Mina Loy
Encyclopedia
Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Löwry (December 27, 1882 – September 25, 1966) was an artist
, poet
, playwright
, novelist, Futurist
, actress, Christian Scientist
, designer of lamps, and bohemian
. She was one of the last of the first generation modernist
s to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot
, Ezra Pound
, William Carlos Williams
, Basil Bunting
, Gertrude Stein
, Francis Picabia
and Yvor Winters
, among others.
and studied painting for two years. When she returned to London, she continued to study painting, once having Augustus John
as a teacher. During her studies, she became familiar with the latest advanced theories in Europe, such as that of Friedrich Nietzsche
, Henri Bergson
, and Sigmund Freud
, as well as teachings of the East. She moved to Paris
with Stephen Haweis, who studied with her at the Académie Colarossi
. The couple married in 1903. Loy is first cited using her new last name in 1904, when she exhibited six watercolor paintings at the Salon d'Automne
in Paris
. Loy and Haweis had their first child, Oda, in 1904. Oda died on her first birthday.
Loy soon became a regular in the artistic community at Gertrude
and Leo Stein
's salon, where she met many of the leading avant-garde artists and writers of the day. Loy would meet the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire
, Pablo Picasso
, and Henri Rousseau
. During her three years in Paris, she, Gertrude Stein
, and Djuna Barnes
would develop lifelong friendships.
In 1907, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence, where they lived more or less separate lives, becoming estranged. Despite drifting apart, they had two more children: Joella in 1907 and Giles in 1909. It was during this time that Loy became part of the Futurists community, having a sexual relationship with their leader Filippo Marinetti. While attending gatherings held at Mabel Dodge's Medici villa, she also networked with expatriates from Manhattan. Among this group were journalist and communist John Reed, as well as novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten
, who would eventually become Loy's agent. During World War I
, Loy would serve in an army hospital.
publications. In 1914, "Aphorisms on Futurism" was published in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work
. "Parturition", her graphic depiction of childbirth, was printed in Trend.
In July 1915, Loy began to write what would be later known as "Songs to Joannes" "(originally "Love songs"), a collection of modernist, avant-garde
love poetry about her disenchantment with Giovanni Papini
, another founding Futurist with whom Loy had been in a romantic relationship in Florence. First readers of "Songs to Joannes" were shocked by Loy's forward expressions of sexuality, particularly the grotesque and uncensored depictions of erotic desire and bodily functions.
In 1918, Loy penned her polemic
al Feminist Manifesto, at least partly in response to the misogyny
of Futurism's founder, F. T. Marinetti.
Disillusioned with the macho elements in Futurism and its move towards Fascism
, as well as desiring a divorce from her husband Stephen Haweis, Loy left her children with a nurse and moved to New York in 1916, where she began acting with the Provincetown Players
. She was a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine, which also included Man Ray
, William Carlos Williams
, Marcel Duchamp
, and Marianne Moore
. She also became a Christian Scientist during this time. Loy soon became a leading member of the Greenwich Village
bohemian circuit. She also met the 'poet-boxer' Arthur Cravan
, self-styled Dadaist and fugitive from conscription
. Cravan fled to Mexico
to avoid the draft; when Loy's divorce was final she followed him, and they married in Mexico City
. Here, they lived in poverty, and years later, Loy would write of their destitution.
Once Loy became pregnant, the couple realized they needed to leave Mexico. A few months later, Cravan set sail for Buenos Aires in a small yacht as Loy watched from the beach. He sailed over the horizon, disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again. The tale of his disappearance is strongly anecdotal, as recounted by Loy's biographer, Carolyn Burke. Their daughter was born April 1919.
, Dadaist Tristan Tzara
, and Jane Heap
. In 1923, she returned to Paris and, with the backing of Peggy Guggenheim
, started a business designing and making lampshades, glass novelties, paper cut-outs and painted flower arrangements. Her first book, Lunar Baedecker was also published that year. She picked up old friendships with Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein.
. She moved to the Bowery
, where she became interested in the Bowery bums, writing poems and creating found art
collage
s on them. In 1946, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her second and last book, Lunar Baedeker & Time Tables, appeared in 1958. She exhibited her found art constructions in New York in 1951 and at the Bodley Gallery
in 1959. In 1953, Loy moved to Aspen
, Colorado, where her daughters Joella and Fabienne were already living; Joella, who had been married to the art dealer of Surrealism in New York, Julien Levy, next married the Bauhaus
artist and typographer Herbert Bayer
. In Colorado, Mina Loy continued to write and work on her junk collages up to her death at the age of 83, in Aspen.
