Monastery, Cyprus depicts the monastery of Agios Ioannis Chrysostomos in the mountainous Kyrenia District of Northern Cyprus. It was part of a series of paintings, some completed collaboratively, by Marr, Mendelson, and Bomberg while on a trip to the island in the summer of 1948. Marr married Mendelson earlier that year and had been elected as secretary to the Borough Group with Bomberg as president. Their collaborative experimentation evidences the increasingly close relationship between the two men and the woman who had drawn them together. Mendelson independently demonstrated her ample ability as a landscapist in other work produced during the trip, later exhibited at the Fine Art Society. Yet although her solo efforts closely resemble her step-father’s Spanish or Cornish scenes with thick linear brushwork in gold and burgundy, here short dabs of paint build defined patches of colour: a more enigmatic palette of various teals, beige, and scarlet in a bath of indigo forms, due to this being one of several works the group painted by moonlight. All three artists’ usually strict attention to angular massing of harsh mountain scenes takes a back seat as the moonlight allows isolated chromatic contrast to be prioritised above an overall scheme. The pools of colour are structured by diagonal recessional lines in the centre of the canvas, suggesting a road leading to the monastery itself or a raised outcrop. These elements combine to demonstrate the artists’ awareness of Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract expressive landscapes, especially Composition 1 (1910, destroyed), that Bomberg had seen exhibited at the Allied Artists Association shows in his youth. Cyprus would constitute a moment of flourishing in Marr’s creative development. As the first significant trip abroad following his association with Bomberg and enrolment in his classes, it was a chance to fully apply Bomberg’s teaching. In this context, the choice of a monastery as a subject is significant and marks the spiritual approach to colour and form common to Marr and his new wife. The painting’s acute red mountain peak embodies the purposeful thrust of new ideas and hopeful action that characterised these post-war years for Leslie and Dinora, as well as a practical understanding of the hieratic power provided by Bomberg’s teaching. Bomberg’s decision to paint this subject by night reflects his approach to instructing his younger companions: sensitivity to colour and form must be forged through restriction and limitation, he suggests; only through reduction and abstraction, intuition and inspiration can a search for ‘the spirit in the mass’ be fulfilled. Monastery is one of few examples where this teaching and the deep personal relationship that underpinned it is played out, constituting a key moment in Marr’s personal and artistic development.