Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable 9780691250465

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Selected Poems and Writings. Apology of Genius
DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD
Feminist Manifesto
TRUANT OF HEAVEN
Moreover, the Moon—
“The Starry Sky” OF WYNDHAM LEWIS
MINA LOY
Brancusi’s Golden Bird
Lunar Baedeker
FROM ROGUE TO RAGS
The Widow’s Jazz
MINA LOY
The Artist and the Public
EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
FURTHER READING
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
Photography and Copyright Credits

Citation preview

MINA LOY

EDITED BY JENNIFER R. GROSS

BOWDOIN COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

MINA LOY

STRANGENESS IS INEVITABLE

April 6 – September 17, 2023

All Rights Reserved

With subsequent travel to: The Arts Club of Chicago, March 19 – June 8, 2024

ISBN 978-0-691-23984-2 (ebook): 978-0-691-25046-5

Copyright © 2023 by Bowdoin College The poetry and writings of Mina Loy in this volume are courtesy of The Estate of Mina Loy. We extend our thanks to Roger Conover for the information he has provided about the editorial and publication history of Loy’s writings. Unless otherwise noted, all reproductions of art works by Mina Loy are courtesy of Roger Conover, © The Estate of Mina Loy. Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected] Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX press.princeton.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Names: Gross, Jennifer R., editor. | Ades, Dawn. | Conover, Roger L. | Lauterbach, Ann, 1942- | Bowdoin College. Museum of Art organizer, host institution. Title: Mina Loy : strangeness is inevitable / edited by Jennifer R. Gross. Description: [Brunswick, Maine] : Bowdoin College Museum of Art ; Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022028752 | ISBN 9780691239842 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Loy, Mina—Exhibitions. | BISAC: ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945) | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory Classification: LCC NX512.L69 A4 2023 | DDC 709.2—dc23/eng/20220926 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2022028752 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

Designed by Roy Brooks, Fold Four, Inc. Frontispiece: Mina Loy, Drift of Chaos II (Hermes) (detail), 1933. Oil on panel, 36 × 47 in. (91.44 × 119.38 cm). Private collection. Pages xiv–1: Stephen Haweis, Mina Loy Holding Auguste Rodin Sculpture (detail), ca. 1905–9. Gelatin silver print on paper, 5 × 8 in. Private collection. Front cover: Mina Loy, Moons I (detail), 1932. Mixed media on board, 26 1∕4 × 35 1∕4 in. (66.68 × 89.54 cm). Private collection. Back cover: Unidentified artist, Mina Loy Dressed for the Blindman’s Ball. 1917. Gelatin silver print on paper, 5 1∕2 × 8 7∕16 in. (14 × 21.5 cm). Private collection.

This book has been composed in News Gothic and Roemisch Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in Italy 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CONTENTS

TRUANT OF HEAVEN THE ARTIST MINA LOY Director’s Foreword ANNE COLLINS GOODYEAR IX Selected Poems and Writings Apology of Genius VII Feminist Manifesto XIII Moreover, the Moon 105 “The Starry Sky” of Wyndham Lewis 111 Brancusi’s Golden Bird 121 Lunar Baedeker 142 The Widow’s Jazz 180 The Artist and the Public 199

JENNIFER R. GROSS 2

MINA LOY ART OF THE UNBEAUTIFUL TRUE ANN LAUTERBACH 112

FROM ROGUE TO RAGS MINA LOY’S CONSTRUCTIONS DAWN ADES 144

MINA LOY “I’M NOT THE MUSEUM” ROGER CONOVER 182

Editor’s Acknowledgments 200 Notes 203 Further Reading 210 List of Contributors 210 Index 211 Photography and Copyright Credits 216

VII

Apology of Genius Ostracized as we are with God — The watchers of the civilized wastes reverse their signals on our track Lepers of the moon all magically diseased we come among you innocent of our luminous sores unknowing how perturbing lights our spirit on the passion of Man until you turn on us your smooth fools’ faces like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries We are the sacerdotal clowns who feed upon the wind and stars and pulverous pastures of poverty Our wills are formed by curious disciplines beyond your laws You may give birth to us or marry us the chances of your flesh are not our destiny — The cuirass of the soul still shines — And we are unaware if you confuse such brief corrosion with possession In the raw caverns of the Increate we forge the dusk of Chaos to that imperious jewellery of the Universe — the Beautiful — Mina Loy, Untitled (Surreal Scene) (detail of fig. 1.111), 1935. Gouache with collage on panel, 20 3∕4 × 16 3∕4 in. (52.71 × 42.55 cm). Private collection.

While to your eyes A delicate crop of criminal mystic immortelles stands to the censor’s scythe.

IX

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

MINA LOY’S LONG REALITY Writing late in her life, at an unspecified time, Mina Loy imaginatively conflated the challenges of growing older with questions about her own legacy. In “An Aged Woman,” Loy noted in her opening stanza, “The past has come apart / events are vagueing / the future is inexploitable.” The poem, which grapples with the specter of aging, concludes: “Dilation has entirely eliminated / your long reality.”1 Yet if Loy seems to allude to the terrifying possibility of another self, growing within and poised to consume the achievements of a younger, more able person, she adds a fictive compositional date, projecting herself decades into the future — July 12, 1984, when she would have been 101 years old — and suggesting the enduring reach of her creative activity. Possibly inspired by her friend Marcel Duchamp, who similarly posited and played with visions of his own pending transformation over the years, and asserted his desire to be assessed by future audiences, Loy implicitly raises questions about what her work would mean generations hence when she herself could no longer be present.2 But her oeuvre’s dilation — through publication and now, through this exhibition — has not eliminated but rather expanded her long reality, even as it has witnessed Loy’s transformation from a colorful and vibrant human being into an intriguing, if often inscrutable, phenomenon. Courageously defying the social and aesthetic conventions of her era, Mina Loy (1882–1966) forged a remarkable creative career that included daring poetry and experimental prose, visual art, and design. While the force of her visual expression, like that of her writing, was admired by such contemporaries as Berenice Abbott, Djuna Barnes, Constantin Brancusi, Joseph Cornell, Arthur Cravan, Marcel Duchamp, Mabel Dodge, Peggy Guggenheim, Julien Levy, Richard

Mina Loy, Untitled (Sketches of Fabienne Lloyd) (detail of figure 4.12), from Mi and Lo, n.d. Ink on paper. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Oelze, Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, and Beatrice Wood — each of whom is represented in the exhibition this book accompanies — it has never before been addressed as a whole. Mina Loy’s work as a visual artist as distinct from her work a poet has long been acknowledged but has never before been documented. Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable, the first major retrospective exhibition of the complex images and objects that Loy created, owes its vision and character to the close examination of Jennifer Gross, the exhibition curator, of Loy’s creative life, complemented by the nuanced perspectives of the poet Ann Lauterbach, the scholar Dawn Ades, and the writer and editor Roger Conover. Together, these contributions testify to Mina Loy’s transformative impact on the visual art and literary avant-garde of the twentieth century. In her lead essay, Gross weaves together Loy’s lifelong commitment as both an artist and a poet and addresses the many factors that mitigated against earlier widespread recognition of Loy’s artistic oeuvre. Lauterbach explores Loy’s struggle with truth and beauty, arguing that her engagement with the emphatically “unbeautiful” materials of the Bowery — including rags and bottle caps — reflected her identification with the destitute and dispossessed. Ades considers Loy in both textual and art historical terms—as a contributor to the Dada magazine Rogue, and within the larger context of Surrealism. Conover speaks to his deep engagement with Loy’s work, and its persistent relevance to and anticipation of contemporary culture, including music. Finally, a selection of Loy’s poems and writings are woven into the book. Like the objects in the exhibition that accompanies this publication, these materials demonstrate Mina Loy’s extraordinary contributions as an image maker, author, and cultural arbiter. Present implicitly in the volume, though not reprinted here, is Mina Loy’s 1925 essay “Modern Poetry,” which opens with the observation, “Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.”3 Demonstrating the clear intersection Loy perceived between all modes of her creative thought and expression, the essay is the source of the exhibition’s subtitle, Strangeness Is Inevitable.4 In acknowledging the syntactical “eccentricities” of modern poetry—and by extension, visual art—Loy points to this “strangeness” as evidence not of the disconnection of poets and artists from the real world, but rather of the “new manner” in which these creatives perceive and thus present that universe. As readers of this book and viewers of the exhibition will experience themselves, Loy’s work retains a radical freshness, testifying powerfully to the artist’s “long reality.” On behalf of my colleagues at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, I express my deepest appreciation to Jennifer Gross and to each of the contributors to this publication for sharing their perspectives and insights to produce such a groundbreaking exhibition and publication. This project was developed in large part during the moment of the recent global pandemic, adding further complexity to the already considerable challenges associated with conducting new research, viewing works of art, and crafting a touring exhibition. With this in mind, we are grateful to the many friends and colleagues at numerous institutions who supported this work by providing access to archives — including virtually when they could not be physically accessed — and who aided our work in tracking down drawings, correspondence, and articles related to Loy and helping us secure reproductions of

