Mina Loy
(1882-1966)
Artist. Writer. Entrepreneur.
She consorted with the major 20th-century avant-garde movements—
Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism—
yet was wedded to none.
She moved among the metropolitan centers of modernism—
London, Paris, Florence, New York, and Berlin—
yet rarely felt at home.
She wrote poems, plays, and experimental prose;
created drawings, paintings, sculptures, and constructions;
designed lampshades, toys, Christmas lights, cleaning tools, and corselets.
Read More About Loy
Mina, the first-born, was the problem child. Imaginative and precocious, she was prone to inventing colorful stories and drawings—and disinclined to proper feminine decorum. She was sent to art school: first in London, then Munich, then Paris.
In Paris, Loy was seduced by fellow artist Stephen Haweis, whom she married in 1903. Their daughter, Oda Janet, was born 1904 (five months after the wedding). That same year, Loy exhibited six watercolors at the prestigious Salon d’Automne under the self-styled name, Mina Loy.
Just as her career began to take off, her personal life crashed. Oda died of meningitis in 1905, Loy’s marriage felt apart, and she was plagued by grief, self-doubt, and neurasthenia. Divorce was financially impossible. She and Stephen moved to Florence to escape scandal and rebuild their marital façade.
In Florence, Loy had two more children but grew more estranged from Haweis. Meanwhile, she developed sustaining friendships with Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, and her ward and artistic protégé, Frances Simpson Stevens, who introduced her to the Italian Futurists in 1913.
In 1914, Loy became entangled in love affairs with F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini. She also embarked on a literary career, publishing her first poems, manifestos, and plays in various American and European little magazines.
When her affairs with the Italian Futurists ended, Loy served briefly as a nurse for the Italian Red Cross during World War I. In 1917, she left her children with their Italian nursemaid and sailed to New York, determined to reinvent herself as an artist.
In New York, Loy found artistic compatriots in the avant-garde circle that gravitated around Walter and Louise Arensburg. She met Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Beatrice Webb, and the love of her live, Arthur Cravan—a boxer, Dada poet, and nephew of Oscar Wilde.
Loy secured a divorce from Haweis in 1917. The next year, she and Cravan sailed to Mexico to escape the draft and got married. Loy became pregnant, and they set off for Argentina on separate boats. Cravan never made it: his sailboat disappeared off the coast of Mexico, and he was never heard from again.
Heartbroken, Loy returned to London and delivered her fourth child, Jemima Fabienne Cravan Lloyd. She then resumed her transatlantic migrations, moving to Geneva, to Florence, to New York, back to Florence, and then to Paris, where she resided from 1921-1936, running a lamp shop funded by Peggy Guggenheim and then acting as an purchasing agent for her son-in-law Julian Levy’s art gallery in New York, serving as a key figure in Surrealism’s New York reception. In 1933, she befriended the Surrealist painter Richard Oelze and drew upon their relationship for her novel, Insel.
Loy returned to New York in 1936, where she interacted with Joseph Cornell, Kenneth Rexroth, Djuna Barnes, and Charles Henri Ford. She became an American citizen in 1946 and moved to the Bowery in 1949, living in a communal household and creating artistic assemblages from local refuse and found objects.
In 1953, she moved to Aspen, Colorado, to be near her daughters. She died there in 1966.
In her lifetime, Loy published two books, Lunar Baedecker [sic] in 1923 and Lunar Baedeker and Time Tables in 1958, as well as dozens of poems, plays, and essays in little magazines. In addition to exhibiting art at the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Carfax Gallery in London early in her career, she showed Surrealist paintings in Julian Levy’s New York gallery in 1933 and “Constructions” at an exhibit curated by Marcel Duchamp at the Bodley Gallery in New York in 1959.
Today, many of Mina Loy’s creations remain unpublished, undated, lost, or in private collections, making her career as difficult to chart as it is fascinating to follow.
Sources
- Carolyn Burke. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
- “Mina Loy Chronology.” The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. Eds. Rachel Potter and Suzanne Hobson. London: Salt Publishing, 2010. 12-15.
- “Time-Table.” Mina Loy. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger L. Conover. Highlands, NC: The Jargon Society, 1982. lxiii-lxxix.
Other Bios
Coming soon. We apologize for the disruption. The portfolio plugin for the bios corrupted the site and has been deactivated until we can resolve the problem.
Djuna Barnes (June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982) was an American writer and artist best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature. (16 January 1872 – 29 July 1966), sometimes known as Gordon Craig, was an English modernist theatre practitioner; he worked as an actor, director and scenic designer, as well as developing an influential body of theoretical writings. Craig was the son of actress Dame Ellen Terry. Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd on May 22, 1887, Lausanne, Switzerland. A pugilist, a poet, a larger-than-life character, and an idol of the Dada and Surrealism movements. His brother Otho was a painter and photographer married to the Russian émigré artist Olga Sacharoff. His father\'s sister, Constance Mary Lloyd, was married to Irish poet Oscar Wilde. He changed his name to Cravan in 1912 in honour of his fiancée Renée Bouchet, who was born in the small village of Cravans in the department of Charente-Maritime in western France. Why he chose the name Arthur remains unclear.
Cravan was last seen at Salina Cruz, Mexico in 1918[4] and most likely drowned in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico in November 1918. 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French, naturalized American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, conceptual art and Dada, although he was careful about his use of the term Dada and was not directly associated with Dada groups. Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet and editor, the founder of the Futurist movement. (January 9, 1881 – July 8, 1956) Italian journalist, essayist, literary critic, poet, and novelist. (pronounced LOO-hahn), née Ganson (February 26, 1879 – August 13, 1962) Wealthy American patron of the arts. She lived with her second husband, architect Edwin Lodge, in Florence from 1905 to 1912. At her palatial Medici villa—the Villa Curonia in Arcetri, not far from Florence—she entertained local artists, as well as Gertrude Stein, her brother Leo, Alice B. Toklas, and other visitors from Paris, including André Gide. (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) American writer of novels, poetry and plays. Born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. A literary innovator and pioneer of Modernist literature, Stein’s work broke with the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of the 19th-century. She was also known as a collector of Modernist art. (August 19, 1871 – May 11, 1944) was an American painter, designer and poet. (January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. (22 May 1888 – 2 February 1973) was an American avant-garde illustrator and artist, who spent most of her life in New York City, United States. Because of her provocative art and public appearances, she was seen as representative of bohemian Greenwich Village and thus known as \"The Queen of Greenwich Village.\" (June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964) American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.
Djuna Barnes
Gordon Craig
Arthur Cravan
Marcel Duchamp
F. T. Marinetti
Giovanni Papini
Mabel Dodge Luhan
Gertrude Stein
Florine Stettheimer
Alfred Stieglitz
Clara Tice
Carl Van Vechten
