s strict guidelines - manifested in Theo van Doesburg’s and Piet Mondrian’s writings - only vertical and horizontal lines were permitted, primary colors only and shades of lightness: black, white, grey; no diagonals, no curves, no representation, and no personal expression. The goal was to achieve a universal, impersonal balance reflecting cosmic harmony. Dividing lines and colors with absolute precision means they engineered art as a model of universal harmony - geometry and color operations like laws of balance rather than personal expression.

As we said, before Moss, De Stijl’s grid - especially in Mondrian’s work - was based on perfect equilibrium: everything held in static balance; a visual system of ideal order - serene, absolute, and closed. When Moss introduced the double line, they broke that stillness. The second line created space between lines, a tension or interval. That gap introduced a different rhythm, vibration, and time - a sense of duration within the image. Instead of depicting eternal harmony, Moss’s compositions acknowledged movement, relation, and instability - making abstraction dynamic rather than fixed. Moss turned geometry into a living system. De Stijl sought to represent the universe as perfect order - pure balance, divine proportion, harmony beyond human error. But Moss, intuitively or intellectually, understood that the universe is not static of flawless - it is relational, dynamic, and in continuous flux. Their double line captures that; it acknowledges tension, vibration, and multiplicity - the perfect imperfection, an acceptance of incompleteness as order itself. The universe is perfect, but not in the mathematical or static sense De Stijl imagined - I would say - its perfection lies in its capacity for movement, imbalance, decay, and renewal - a self-adjusting system that remains whole precisely because it changes.

So, Moss’s double line could be read as a visual expression of that kind of truth: perfection not as stillness, but as ongoing adjustment. Their work doesn’t deny order - it shows that order is alive. While De Stijl sought perfection through a kind of control; Moss found it in motion. In their work, balance is never fixed but continuously renewed - just as their life, moving across places, identities, and disciplines, embodied that same fluid principle. For Moss, from my perspective, order was not imposed but lived: a structure open to change, relation, and becoming.

Yet the principle that defined Moss’s vision would soon be absorbed into another name. What originally defined Moss’s vision was later rebranded under Mondrian’s name. Mondrian’s paintings began to incorporate the same doubled lines that had defined Moss’s work. For Mondrian Moss’s innovation was decisive. Around 1931-1932, after he and other figures in the Paris avant-garde had had active correspondence and exchanges with Moss - in letters describing Moss’s working process and compositional ideas - he began using double lines in his own paintings (like Composition with Double Line and Yellow (1932). While no surviving letter directly from Moss to Mondrian contains a sketch, Howarth and Michael White both argue that their artistic dialogue included visual exchange - they visited each other’s studios and saw works in progress.

Marlow Moss, Composition in Red, Black and White, 1953 (© of the original picture belongs to Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam)

From Single Line to Double Line

Mondrian’s pre-1930 work was already highly refined, but formally limited. Before the 1930s, Mondrian’s De Stijl compositions (1917-1930) - the classic grids of black lines and block of primary color - were groundbreaking in their time but over time the system was reaching a point of formal exhaustion - it had become too resolved. Mondrian’s aesthetic - once radical - had already begun to saturate visual culture. In other words, Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism risked becoming static. When Mondrian began using the double line (1932), his work acquired an entirely new energy: rhythm, vibration, temporal tension. It allowed him to reintroduce uncertainty - to make order feel alive again. The introduction of the double line reanimated the stillness and stagnation, restoring rhythm and tension to a field that had grown static.

Seen in retrospect, the introduction of the double line in his work is not necessarily a fundamental turning point - but definitely a significant part of his late work. The instantly recognizable “Mondrian” style - the kind of work we all know and admire - used by Yves Saint Laurent, L’Oréal and all kind of design would exist probably without the double line. So, his work would likely have achieved recognition regardless, yet the double line - which became one of the signature of his mature style - complicates the legacy. His success wasn’t dependent on Moss; he was already respected and innovative but the double line adds an ethical and historical tension because the motif wasn’t his original idea. But did he ever acknowledge the origin of the double line? The short answer is: no. In his writings from the early 1930s he described a “new vibration” and “interval between lines”, ideas that would become central to his mature compositions, yet he never credited Marlow Moss. Their correspondence ends without mention of influence or collaboration.

So, it is normal and necessary for artists - and everyone - to inspire each other; creative ideas are rarely born in isolation. This gently rejects the idea of “original genius” as a myth. Art - like science, innovation, evolution - evolves through exchange. Creativity works like an ecosystem or scientific process: progress depends on shared information and interaction, not isolation. Getting inspired isn’t copying - it is how knowledge and aesthetics evolve over time. One artist’s discovery becomes the seed for another’s innovation. Open exchange is how culture grows, the cross-pollination of ideas is necessary for artistic and cultural progress. But there is an ethical shift: when one voice disappears from the record while another becomes an icon through the same ideas, the balance collapses. This is what happened between Marlow Moss and Piet Mondrian. Of course, Moss also learned from and got inspired by Mondrian; their exchange was one mutual influence, I would say. Yet the balance of that dialogue was never equal. Between a celebrated white male artist and a queer, gender-nonconforming painter, visibility itself became uneven terrain. And in correspondence and surviving notes, Moss explicitly aligned themself with the Neo-Plasticist movement that Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg had founded. This concludes that the natural, healthy process of mutual inspiration turned into an unequal power and competition dynamic. The shared exchange was rewritten into a one-sided story - the myth of the male “genius” artist.

A system built on competition and control - whether in art, fashion, academia, or politics - always reproduces inequality (© Edie Lou)

Redrawing the Line

Like countless other cases across modernism and throughout history, Moss’s erasure was not an isolated event but a part of a systemic pattern. As most of us know by now, cultural and institutional power has historically been organized around patriarchal and hierarchical models of authorship. Across politics, art, science, and philosophy, the figure of the solitary male genius became the dominant myth - a narrative that conflated authority, rationality, and creativity with masculinity. Exclusively.