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

this material. In particular, we would like to recognize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Nancy Kuhl, June Can, Matthew Rowe, and Mary Ellen Budney; and from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Jonathan Hoppe. We are deeply appreciative to the private and institutional lenders who supported this exhibition through their generous loans and in making reproductions of works of art in their collection available to us. We offer our sincere thanks to Roger Conover, Marie Difilippantonio, Michael Duncan, Jessica and John Gordon, Francis M. Naumann, and Helen Zell, as well as our colleagues at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Special Collections and Rosenbach Library. Numerous other colleagues supported the development of this publication and the related exhibition. We offer our heartfelt thanks to our colleagues at Princeton University Press, particularly Michelle Komie, publisher of art and architecture; and Terri O’Prey, Whitney Ravenhorst, Steven Sears, and their former colleague Kenneth Guay. Thanks too to copyeditor Kathleen Kageff. For their sensitive imaging of many of the works in the catalogue and the exhibition, we thank Luc Demers and Jay York. For their attentive work in the conservation of key objects, we are grateful to Rob Conzett, Matt Hamilton, Rebecca Johnston, and Brook Prestowitz of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. At the BCMA, this publication and exhibition would not be possible without the diligent and tireless work of Suzanne Bergeron, Leslie Bird, Michelle Henning, Jo Hluska, Sean Kramer, Laura Latman, Sabrina Lin ’21, José Ribas ’76, and Shannon Viola. For their support we also thank Casey Braun, Sean Burrus, Elizabeth Carpenter, Jim Higginbotham, Sean Kramer, Liza Nelson, Steve Perkinson, Amanda Skinner, Laura Sprague, Adam Talbot, and Anne Witty. We are enormously grateful to the Bowdoin students who have supported us through their work on this project as interns, particularly Cassie Jackson, ’22. As always, I express, on behalf of all my colleagues at the BCMA, our thanks to the museum’s Advisory Council, to Dean for Academic Affairs Jennifer Scanlon, and to President Clayton Rose. We also wish to express our appreciation to Janine Mileaf, executive director of the Arts Club of Chicago, for her collaboration in sharing this exhibition with a broad national audience. No project can happen without generous financial support. For the critical resources that have made possible the realization of Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and at the Arts Club of Chicago, together with the accompanying catalogue, we acknowledge, with our profound thanks, the Elizabeth B. G. Hamlin Fund, the Zell Family Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, Peter J. Grua ’76 and Mary G. O’Connell ’76, Robert Freson, Selina F. Little, Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, Colby College Museum of Art, and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation. Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable is made possible at the Arts Club of Chicago through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Anne Collins Goodyear Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art

XI

XIII

Feminist Manifesto The feminist movement as at present instituted is

Inadequate Women if

you want to realise yourselves — you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval — all your pet illusions must be unmasked — the lies of centuries have got to go — are you prepared for the Wrench — ? There is no halfmeasure — NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is

Absolute Demolition

Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vicecrusades & uniform education — you are glossing over Reality. Professional & commercial careers are opening up for you —

Is that all you want?

And if you honestly desire to find your level without prejudice — be Brave & deny at the outset — that pathetic clap-trap war cry Woman is the equal of man — for She is NOT! The man who lives a life in which his activities conform to a social code which is a protectorate of the feminine element — — is no longer masculine The women who adapt themselves to a theoretical valuation of their sex as a relative impersonality, are not yet

Feminine

Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not — seek within yourselves to find out what you are As conditions are at present constituted — you have the choice between Parasitism, & Prostitution — or Negation Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited — at present they are at the mercy of the advantage that each can take of the others sexual dependence — . The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge — is the sexual embrace. Mina Loy, Fille en robe rouge (see fig. 1.24), 1913. Watercolor with graphite, 19 1∕2 × 15 1∕2 in. (49.53 × 39.37 cm). Private collection.

XIV

The first illusion it is to your interest to demolish is the division of women into two classes the mistress, & the mother every well-balanced & developed woman knows that is not true, Nature has endowed the complete woman with a faculty for expressing herself through all her functions — there are no restrictions the woman who is so incompletely evolved as to be un-self-conscious in sex, will prove a restrictive influence on the temperamental expansion of the next generation; the woman who is a poor mistress will be an incompetent mother — an inferior mentality — & will enjoy an inadequate apprehension of Life. To obtain results you must make sacrifices & the first & greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your “virtue” The fictitious value of woman as identified with her physical purity — is too easy a stand-by —— rendering her lethargic in the acquisition of intrinsic merits of character by which she could obtain a concrete value — therefore, the first selfenforced law for the female sex, as a protection against the man made bogey of virtue — which is the principal instrument of her subjection, would be the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty — . The value of man is assessed entirely according to his use or interest to the community, the value of woman, depends entirely on chance, her success or insuccess in manoeuvering a man into taking the life-long responsibility of her — The advantages of marriage are too ridiculously ample — compared to all other trades — for under modern conditions a woman can accept preposterously luxurious support from a man (with-out return of any sort — even offspring) — as a thank offering for her virginity The woman who has not succeeded in striking that advantageous bargain — is prohibited from any but surreptitious re-action to Life-stimuli — & entirely

debarred maternity.

Every woman has a right to maternity — Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her raceresponsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex —

XV

Each child of a superior woman should be the result of a definite period of psychic development in her life — & not necessarily of a possibly irksome & outworn continuance of an alliance — spontaneously adapted for vital creation in the beginning but not necessarily harmoniously balanced as the parties to it — follow their individual lines of personal evolution — For the harmony of the race, each individual should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male & female temperaments — free of stress Woman must become more responsible for the child than man — Woman must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved — The feeling that it is a personal insult when a man transfers his attentions from her to another woman The desire for comfortable protection instead of an intelligent curiosity & courage in meeting & resisting the pressure of life sex or so called love must be reduced to its initial element, honour, grief, sentimentality, pride & consequently jealousy must be detached from it. Woman for her happiness must retain her deceptive fragility of appearance, combined with indomitable will, irreducible courage, & abundant health the outcome of sound nerves — Another great illusion that woman must use all her introspective clear-sightedness & unbiased bravery to destroy — for the sake of her self respect is the impurity of sex the realisation in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex — except in the mental attitude to it — will constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to imagine.

TRUANT OF HEAVEN THE ARTIST MINA LOY JENNIFER R. GROSS

Not since Marcel Duchamp curated her final one-person exhibition in New York at the Bodley Gallery in 1959 has the artist Mina Loy risen above the obscuring cloud of mystery and notoriety that settled around her in 1914 when her writing was first published in Camera Work (fig. 1.1) and Trend (fig. 1.2). While literary historians have embraced the breadth and force of her written work,1 art historians have yet to fully acknowledge the modern marvel that was Mina Loy. Her omnivorous creativity defied categorization, and her superlative, complex persona deflected focus. The artist Mina Loy was at once a shooting star, a lunar beacon, and a constellation unto herself. While Loy the poet is known to the world, Loy the artist and cultural pollinator, who hybridized her ideas across media as a dedicated and innovative painter, portraitist, inventor, and industrial and fashion designer, remains less recognized. In fact, an understanding of the breadth of the term artist as defined by Loy and her peers stands to enrich the definition of modernism in the twentieth century as a phenomenon that was more aesthetically nuanced, media fluid, and culturally inclusive. It is not a surprise that a woman of keen intellect and an unclassifiable aesthetic has remained an anomaly. She was a true Other, as published in Others magazine (fig. 1.3) by Alfred Kreymborg in 1915. She was a reluctant citizen of the British Empire, an assimilated Jew, a resident alien in Italy and France, and finally a naturalized American citizen. She spoke and wrote in four languages. If Loy had been born fifty years later, there is little doubt her polymathic aspirations would have found more enabling reception. The effervescent web of Loy’s expression hung on what many identified as her “cerebral” nature. The term was applied by critics to her poetry as well as to her much desired dinner conversation. The machinations of Loy’s intellect were precise and