Loy also wrote a novel, Insel, which was published posthumously.
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
, poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
, novelist, Futurist
Futurism (art)
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...
, actress, Christian Scientist
Christian Science
Christian Science is a system of thought and practice derived from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy and the Bible. It is practiced by members of The First Church of Christ, Scientist as well as some others who are nonmembers. Its central texts are the Bible and the Christian Science textbook,...
, designer of lamps, and bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
. She was one of the last of the first generation modernist
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...
s to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, Basil Bunting
Basil Bunting
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...
, Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.- Early life :...
and Yvor Winters
Yvor Winters
Arthur Yvor Winters was an American poet and literary critic.-As modernist:Winters's early poetry, which appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, was written in the modernist idiom, and was heavily influenced both by Native American...
, among others.
Early life
Mina Loy was born Mina Gertrude Löwry in London, England. Her mother Julia Bryan was English, and her father Sigmund Löwry was a Hungarian Jew. Upon leaving school at age seventeen, she moved to MunichMunich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
and studied painting for two years. When she returned to London, she continued to study painting, once having Augustus John
Augustus John
Augustus Edwin John OM, RA, was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a short time around 1910, he was an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom....
as a teacher. During her studies, she became familiar with the latest advanced theories in Europe, such as that of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
, and Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
, as well as teachings of the East. She moved to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
with Stephen Haweis, who studied with her at the Académie Colarossi
Académie Colarossi
The Académie Colarossi is an art school founded by the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi. First located on the Île de la Cité, it moved in the 1870s to 10 rue de la Grande-Chaumière in the VIe arrondissement of Paris, France....
. The couple married in 1903. Loy is first cited using her new last name in 1904, when she exhibited six watercolor paintings at the Salon d'Automne
Salon d'Automne
In 1903, the first Salon d'Automne was organized by Georges Rouault, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Angele Delasalle and Albert Marquet as a reaction to the conservative policies of the official Paris Salon...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. Loy and Haweis had their first child, Oda, in 1904. Oda died on her first birthday.
Loy soon became a regular in the artistic community at Gertrude
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
and Leo Stein
Leo Stein
Leo Stein was an American art collector and critic. He was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the older brother of Gertrude Stein. He became an influential promoter of 20th-century paintings. Beginning in 1892, he studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for two years. The...
's salon, where she met many of the leading avant-garde artists and writers of the day. Loy would meet the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, and Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier , a humorous description of his occupation as a toll collector...
. During her three years in Paris, she, Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, and Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens...
would develop lifelong friendships.
In 1907, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence, where they lived more or less separate lives, becoming estranged. Despite drifting apart, they had two more children: Joella in 1907 and Giles in 1909. It was during this time that Loy became part of the Futurists community, having a sexual relationship with their leader Filippo Marinetti. While attending gatherings held at Mabel Dodge's Medici villa, she also networked with expatriates from Manhattan. Among this group were journalist and communist John Reed, as well as novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten
Carl van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.-Biography:...
, who would eventually become Loy's agent. During World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, Loy would serve in an army hospital.
Poetry and Work
Loy's extremely original poems started to frequent smaller magazines such as Rogue, attracting the attention of the New York avant-garde. Once her work started to gain momentum, she began to publish poems and articles in more significant New YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
publications. In 1914, "Aphorisms on Futurism" was published in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work
Camera Work
Camera Work was a quarterly photographic journal published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. It is known for its many high-quality photogravures by some of the most important photographers in the world and its editorial purpose to establish photography as a fine art...
. "Parturition", her graphic depiction of childbirth, was printed in Trend.
In July 1915, Loy began to write what would be later known as "Songs to Joannes" "(originally "Love songs"), a collection of modernist, avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
love poetry about her disenchantment with Giovanni Papini
Giovanni Papini
Giovanni Papini was an Italian journalist, essayist, literary critic, poet, and novelist.-Early life:...
, another founding Futurist with whom Loy had been in a romantic relationship in Florence. First readers of "Songs to Joannes" were shocked by Loy's forward expressions of sexuality, particularly the grotesque and uncensored depictions of erotic desire and bodily functions.
In 1918, Loy penned her polemic
Polemic
A polemic is a variety of arguments or controversies made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. Other variations of argument are debate and discussion...
al Feminist Manifesto, at least partly in response to the misogyny
Misogyny
Misogyny is the hatred or dislike of women or girls. Philogyny, meaning fondness, love or admiration towards women, is the antonym of misogyny. The term misandry is the term for men that is parallel to misogyny...
of Futurism's founder, F. T. Marinetti.