The dominant idea of artistic “genius” in Western Cultures - especially from the 19th to mid-20th centuries - was built around the myth of the solitary, heroic man who created through pure individual vision and mastery. Western history - not just art history, obviously - was built through the epistemology of the white male gaze: a way of seeing, classifying, and valuing the world that positioned white masculinity as both the subject (the one who sees) and the standard (the measure of value). Everything else - women, queer identities, people of color, the colonized - became object, the influenced, or other. The entire cultural narrative was constructed for centuries to exclude them. The myth of genius, universality, and objectivity was never neutral; it was gendered, racialized, and hierarchical from its foundation. The white male system dictated power and accessibility - defining who was allowed to be part of the “club”.

And like countless other cases across modernism, Moss’s erasure was not an isolated event but part of a systemic pattern. Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Constructivist experiments were absorbed into her husband’s legacy; Lucia Moholy’s pioneering photograms became known under László Moholy-Nagy’s name; Anni Albers’s architectural textiles - today we would say textile design - were relegated to cute “craft”; Camille Claudel and Rodin of course, Fanny Mendelssohn’s compositions published under her brother’s name, Sonia Delaunay’s chromatic theories dissolved into her husband’s myth, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, whose collaborative self-portrait dismantled gender binaries, or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhove, whose radical assemblages predated Duchamp’s readymades, and so on and so on. Each instance reveals the same dynamic: when women or queer creators wanted to enter the stage, they faced the same systemic absorption.

All those stories, just like Moss’s, aren’t just about being left out; they expose how the entire system of “genius” was built. Movements like De Stijl claimed to represent universal harmony, beyond gender, nation, or immaterial order. But paradoxically, the people who actually lived that ideal - fluid, boundary-crossing, dissolving the boundaries between male and female, universal - like Moss or other queer or female artists - were the ones the system excluded. The so-called universal values of De Stijl or other modernist movements were presented as neutral truths that applied to everyone, but in reality, they reflected a specific cultural bias: the worldview of the white, educated, European men. It pretended to be beyond culture, but it was actually shaped by one - by Western patriarchal norms that defined what counted as reason, beauty, or genius.

And why does this story still matter today? Well…because what happened to Marlow Moss or other creators still happens today - especially to unconventional voices, queer and gender-nonconforming creators whose ways of thinking don’t fit the system’s - or sub-system’s - clean lines. The same structural logic still governs culture - in art, fashion, technology, and beyond. Moss’s story is not about one forgotten artist; it is about how systems decide who gets to define innovation, whose work becomes “visionary”, and whose contributions dissolve into the background.

Even systems or industries that claim to be progressive - like contemporary art, fashion, or politics - still operate through the same power dynamics as before. They use the language of equality, diversity, or innovation, but underneath, they’re still driven by visibility (who gets seen), capital (who gets funded), and control (who decides what counts). The structure of the hierarchy of power and recognition - remains the same. In this economy, the goal is not meaning or integrity - it is to be seen, monetized, and sustained within a cycle of competitive display. Moss’s rigor resists this order. Their life and work model another form of authorship: about relation - between elements, between people, between self and structure.

Moss embodied a collaborative, interconnected vision of creation, where art was not about status or control but about balance, awareness - an identity structured by dynamic and evolution. And Mondrian? The very architect of De Stijl’s values and order failed to uphold its core principles. The artist who sought purity and equilibrium on canvas could not extend that same integrity beyond it: he never credited Marlow Moss, whose innovation reshaped his own work. But the asymmetry between Moss and Mondrian was not simply a personal failure of acknowledgement; it was a structural one. Their erasure was not authored by a single person, but a reflection of a system that, for decades, was shaped by the white male perspective. It was a systemic failure - built on exclusion, hierarchy, and selective visibility. Moss wasn’t forgotten, obviously, because they lacked talent, but because the system only made certain people visible while overlooking contributions that disrupted established narratives. A way of maintaining power - operating for centuries - through control of knowledge and cultural importance.

In credit to Moss - to everyone who created without recognition, whose work was, or still is, absorbed into collective amnesia: society is beginning, however slowly, to correct its course. The blind spots of history are starting to come into focus. The old and outdated structures are beginning to loosen; slowly, a shift is taking shape - toward recognition, equity, and share authorship. Creative industries, artists itself, and audiences who demand a more transparent and democratic value system are beginning to question the structural exclusivity - the one-directional, male-dominate flow of recognition, power, and the old idea of the “lone genius” and instead value collective, transparent, and fair creative practices. It is acknowledging collaboration and the exchange of ideas rather than maintaining hierarchical credit systems.

We are still not there completely, though, there is still resistance, inequality, and exploitation, but progress is visible. While power still exists, it’s being challenged; the dominance of white, male, Eurocentric authorship in culture is no longer untouchable. The future belongs not to power games or hierarchical struggle. A system built on competition and control - whether in art, fashion, academia, or politics - always reproduces inequality and creates discrimination, obviously. People spend more energy defending territory than creating something new. Systems built on rivalry and hierarchy eventually collapse under their own isolation; those grounded in collaboration and reciprocity sustain growth, creativity, and collective intelligence. Real innovation happens in collaboration, in networks of mutual recognition. But openness alone isn’t enough. The flow of ideas must be accompanied by fairness - acknowledgement, cultural authorship, and recognition. And just a friendly reminder: History may have favored Mondrian, but time is less forgiving than myth. His silence on Moss’s contribution now casts a shadow over his legacy - a subtle signal that holding to transparency and honesty is the best way to go.

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