3

unrelenting in their pursuit of truth. She was in fact too smart for her own good. To quote Loy’s own “Feminist Manifesto” of 1914, included in this volume,“Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not. Seek within yourselves to find out what you are. As conditions are at present constituted you have the choice between Parasitism, Prostitution, or Negation.” Loy elected negation. Loy further positioned herself as an outlier in her modernist milieu through her ardent theism,2 which affirmed her belief that to be an artist was a divine calling.3 An adherent to Christian Science, Loy blended her belief in God with her belief in science, resolving that the former was a natural evolutionary progression of the latter, which would lead to the redemption of humanity.4 She was an ephemeral presence in avant-garde circles, partially because she was tremendously busy — running a business; raising her children;5 writing poetry, prose, plays, and criticism; painting; and inventing — and also because she was often in retreat, managing the depression that came upon her in waves throughout her life. Her fortitude and authenticity as an artist were why Duchamp and the remainder of her Parisian (1923–36) cohort — Djuna Barnes, Robert Coates, Max Ernst, and Peggy Guggenheim — all attended Loy’s Bodley exhibit in her absence. It was their salute to a fellow art warrior. Loy had remained true to her call as an artist and fought nobly against the world and its conventions, the heavens, and her circumstance. She was truly a modern (fig. 1.4).

*

If painter was Mina Loy’s first and lifelong self-identification, her sustained preoccupation was reckoning with the human condition.6 She measured her personal experiences against the social conventions that constrained her, and

FIG. 1.1 Alfred Stieglitz, ed., Camera Work 45, January 1914. Private collection.

FIG. 1.2 Djuna Barnes, Trend Magazine 8, October 1914 (cover). Trend Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library.

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FIG. 1.3 Advertisement for Others magazine, ca. 1915–19. Private collection.

FIG. 1.4 George Platt Lynes, Mina Loy, 1931, printed 1959. Gelatin silver print on paper, 6 1∕2 × 4 1∕2 in. (16.6 × 11.6 cm) (image/paper); 14 × 11 in. (35.6 × 28 cm) (mount). Art Institute of Chicago, Photography Expense Fund (1960.509).

TRUANT OF HEAVEN

she fought to imagine herself anew through her art.7 What scholar Samuel French Morse has aptly written of her literary style also applies to her visual work: “The originality of Mina Loy is not merely a matter of typography or syntactical eccentricity; it seems to derive from a peculiar combination of fantasy and savagery … a relentless attack on the ready-made explanations of human wastefulness.”8 In both artistic practices, she sought to make sense of herself and others9 against the backdrops of her immediate context and the universe. Her creative process was fueled by the interplay of simultaneity, painting and writing harmonizing on key. “The two, writing and painting, go together with me,” she wrote Julien Levy when working on her 1933 exhibition at his gallery.10 As a child, art enabled Loy to create a fantasy world she longed to inhabit. She described her early capacity to draw as sourced in her imagination rather than the world: “I could draw anything I longed to see provided I had nothing to look at.”11 During her student years and into midlife, this imaginative practice was redirected and disciplined through her close observation of people, particularly women, resulting in a highly developed capacity as a portraitist and as a recorder of genre scenes depicting women’s roles in society. As a young woman growing up in London, Mina Lowy could not reconcile her identity as the daughter of a nonobservant Jewish immigrant father and a conservative English mother in the socially constraining, middle-class world of Victorian England. Her father, Sigmund Lowy (fig. 1.5), a tailor, had married Mina’s mother, Julia Bryan, under duress, as she became pregnant with Mina during their brief courtship. Mina’s mother was socially timorous and struggled to keep her daughters in standing with the social conventions their financial means afforded (fig. 1.6). Mina’s precociousness was an enigma to her mother, and they remained at cross-purposes throughout their lives.12 Her father, however, enabled Mina to escape by enrolling her in art school.13 Once out of the house, Mina’s independent streak gained momentum, as she discovered a world that affirmed her doubts about conventional society and revealed she had inherited her father’s artistic inclinations. The following year, at the age of seventeen, she moved on to study in Munich at the Kunstlerien Verein. She was on her way to becoming an artist. In 1903, after a reluctant return to London, Loy moved to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi. It was an international school, enabling Loy to socialize with both English and American students. The study of plaster casts and cadavers was part of the curriculum, even for women, and Loy further developed her drawing practice.14 At Colarossi she met Wyndham Lewis and Jules Pascin, who would later inspire her writing and influence her burgeoning modernism. Loy recalled her student days (fig. 1.7, fig. 1.8) in a letter to Carl Van Vechten in 1915: Paris in those days for everyone meant just learning to love the dear old impressionists — I had Manet and Monet on the spot — but Degas frightened me for a year — and I shall always feel grateful to the day I first “saw” the early Renoirs — But the most beautiful things in Paris were the Fêtes — and the Bal Bullier.15

5

FIG 1.5 Unidentified photographer, Sigmund Lowy, ca. 1890. Gelatin silver print on paper. Location unknown.

6

FIG. 1.6 Unidentified photographer, Mina Loy as a Girl, ca. 1886. Gelatin silver print on paper, 7 7∕8 × 4 3∕4 in. (20 × 12 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 1.7 Stephen Haweis, Mina Loy, ca. 1905. Gelatin silver print on paper, 5 7∕16 × 3 1∕8 in. (13.8 × 8 cm). Private collection.

Loy found Paris enchanting, but life would not allow her to settle there for another decade and a half. Within the year she married a fellow English student, Stephen Haweis (fig. 1.9), a marriage they agreed suited them socially, if not amorously, after their discovery that Loy was pregnant. Their marriage freed Mina from the threat of her return to a stifling life in England, and her allowance would support them both. Haweis had a reputable family name, which would secure them a reasonable level of entrée in the world, and he was shrewd at negotiating the social and economic complexities of the art world. He admired Mina as an artist and was astonished to have secured such a beautiful and talented wife. This pride soon soured into humiliation, however, when he realized Loy surpassed him intellectually and artistically. Within the year he became involved in an affair. Time revealed that Loy was naive about her legal standing in their arrangement, which empowered her husband and left her subject to his demands, under the threat that he would expose their continued deception to her father that they had a harmonious union. For a decade, Haweis resisted Loy’s request for a divorce in order to receive a portion of her family allowance. During these years he ably negotiated both of their careers. He mostly likely secured her first one-person exhibition at Carfax Gallery in London in 1912. Later he entered her drawings in shows in America: one, in 1914, at the Architectural League of New York; and one, in 1915, in the Pan-American Exhibition in San Francisco.16

TRUANT OF HEAVEN

Early in their marriage, Haweis was successful as a photographer, opening an art photography business with a partner named Henry Coles. They secured Auguste Rodin as their client, producing over two hundred photographs of his sculptures. Their work was widely acclaimed, and their images of Rodin’s Balzac, famously printed by Alfred Stieglitz in Camera Work, are renowned. Haweis photographed his wife around 1905, and these images stand as some of the most captivating made of her. One portrait depicts her holding a small Rodin sculpture in one hand, another provocatively smoking, and another in a sensuous full-length view of her nude back, her long hair falling to the floor. In all, Loy does not appear as a passive muse, but a sexually aware collaborator (figs. 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13).17 Through Haweis’s connections, the couple made the acquaintance of Walter Sickert and critic George Moore. They met the protofeminist writer Colette, whose personal life may have contributed to Mina’s rapid updating of her own perspective on social conventions. Mina continued to paint and draw at home during her pregnancy. She also began to create millinery and clothing designs. In his autobiography, Haweis credited Loy for introducing to Paris the uncorseted profiles (fig. 1.14) for women that later made designer Paul Poiret famous, her acumen for detail, texture, and color in cloth a certain inheritance from her father. In May 1904, the couple’s daughter Oda was born, and six of Loy’s watercolors were selected for the Salon d’Automne. Loy registered for the salon

7

FIG. 1.8 Henri Joel Le Savoureux, Stephen Haweis and Mina Loy in Art School, c. 1905. Photograph on paper. Location unknown.

8

FIG. 1.9 Mina Loy, Portrait of Stephen Haweis, ca. 1905. Pencil on paper. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.10 Stephen Haweis, Mina Loy Holding Auguste Rodin Sculpture, ca. 1905–9. Gelatin silver print on paper, 5 × 8 in. (12.7 × 20.32 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 1.11 Stephen Haweis, Mina Loy, ca. 1905. Gelatin silver print on paper, 7 × 5 in. (17.78 × 12.7 cm). Private collection.