Loy and Arthur Cravan
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
, as well as desiring a divorce from her husband Stephen Haweis, Loy left her children with a nurse and moved to New York in 1916, where she began acting with the Provincetown Players
Provincetown Players
The Provincetown Players was an amateur group of writers and artists who, at the early part of the 20th Century, wanted to see a change in American theatre and created a company committed to producing new plays by exclusively American playwrights...
. She was a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine, which also included Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
, and Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
. She also became a Christian Scientist during this time. Loy soon became a leading member of the Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
bohemian circuit. She also met the 'poet-boxer' Arthur Cravan
Arthur Cravan
Arthur Cravan was known as a pugilist, a poet, a larger-than-life character, and an idol of the Dada and Surrealism movements. He was the second son of Otho Holland Lloyd and Hélène Clara St. Clair of Armenian desent. His brother, Otho, was born in 1885...
, self-styled Dadaist and fugitive from conscription
Conscription
Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names...
. Cravan fled to Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
to avoid the draft; when Loy's divorce was final she followed him, and they married in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
. Here, they lived in poverty, and years later, Loy would write of their destitution.
Once Loy became pregnant, the couple realized they needed to leave Mexico. A few months later, Cravan set sail for Buenos Aires in a small yacht as Loy watched from the beach. He sailed over the horizon, disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again. The tale of his disappearance is strongly anecdotal, as recounted by Loy's biographer, Carolyn Burke. Their daughter was born April 1919.
Return to Europe and New York
Loy would return to Florence and her other children. However, in 1920 she would set out for New York, hoping to find Cravan, unable to accept his death. Here she returned to her old Greenwich Village life, perusing theater or mixing with her fellow writers. She would mingle and develop friendships with the likes of Ezra PoundEzra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, Dadaist Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
, and Jane Heap
Jane Heap
Jane Heap was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner , she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of...
. In 1923, she returned to Paris and, with the backing of Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim
Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R...
, started a business designing and making lampshades, glass novelties, paper cut-outs and painted flower arrangements. Her first book, Lunar Baedecker was also published that year. She picked up old friendships with Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein.
Later life and work
In 1936, Loy returned to New York and lived for a time with her daughter in ManhattanManhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
. She moved to the Bowery
Bowery, Manhattan
Bowery , commonly called "the Bowery," is a street and a small neighborhood in the southern portion of the New York City borough of Manhattan...
, where she became interested in the Bowery bums, writing poems and creating found art
Found art
The term found art—more commonly found object or readymade—describes art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function...
collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
s on them. In 1946, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her second and last book, Lunar Baedeker & Time Tables, appeared in 1958. She exhibited her found art constructions in New York in 1951 and at the Bodley Gallery
Bodley Gallery
The Bodley Gallery was a prominent art gallery in New York City, USA, from the late 1940s through the early 1980s. The Bodley specialized in contemporary and modern art. David Mann was director of the gallery during its heyday and Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Braun The Bodley Gallery was a prominent art...
in 1959. In 1953, Loy moved to Aspen
Aspen
Populus section Populus, of the Populus genus, includes the aspen trees and the white poplar Populus alba. The five typical aspens are all native to cold regions with cool summers, in the north of the Northern Hemisphere, extending south at high altitudes in the mountains. The White Poplar, by...
, Colorado, where her daughters Joella and Fabienne were already living; Joella, who had been married to the art dealer of Surrealism in New York, Julien Levy, next married the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
artist and typographer Herbert Bayer
Herbert Bayer
Herbert Bayer was an Austrian American graphic designer, painter, photographer, sculptor, art director, environmental & interior designer, and architect, who was widely recognized as the last living member of the Bauhaus and was instrumental in the development of the Atlantic Richfield Company's...
. In Colorado, Mina Loy continued to write and work on her junk collages up to her death at the age of 83, in Aspen.
Loy also wrote a novel, Insel, which was published posthumously.
External links
- Mina Loy at Modern American Poetry
- Mina Loy at Modernism: American Salons (Case Western) – photographs, works, bibliography, and links
- Mina Loy at the Modernist Journals Project – examples of visual art
- Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy: Drafts of "Nancy Cunard", Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript LibraryBeinecke Rare Book and Manuscript LibraryYale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library was a 1963 gift of the Beinecke family. The building was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and is the largest building in the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books...
, Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, accessed January 30, 2008. - Mina Loy, "The Sacred Prostitute"