10

FIG. 1.12 Stephen Haweis, Mina Loy, ca. 1905–9. Gelatin silver print on paper, 7 × 5 in. (17.78 × 12.7 cm). Private collection.

TRUANT OF HEAVEN

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FIG. 1.13 Stephen Haweis, Mina Loy, ca. 1905–9. Gelatin silver print on paper, 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.32 cm). Private collection.

12

FIG. 1.14 Mina Loy, Fashion Designs, ca. 1915. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 14 × 20 1∕2 in. (35.56 × 52.07 cm). Private collection.

as Mina Loy rather than using the surname Haweis,18 or Lowy. She saw herself as a stand-alone entity without the need for patriarchal oversight or entrée. She was twenty-two. Her work was subsequently exhibited at the Salon d’Automne 1905, 1906, 1913, and 1923 (fig. 1.15). She was elected a member of its drawing society in 1906 and served as a juror in 1912 (fig. 1.16). Throughout 1904 and 1905 Loy’s domestic environment occupied her paintings Objects, La Guitare, La Dispute, Devant le miroir, and La Mere.19 She tended attentively to Oda, but the baby contracted meningitis and died on the anniversary of her first birthday. The loss was profound for Loy. Her grief marked her countenance, which she recorded in a self-portrait that year. In Devant le miroir, 1905 (fig. 1.17), Loy depicted herself with a blank, dull gaze, a somber self-regard. She was ever distant, as Djuna Barnes would one day describe her in the opening lines of Dusie, the eponymously titled short story about her dear friend: “It is about Dusie, Madame, she was very young … absent and so pale. … She was dégagé, but you could not know her well.”20 Loy depicted herself as a good Victorian, with hat in place, or possibly as if she had caught sight of herself in the mirror, and had quickly recorded this apparition of her sorrow. The drawing captures an indifferent air that Loy would

TRUANT OF HEAVEN

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FIG. 1.15 Mina Loy, Women in Carriage, ca. 1900. Mixed media on paper, 8 × 8 in. (27.32 × 20.32 cm). From the collection of J. and J. Gordon.

FIG. 1.16 Mina Loy, Sociétaire du Salon d’Automne Paris calling card, n.d. Ink on paper, 2 × 3 1∕2 in. (5.08 × 8.89 cm). From the collection of J. and J. Gordon.

retain throughout her life, which Natalie Barney wrote famously of, decades later, after Mina’s return to Paris: “Hasn’t she already evolved out of this world of appearances: she walks as though the angels were already nibbling at her heels. But, meanwhile, she wears a blind gaze among us as though she has contemplated the Gorgon — a look as if struck with indifference. Her beauty has receded into itself. She offers us this Apology of Genius, as a whole prismatic poetry that plays with this world stopped in density, from which, thanks to some perception of a fourth dimension, she escapes.”21 Though Mina found Oda’s death devastating, her response was to strike out professionally and personally against the limits of her life. In the year leading up to Oda’s death, she had felt shut in at home as a young mother and artist, reliant on her husband’s contacts to move her name forward. She took matters into her own hands by radicalizing her work. She created a body of small watercolors that were selected for the 1906 Salon d’Automne. The images were rooted in real life but had been transformed through her imagination to introduce more complex and emotional underpinnings of experience. Carl Van Vechten described Loy’s journey from observation to transformation in the genesis of two of these early paintings in Rogue in 1915.

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FIG 1.17 Mina Loy, Devant le miroir, ca. 1905. Graphite on brown paper mounted on cardboard, 16 × 13 in. (40.64 × 33.02 cm). Private collection.

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Today his account stands as one of few records of Loy’s work process at the time and provides insight into the creation of one of Loy’s most acclaimed and exhibited works, L’Amour dorloté par les belles dames (fig. 1.18). The paintings of Mina Loy seem to the beholder the strange creations of a vagrant fancy. I remember one picture of hers in which an Indian girl stands poised before an oriental palace, the most fantastic of palaces, it would seem. But the artist explained to me that it was simply the façade of Hagenbeck’s menagerie in Berlin, seen with an imaginative eye. The girl was a model. … One day on the beach at the Lido she saw a young man in a bathing suit lying stretched on the sand with his head in the lap of a beautiful woman. Other women surrounded the two. The group immediately suggested a composition to her. She went home and painted. She took the young man’s bathing suit off and the women she dressed in lovely floating robes, and she called the picture, L’Amour dorloté par les belles dames.22

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FIG. 1.18 Mina Loy, L’Amour dorloté par les belles dames, 1906. Watercolor on paper, 15 1∕2 × 22 1∕4 in. (39.37 × 56.52 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.19 Mina Loy, La Maison en Papier, 1906. Gouache and graphite on paper, 19 3∕4 × 12 1∕2 in. (50.17 × 31.75 cm). Private collection.

There is uncertainty as to whether the original title of the work is “l’Amour dorloté pas les Belles Dames,” which is absent the necessary negation “ne” to translate to “Love does not coddle the beautiful ladies” or “l’Amour dorloté par les Belles Dames,” “Love pampered by the beautiful ladies.” The first seems more apt to Loy’s experience. While the women gawk at the slender, winged Eros/Cupid/Icarus23 who has fallen from the heavens into their midst, they provide no ministrations to him. Loy’s grammar was creative even in her native tongue, so the interpretation and translation remain with the viewer. In the foreground, a detached figure gazes into the distance, unaffected by the commotion behind her, absorbed in wistful thought. The refinement and animation of detail is breathtaking in this painting and other works of this period, such as La Maison en Papier (fig. 1.19). Loy’s distinctive use of color holds these compositions in coherence and focuses the viewer’s attention on every fine detail. She was invited to be a sociétaire, a member of the Salon d’Automne drawing society that year, a recognition of which she would remain proud all her life. Loy’s submissions to the 1906 Salon d’Automne were noted by the curator and critic Paul Jamot in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts as evoking the work of some of the most worldly, outrageous, even pornographic artists of the day, those who dared to represent the banal and carnal considerations of society. Jamot’s voice was not an incidental one in Paris, as he was to become the curator of the department of painting at the Louvre from 1927 to 1939. He wrote, “Miss Mina Loy who, in her strange watercolors where are combined Guy, Rops, and Beardsley, shows us ambiguous ephebes whose nudity is caressed by ladies in the furbelows of 1885.”24 Mina Loy was heralded in excellent company, included in a coterie that was integral to defining the modern in Paris. She was identified not as a mere postimpressionist but as a Decadent painter. She had not debuted as a “lady,” a distinction in which Loy took great pride. She had empowered her own vision of the world by representing women through a woman’s eyes. For the first twenty years of her career, Loy would primarily paint such small-scale genre scenes depicting women in fanciful or actual social contexts and then women at work, including weavers, hat makers, and performers. Her process of transforming her observations of the world through her imagination was leading her toward becoming a modern painter. Oda’s death also energized her to move forward with her personal life. She addressed the neurasthenia brought on by her grief, seeing a young friend who was a psychiatrist and an amateur photographer, Dr. Henri Joel Le Savoureux. We do not know if his treatment ameliorated her symptoms, but their friendship led to an affair. That summer Mina became pregnant. When Haweis learned of her condition he made the claim that the circumstance demanded they strike a new deal in their marriage, one in which he would “accept” the child as his own on the conditions that he and Mina leave Paris, and that she give him another child. Haweis’s edict forced Loy to leave behind her extraordinary artistic debut. Mina and Stephen committed to continuing the pretense of their marriage in Italy. Florence had a strong English expatriate community that

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FIG. 1.20 Mina Loy, Maternity, 1935. Terracotta sculpture, 8 1∕2 × 3 1∕2 in. (21.59 × 8.89 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 1.21 Unidentified photographer, Mina and Joella, 1909. Gelatin silver print on paper, 3 3∕8 × 3 1∕8 in. (8.5 × 8 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 1.22 Unidentified photographer, Mina and Joella in Florence, ca. 1908. Gelatin silver print on paper, 5 1∕8 × 7 in. (13 × 17.8 cm). Private collection.

Haweis believed would be good for their careers. A daughter, Joella, was born in July. Mina quickly became pregnant with a son, Giles, who was born early in 1909 (fig. 1.20). Emulating Loy’s upbringing, the couple employed a nurse named Giulia who oversaw the children’s care full-time for the next twelve years. During these years, a dramatic event took place that permanently reoriented Loy’s perspective on life. Joella became ill with an infant paralysis that worsened into a coma. 25 In desperation, Mina turned to a Christian Scientist practitioner active in Florence for her healing. Joella (figs. 1.21, 1.22) recovered miraculously, and Mina became a person of faith, setting her on a course to develop a complex belief system that would position her outside of mainstream modernist thought for the rest of her life. Loy believed in God and an ordered universe. Her faith infused her art and writing and was vital to her perseverance through the many difficulties she was yet to encounter. Loy’s drawings from these years are of family, friends, and the Italian street peasants (fig. 1.23). This was the beginning of her lifelong consideration of society’s refusé, in whose limited options she saw mirrored her own circumstance. Women remained the focus of her art (fig. 1.24). Loy’s picture The Beach, 1907 (fig. 1.25), shows the resort Forte dei Marmi, where Mina and Stephen would deposit the children to escape Florence’s heat in summer. While this work has previously been dated to 1907, it is likely that Joella and Giles were the models for the children at play, which would date the work to 1911 or later. The scene is artistically noteworthy for Loy’s innovative introduction of time into the composition by depicting the central character as a woman

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at various stages of womanhood; an adult in the changing tent, a girl coming of age, and a teenager. Loy had tested this compositional device in L’Amour dorloté par les belles dames, 1906, by placing the detached, contemplative seated figure in the foreground. In each work, a single figure looks provocatively out of the composition to engage the viewer, identifying the scene not solely as a depiction of the world, but also as a psychological consideration: Loy’s contemplation of herself as a young woman reckoning with her identity beyond her circumstance. In both works the central characters are identifiable as Loy by their distinct eyebrows, which Loy claimed were her strongest feature. The three long-limbed, statuesque figures are repeated in a comparable work, La Maison des Bains (fig. 1.26), 1913. Preoccupied by the humiliation of her marriage and her poor health, Loy maintained a subdued presence in Florence until the appearance of the American heiress Mabel Dodge (fig. 1.27) in 1910. Over the next years, through the artistic and literary alliances she formed through the salon gatherings at Dodge’s Villa Curonia and through her separation from Haweis, who began traveling abroad, Loy blossomed (fig. 1.28, fig. 1.29, fig. 1.30).26 She characterized her life as moving slowly from one “of shilly-shallying shyness … to expansiveness under the luxury of Mabel Dodge’s flowering trees.”27 Through the influx of visitors to Villa Curonia, Loy began to encounter her first modernists, those whose individuality and dissonance with tradition rang true to her own creative being. Early accounts of Loy report her holding intellectual court at Villa Curonia. In his thinly veiled autobiography Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works, Carl Van Vechten recounts a dinner scene at the villa of Edith Dale (a.k.a. Mabel Dodge), in which Loy trounced a flushed contessa’s theories of art as a form of black magic with a complex synopsis of literary authors anchoring her rebuttal.28 “ ‘Art is a protest,’ corrected Mina Loy. ‘Each artist is protesting against something: Hardy, against life itself; Shaw, against shams; Flaubert, against slipshod workmanship; George Moore, against prudery; Cunninghame Graham, against civilization; Arthur Machen, against reality; Theodore Dreiser, against style.’ ” While raising children and making art, Loy was keeping up with her reading, and she had begun to add the title of author to her byline. She and Dodge became fast friends and social allies. Dodge was a remarkable cultural benefactor. Loy constantly turned to Dodge to promote her writing or art (fig. 1.31, fig. 1.32). Dodge reported Loy as making dark genre paintings.29 The titles of Loy’s work of this period, all lost, indicate the trite tenor of her life: Ladies Fishing, Ladies Watching a Ballet, Ladies at Tea, The Little Carnival, Voyageurs, and The Heart Shop.30 The next few years marked Loy’s transformation and ascendence into public view as a modernist. Her enlightenment came through her introduction in Florence to two remarkably dissimilar sources: Gertrude Stein in 1911, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1914. It was a formal letter of introduction from Colarossi student Alice Wood that enabled Mina to invite Stein and Alice Toklas to the home her father had bought her young family the previous year

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FIG. 1.23 Mina Loy, Untitled drawing, published in Crapouillet, ca. 1915. Private collection.

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FIG. 1.24 Mina Loy, Fille en robe rouge, 1913. Watercolor with graphite, 19 1∕2 × 15 1∕2 in. (49.53 × 39.37 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.25 Mina Loy, The Beach, ca. 1911. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 20 × 25 in. (50.8 × 63.5 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.26 Mina Loy, Maison des bains au Forte dei Marmi, ca. 1913. Gouache and ink with traces of graphite on paper mounted on cardboard, 13 3∕4 × 17 1∕2 in. (34.93 × 44.45 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.27 Unidentified photographer, Portrait of Mabel Dodge, Arcetri, ca. 1913. Gelatin silver print. Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

(fig. 1.33).31 Toklas wrote of their meeting that “a friendship with her commenced that lasted over the years,” describing Mina as “beautiful, intelligent, sympathetic and gay.”32 It would continue through the 1920s and 1930s when they all lived in Paris.33 Stein’s writing was of immediate interest to Loy, and Stein shared early versions of manuscripts, including The Making of Americans, to which Loy responded intuitively and intelligently. Years later Stein wrote, “Mina Loy … was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand.”34 Loy’s conversion to modernism was modeled through her own writing in response to Stein’s work. This method of self-education would be the first of many such “apprenticeships” through which Loy schooled herself in modernist thinking and forms and discovered her personal expression in response to other artists’ work, including that of Constantin Brancusi, Wyndham Lewis, and Edgar Allan Poe (please see Ann Lauterbach’s essay in this volume.). Her comprehension of the tenets of modernism as a channeling of intuitive responses to her own experience became paramount. As she wrote, “The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears — and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or

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FIGS. 1.28 –1.30 Mina Loy letter to Stephen Haweis, March 22 or 27, 1914. Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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FIGS. 1.31– 1.32 Mina Loy letter to Mabel Dodge (details), September 17, ca. 1910. Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library.

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glass case or tradition. Modernism says: Why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensory everyday life?”35 Stein’s fracturing of linguistic tradition was a natural progression of Loy’s daily experience simultaneously navigating the use of English, French, German, and Italian in conversation as well as in her mind. Stein’s creative autonomy, uncompromising voice, and nontraditional lesbian household modeled for Loy the life of an independent woman artist. Loy became an advocate for Stein, bringing her unpublished work to New York in 1920, to read at Société Anonyme, Inc., the artists’ museum formed by Katherine Dreier, Duchamp, and Man Ray. Loy drew Stein’s portrait, which Stein was rumored to have signed in approval. Loy also wrote a critical analysis of Stein’s work in 1929 (fig. 1.34). The essay was run as a two-part letter to Ford Madox Ford in the Transatlantic Review (fig. 1.35) and included a poem dedicated to Gertrude Stein casting her as the Madame Curie of language, who saved the world with her extractions.

FIG. 1.33 Unidentified artist, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Basket in France, ca. 1944. Gelatin silver print. Bancroft Library Portrait Collection, University of California, Berkeley.

Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary she crushed the tonnage of consciousness congealed to phases to extract a radium of the word36

In her essay, Loy identified modernism as an energetic force that reached across disciplines through visionaries including Cezanne, Brancusi, and Stein. In Stein’s work Loy found the articulation of her own outcry against tradition and the narcoleptic haze of everyday life. “The pragmatic value of modernism lies in its tremendous recognition of the compensation due to the spirit of democracy. Modernism is a prophet crying in the wilderness of stabilized nature that humanity is wasting its aesthetic time. For there is a considerable extension of time between the visits to the picture gallery, the museum, the library. It asks ‘what is happening to your aesthetic consciousness during the long long intervals?’ ”37 Loy answered her own call, awaking from her creative slumber, pen in hand. During the years of Loy’s ascendency as a writer, she also made hats and designed clothes and covers for fashion magazines. She established a regular practice of drawing portraits, for which she became well regarded, exhibiting these in two exhibitions in America in 1925. Portrait drawing was a vehicle for acute observation. Her early subjects included Stein; her Italian psychiatrist friend Roberto Assagioli; and Carl Van Vechten (fig. 1.36). Later subjects included Marianne Moore, Constantin Brancusi, Sigmund Freud (fig. 1.37),

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FIG. 1.34

FIG. 1.35

F. M. Ford, ed., Transatlantic Review, October 1924. Private collection.

Mina Loy, “Gertrude Stein,” Transatlantic Review, October 1924. Private collection.

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FIG. 1.36 Mina Loy, Portrait of Carl Van Vechten, 1913. Graphite on paper, 18 × 12 1∕2 in. (45.72 × 31.75 cm). Carl Van Vechten Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library.

FIG. 1.37 Mina Loy, Portrait of Freud, 1922. Ink on paper, Location unknown.

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FIG. 1.38 Mina Loy, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919. Printed by Tipographia Giuntina. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library.

James Joyce, and Flossie Williams. A number of these works now exist only in reproduction, as Loy sold them to illustrate biographical articles in magazines. Often, she would create a poem to complement a drawing, providing Loy the opportunity for a more in-depth consideration of the sitter, as was the case for Stein, Brancusi, Moore, and Pascin,38 and enabling a dialogue in her head between mediums, between visual and verbal reckoning. Loy considered herself an expert in the close study of physiognomic acumen. This resulted in her creation of a treatise, her first invention, which she called Auto-Facial-Construction (fig. 1.38). Loy’s proposal for self-induced physiognomic reconstruction appeared in Florence in 1919 as an advertising prospectus. It reads, “Years of specialized interest in physiognomy as an artist, have brought me to an understanding of the human face, which has made it possible for me to find the basic principle of facial integrity, its conservation, and when necessary, reconstruction.”39 She believed the face communicates true personality to others and that the responsibility lay with the owner of the face to wield it with consideration. There is no record of any

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subscribers, but the graphically well-considered “portfolio” attests to Loy’s earnest faith in its principle for self-improvement, as well as its potential as a moneymaker. To Dodge she explained, “I am enclosing a prospectus of a new method I shall teach when not drawing or writing about art. It came as much as a most unexpected revelation — & it works! I think the life-force inspired me with it — to solve the problem of keeping bodies alive without prostituting art.”40 In Florence, Loy met a number of allies from London: the Duchess of Rutland, American writer Muriel Draper, and Ethel Harter, who would encourage and support her. Loy had her first one-person exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1912, which received positive feedback in the press. A review in Studio Magazine’s closely mimicked the review of her work exhibited six years earlier in Paris, which was not a surprise, as she had chosen to exhibit many of the same works. “The Directors of the Carfax Gallery have during the past month, introduced … Mina Loy (Mrs. Stephen Haweis). … Her work … is carried through to success in the strength of a fine imaginative feeling for pattern and an indisputable sense of colour.”41 Another more extensive review in the Morning Post of October 14, 1912, called out their variety: “Mrs. Haweis (Mina Loy) shows a collection of drawings at the Carfax. It is difficult to find for these any common denominator. … Other capital drawings are the series of Ladies at Tea, Maison en Papier, Japanese Toys, and Voyageurs. … The only landscape is a view of the Bridge at Dinan, quite simple and good.” The art scene in London had changed dramatically since Loy was a student. Her visit made her aware of the shifts and conflicts incited by the introduction of modernism. Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition was on view at the Grafton Galleries. The exhibition was radical for London as it set English artists such as Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Stanley Spencer alongside Bonnard, Matisse, and Picasso. The only artist in whose work Mina specifically expressed an interest was her Paris acquaintance Wyndham Lewis. In a letter to Dodge she described Lewis as “a marvellous draftsman of the Picasso school — in method — but himself alone in vision.”42 His work would soon come to feature more significantly in her own. In the autumn Mina contributed one oil painting, The Sewing Machine, and three drawings, Le Cirque Hagenback à Florence, La Petit carnival, and La Grotte de Cythere, to the Salon d’Automne.43 In the summer of 1913 the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten (fig. 1.39) came to Florence as a guest at Villa Curonia. He wrote of being instantly charmed by Loy: “She made an unforgettable figure with her gray-blue eyes, her patrician features, her waved black hair, parted in the centre. Tall and slender, her too large ankles were concealed by the tight hobble-skirts she wore. Her dresses, of soft dove-coloured shades, or brilliant lemon with magenta flowers, or pale green and blue, were extremely lovely. Strange, long earrings dangled from artificially rosy ears: one amber pair imprisoned with flies with extended wings.”44 More importantly, Van Vechten was duly impressed by Loy’s writing, and he signed on as her literary agent (fig. 1.40). While continuing to write,45 she exhibited two works at the Friday Club in London: Woman’s Head and Maria con Bruno, a portrait and a double portrait

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FIG. 1.39 Mark Lutz, Portrait of Carl Van Vechten, at the Villa, Curonia, Florence, June 22, 1935. Gelatin silver print on paper. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC, LCUSZ62-137893.

that were hung alongside works by artists considered at the forefront of the British art scene. Loy wrote Dodge that she was proud that Lord Henry Bentinck had bought one of her paintings, but she expressed doubts about the state of her work: “I painted one good picture but I have not evolved beyond post-impressionism.”46 It was Dodge and Van Vechten who delivered her Futurist-inflected poems to America. Ezra Pound soon credited her as the source of logopoeia: “poetry … akin to nothing but language which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas”;47 and the New York avant-garde affirmed her as the harbinger of Futurism, Dada, and unprecedented linguistic scandal. Loy first saw her name in print in January 1914, when Alfred Stieglitz published her manifesto Aphorisms on Futurism in Camera Work (fig. 1.41) alongside a play by Stein and an art review by Dodge. The text was an incantation about self, a meditation on individual potential and self-determination achieved by radically cutting off one’s past and reflexive behavior. The text layout was typographically inspired by Futurism. More of her writing would soon appear in the little

FIG. 1.40 Mina Loy letter to Carl Van Vechten, December 17, ca. 1914. Ink on paper. Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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FIG. 1.41 Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” Camera Work 45, January 1914. Private collection.

magazine Rogue, published by Allan and Louise Norton, and Kreymborg’s Others, setting the stage for Loy’s debut in New York. Wyndham Lewis once stated that the war that began in July and raged in Italy to November of 1918 had stopped art dead,48 yet it was not able to stop Mina Loy. While the rest of Europe moved with trepidation, Loy launched herself on the world. Haweis had decided to travel abroad, and to help with expenses Mina took in a tenant, the American painter Frances Simpson Stevens. Together they became Futurists.49 Stevens brought the Italian Futurist movement home in the persons of Carlo Carrà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Giovanni Papini. They swept Loy up in the power of their declarative messaging and manifesto writing, and in the esprit they exuded, their passion to overthrow all convention. While discerning about Futurists ideas, adopting what she found useful and rejecting that which was not, Loy was more impulsive about her personal life and soon embarked on what would become perhaps the most transformative relationship in her life, an affair with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (fig. 1.42). Marinetti freed her from her insecurities regarding her intellect and invigorated her with his passion and vision. Her affair with Marinetti was followed by one with his competitor, Papini (fig. 1.43). While both men proved imperfect lovers, they ignited her artistic aspirations. The Futurists advocated for a “synthetic art one in which … there is neither painting nor sculpture, neither music nor poetry: there is only creation.”50 Marinetti introduced her to the power wielded through the declarative word, which eventually caught the imagination of many painters. “Instead of ‘free verse’ he now proposed ‘free words,’ parole in libertà. … Words were organized like evocative images in a painting.”51 Their art motivated Loy to test her hand at their fragmented and energetic style of painting, and she contributed three portraits of Marinetti to the First Free Exhibition of International Futurist Art in Rome (fig. 1.44).52 The writer Neith Boyce identified Loy as a painter in the summer of 1914, noting Loy’s Futurist swagger: “In the evening appears Mrs. Haweis looking like a Futurist poster — .” Boyce also mentioned that Mrs. H. commented quite publicly that she wanted to go to Milan and get a child by Marinetti before he goes to war — “she says there is nothing else for women to do in wartime.”53 Loy instead began work as an aide in a hospital for wounded soldiers and to write experimental plays: The Sacred Prostitute (1914), Collision and Cittàbapini (1915), and The Pamperers (1916). The imagination from which Loy had conjured her art she now used to conjure the mores and hungers of a generation whose world was on the cusp of fracture.54 She also turned to Papini, who had previously secured her attention. Loy allowed herself to fall in love with him, although his marriage prevented their relationship from developing. By the end of their relationship Mina was over both Italian men and Futurism. Loy quickly grabbed the brass ring that her New York literary connections provided. The intoxication of her newfound self-realization and conviction led her to pen her most radical suite of poems, Love Songs, as a war cry against women’s secondary relegation in society. She poured herself into her writing, decrying the unsatisfactory nature of women’s dependence on others

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FIG. 1.42 Unidentified photographer, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Italian Writer (Futurist), 1916. Photograph. Private collection.

FIG. 1.43 Unidentified photographer, Portrait of Giovanni Papini, Italian Writer and Philosopher, ca. 1920–25. Black-and-white photograph. Fratelli Alinari Museum Collections, Florence, Italy.

and the entrenched behaviors that limited their self-aspiration and realization. In 1915 Loy wrote to Van Vechten of her Love Songs, suggesting he offer the first four to Kreymborg for Others, and telling him, “I am soon going to write the second batch — which will be finer — the whole will make a progression of realisations — crescendo & transcendo!”55 The first were published in July, and while Loy was confident they were “the best since Sappho,”56 she, Van Vechten, and Kreymborg were overwhelmed by the outraged response they garnered. In the anthology Our Singing Strength (1929), Kreymborg identified the source of the violent sensation that greeted them: In an unsophisticated land, such sophistry, clinical frankness, sardonic conclusions, wedded to madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax and punctuation horrified our gentry and drove our critics into furious despair. The nudity of emotion and thought roused the worst disturbance and the utter nonchalance in revealing the secrets of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd. … Had a man written these poems, the town might have viewed them with comparative comfort. But a woman wrote them, a woman who dressed like a lady and painted charming lamp-shades.57 Loy had claimed her subjective utterance and empowered it with the emotional furor of Futurism’s bombast. Words had become Loy’s chosen medium

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FIG. 1.44 Pittori Futuristi brochure, Esposizione Libera Futurista Internazionale, Rome, April/May 1914. Collection of Francis M. Naumann and Marie T. Keller, Yorktown Heights, New York.

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FIG. 1.45 Richard Boix, DA-DA (New York Dada Group), 1921. Ink on paper, 11 1∕4 × 14 1∕2 in. (28.575 × 36.83 cm). Museum of Modern Art, Katherine S. Dreier bequest.

for her outcry against her negation, and when she had drained her ewer of complaint she turned her thoughts and energies to the future, to New York, and to being a modern woman.58 Selling Haweis’s family heirlooms to buy her ticket, she left her children in Giulia’s care and sailed for America in October 1916. For the first time in her life, Loy arrived in a new city under her own recognizance. She was immediately embraced into the literary circles of Louise and Allen Norton, Alfred Kreymborg, and Walter and Louise Arensberg (fig. 1.45). It was from the Arensbergs’ apartment that the Society of Independent Artists59 was launched and where Mina was able to put her hand in as a contributor, alongside Arensberg, Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood, in the publishing of The Blind Man (fig. 1.46). She became a regular at the Arensbergs’ apartment, huddled in a corner with Duchamp and the French cohort (fig. 1.47), or the American painter, poet, and art critic Marsden Hartley. The Italian painter Joseph Stella was also there, with whom she could disassemble the Futurist scene in Italy and the rise of fascism. There she met Man Ray, the American photographer who would become her neighbor and dear friend in Paris. Louis Eilshemius was also among their ranks. Loy wrote her first art criticism about this outsider for The Blind Man. Mina Loy had finally found her artistic cohort (fig. 1.48). That autumn, Loy started a lampshade business, inventing shades made of parchment rather than silk. This work covered her rent and kept her fed beyond the Arensbergs’ famous hors d’oeuvres.60 She was also soon acting with the Provincetown Players in Kreymborg’s Lima Beans (fig. 1.49, fig. 1.50)

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FIG. 1.46 Marcel Duchamp, Henri Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood, The Blind Man, April 1917. Ink on paper, 11 × 8 1∕16 in. (28 × 20.5 cm). Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Museum Purchase in collaboration with the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives: Barbara Cooney Porter Fund, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund, Bowdoin College Museum of Art; the Philip Conway Beam Endowment Fund, Bowdoin College Museum of Art; and the StonesPickard Special Editions Book Fund, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library.

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FIG. 1.47 Unidentified photographer, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp Seated in Katherine Dreier’s New York Apartment, ca. 1918. Gelatin silver print on paper. Katherine S. Dreier Papers / Société Anonyme Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.48 Unidentified photographer, Mina Loy dressed for the Blindman’s Ball, 1917. Gelatin silver print on paper, 5 1∕2 × 8 7∕16 in. (14 × 21.5 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.49 Program for Alfred Kreymborg’s play Lima Beans, produced by the Provincetown Players, December 1916. 7 3∕8 × 4 15∕16 in. (18.7 × 12.5 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 1.50 Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams in Lima Beans, Alfred Kreymborg’s “scherzo for marionettes,” as staged at the Provincetown Playhouse, December 1916.

FIG. 1.51 Allen Norton, ed., Rogue 1, April 1, 1915. Private collection.

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alongside William Carlos Williams. The short play, featuring lima and green beans as conduits of love, was noteworthy for lines delivered in free verse with pantomime movement. Loy’s self-designed costume was the succès de scandale of the evening owning to her unusual stocking-shaped hat and dress with a plummeting neckline. The set, reminiscent of the cover of Rogue (fig. 1.51), was designed by Marguerite and William Zorach. Marianne Moore, Loy’s American compeer in modernist poetic ascendency, was in attendance and noted that Loy was “very beautiful” and “enunciated beautifully.” Their preshow meeting is said to have inspired Moore’s poem “Those Various Scalpels” (1917) (fig. 1.52)61 about Loy. In Moore’s sizing up of Loy, both aesthetically and literarily, she raised the question of whether Loy’s incisiveness was a military offensive or a surgical cure. In fact, it was both. Loy’s unrelentingly critical eye — as it fell on the world, art, cultural theory, politics, persons at hand, and herself — was breathtaking. It could be withering as much as revelatory, and the New York avant-garde hung on her every word.62 Years later, in the April 1925 issue of Charm, Loy was even unsparing of Moore, one of few poets to whose abilities Loy might have conceded some favor, noting that Moore’s poetics “suggest the soliloquies of a library clock” (fig. 1.53). The press soon identified the polymathic artist and social butterfly Mina Loy as the modern woman. In the New York Sun on February 13, 1917, in “Do You Strive to Capture the Symbols of Your Reactions? If Not You Are Quite Old Fashioned” (later syndicated as “Mina Loy, Painter, Poet and Playwright … ”) she was introduced: “Mina Loy writes free verse but does

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FIG. 1.52 Marianne Moore, “Those Various Scalpels,” The Lantern, 25 June 1917. Bryn Mawr College Libraries, Special Collections

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FIG. 1.53 Mina Loy, Bust-Length Portrait of Marianne Moore, ca. 1917. Pencil on woven paper, 6 1∕8 × 3 1∕2 in. (15.56 × 8.89 cm). The Rosenbach, Philadelphia.

FIG. 1.54 Unidentified photographer, Arthur Cravan, in The Soil: A Magazine of Art, April 1917. Photograph on paper. Private collection.

many other things, too. Who is she, where is she, what is she — this ‘modern woman’ that people are always talking about? Is there any such creature? … Some people think the women are the cause of modernism, whatever that is. But, then, some people think woman is to blame for everything they don’t like or don’t understand. … Try Mina Loy, you know she writes free verse and things like that. … If she isn’t the modern woman, who is, pray?” Later in the article their question was definitively answered: “She can and does write free verse and hold the intuitional pause exactly the right length of time. … She can and does paint lampshades and magazine covers. She can and does act, design her own stage and social costumes. … She is particularly proud of the fact that like Columbus she was discovered by America. … This woman is halfway through the door into To-morrow.” And then Mina Loy met Arthur Cravan (fig. 1.54) through the Arensberg circle. His notoriety as a Dada provocateur, publisher (fig. 1.55, fig. 1.56), and pugilist preceded him, as he had recently fought Jack Johnson in Barcelona, Spain.

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He was also the nephew of Oscar Wilde. In Cravan Loy found an intellectual and spiritual connection she had never felt with any other human being.63 They became inseparable in New York that summer, but Cravan was forced to leave the city and then the country in order to avoid military conscription. While Loy and Cravan continued to correspond during his peregrinations that autumn, Loy wrote a poem in response to Wyndham Lewis’s painting The Starry Sky (fig. 1.57)64 that was reproduced in the Little Review in November 1917. Lewis had become a role model for Loy, as an artist who had secured his visibility utilizing his voice as a publisher, writer, playwright, and critic. Loy also admired Lewis’s intelligent and strong stance against Marinetti as published in Blast, his magazine dedicated to vorticism. His fragmented Futurist-influenced play Enemy of Stars also appeared in Blast (fig. 1.58) and would be reissued as a book in 1932, the year that Loy began to make paintings of the heavens inhabited by moons engaged in play with stars. Her poem “The Starry Sky of Wyndham Lewis,” quoted below and included elsewhere in this

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FIG. 1.55 Arthur Cravan, Maintenant, 1912; reprint edition, 1957. Private collection.

FIG. 1.56 Robert J.Coady, ed., The Soil: A Magazine of Art, April 1917. Private collection.

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FIG. 1.57 Wyndham Lewis, The Starry Sky, in Little Review, November 1917. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

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volume, gives evidence of Loy’s emulation of his precedence as a modernist. The poem reveals a litany of considerations that Loy observes as Lewis’s success in this painting, a scene in which he navigated between the solidified impermeable realities of human existence and the realm of heavenly enlightenment attainable through creativity. Loy and Lewis shared a vision of the heavenly constellations as an apt metaphor for artistic aspiration: who raised these rocks of human mist pyramidical survivors in the cyclorama of space In the austere theatre of the Infinite the ghosts of the stars perform the “Presence” Their celibate shadows fall upon the aged radiance of suns and moons — The nerves of Heaven flinching from the antennæ of the intellect — the rays that pierce the nocturnal heart The airy eyes of angels the sublime …

Loy’s poem, while a tribute, was also her laying down a touchstone for herself, offering a portal to a creative vein of realization she had yet to tap. She would return to mine it fifteen years later, prompted by the reissuing of Lewis’s play in 1932, her answer to the creative call she first saw embodied in his “rocks of human mist,” which she had internalized through writing her poem in response. The subsequent body of “airy eyes of angels” paintings would appear in her one-person exhibition at Julien Levy’s gallery in 1933. On December 30, 1917, Cravan wrote to Loy declaring his love and begging her to join him in Mexico. Her father had died that spring, and his will was probated in August, leaving Loy and her sisters two hundred pounds each

FIG. 1.58 Wyndham Lewis, Blast, June 20, 1914. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library.

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FIG. 1.59 Mina Loy, International Psychodemocracy, Little Review, Autumn 1921. Private collection.

and freeing her to finally divorce Haweis.65 Mina handed her lampshade business over to her assistant and set out for Mexico. She married Cravan there in January 1918 and was soon pregnant. The inheritance check was slow in making its way to Mexico, and the couple experienced true hardship. When the money finally arrived, they determined that they would return to Europe for the birth of their child. Mina would sail to Buenos Aires in comfort on a passenger ship, and Cravan would join her there, sailing on a small skiff he had purchased and restored. Rumor has it that he set off from the beach one day to test his small craft and was never seen again. His disappearance from Loy’s life has remained a mystery. Loy went on to Buenos Aires alone, as they had planned, and kept busy writing a manifesto, International Psycho-democracy (fig. 1.59). While some scholars have interpreted the text as a memorial to her life with Cravan, as well as her attempt to conquer consciousness, it more readily reads as Loy’s response to the racial and social inequities she had witnessed in Mexico and to the rise of communism. After a few months, when Cravan did not sail into view, Loy traveled to England to have their daughter, Jemima Fabienne Cravan (Fabi), at her maternal home. After Fabi’s birth, Mina made her way back to Florence. After a few months she again left the children

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with Giulia and, in March 1920, set sail for New York in search of Cravan. A report from the FBI documented the discovery of a body that matched his description, leading her to believe that her husband had been murdered for their money. In the spring of 1921, while she was away in New York, Haweis returned to Florence and left shortly thereafter, taking Giles with him. Loy would never see her son again. Loy had begun to write and paint again in Florence, and while in New York she turned her attention to her career, but the art world had moved on. The Arensbergs’ circle had lost steam because of prohibition, and many of its members had moved to Los Angeles. The trip did avail a coterie of important new relationships. She reconnected with the writer Djuna Barnes, and they cemented a friendship of a lifetime (fig. 1.60, fig. 1.61). Loy met the writer Bryher and her husband, Robert McAlmon, who became her publisher. She met Harry Kemp, Harold Loeb, and Scofield Thayer, who published her art and writings in the Dial that year. As autumn turned to winter, Loy’s mood darkened further, and she began to reckon with going on in life without Cravan. Before year’s end, she was cast in Laurence Vail’s What D’You Want? at Provincetown Players. In the spring

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FIG. 1.60 Man Ray, Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, 1920. Gelatin silver print on paper. Sylvia Beach Papers, C0108, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

FIG 1.61 Djuna Barnes, Caricatures of Mina Loy, Marsden Hartley, and Gertrude Stein, published in New York Tribune, November 4, 1923. Ink on paper. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries.

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FIG 1.62 Rose Valley Sanitarium advertisement, Media Pennsylvania, 1917. Location unknown.

she received a check from her mother and used the funds to take herself to a sanatorium in Pennsylvania called Rose Valley (fig. 1.62), known for its electricity and milk treatments. Her hope was that she would recover from what she described in a letter to Robert McAlmon as her “very smashed up” health, and that she might come back fighting, perhaps as a real estate agent.66 While it is not evident that Cravan’s influence came to bear greatly in Loy’s art in the years to follow,67 both he and the longing his absence inspired were recurring sources for her writing. She drafted numerous versions of a narrative account of Cravan’s life entitled Colossus. His presence haunts poems including “The Widow’s Jazz” (fig. 1.63, fig. 1.64) and “Poe.” Loy wrote “Poe” after her time in Rose Valley. In it she invokes the spirit of Poe’s “quaffing nepenthe” from “The Raven” of 1845. Nepenthe was the fictional medicine for sorrow in ancient Greek literature and mythology, first cited in Homer’s Odyssey, the “drug of forgetfulness.” In “Poe,” Loy’s soul-chilling longing for Cravan functions as an avatar for the greater losses of the age felt after World War I: a lyric elixir of death embalms the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves on moon spun nights

It was not only Loy who was feeling discouraged that spring; Ezra Pound wrote to Marianne Moore in April asking, “Entre nooz: is there anyone in America except you, Bill and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?”68 It was Pound who recognized in Loy not self-pity, but one of “clever people in despair, or hovering on the brink of that precipice. It is a mind cry, more than a heart cry. ‘Take the world if thou wilt but leave me an asylum for my affection’ is not their lamentation, but rather ‘In the midst of this desolation, give me at least one other intelligence to converse with.’” Pound’s interest in Loy’s poems continued well into his tumultuous life; qualifying her contributions was complicated: “Anglo-American literature in my half-century has been nursed, nourished, and supported in reviews edited by WOMEN … Mary Butts, Kay Boyle, Mina Loy.” As to Mina Loy, he continued, “It would take an entire article for an adequate discussion.”69 Loy continued to participate in the New York art community. An article in the Pittsburgh Press on April 3, 1921, entitled “Would You Be Different?,” described her as deeply engaged in fashion commerce: “Modern Mina Loy is keeping busy these days creating for several houses here frocks and hats that should satisfy the most ambitious of those who seek to be different” (fig. 1.65, fig. 1.66). She read Gertrude Stein’s unpublished poems at the Société Anonyme, Inc.70 She showed several drawings that she had made in Italy at Belmaison Gallery (fig, 1.67, 1.68) and published another in Playboy (fig. 1.69). It is also likely that Mina made a drawing, Girl with the Red Hair (fig. 1.70), which appeared in the Dial. A single issue of New York Dada was released in April 1921, announcing a boxing coming-out party for Joseph Stella and Marsden Hartley at Madison Square Garden, titled “Pug Debs Make Society Bow.” “The

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FIG. 1.63 Richard Johns, ed., Pagany, Spring 1931. Private collection.

FIG. 1.64 Mina Loy, “The Widow’s Jazz,” published in Pagany, Spring 1931. Private collection.

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FIG. 1.65 Newspaper Enterprise, “Would You Be Different? Madame Loy Shows How,” Pittsburgh Press, April 3, 1921.

FIG. 1.66 Mina Loy, Fashion Sketches, September 19, 1941. Colored pencil on paper. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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FIG. 1.67 Mina Loy, Three Studies by an Unusual Artist, Mina Loy, in Art Review, October 1921. Private collection.

FIG. 1.68 Mina Loy, Drawing, in Art Review, October 1921. Private collection.

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FIG. 1.69 Mina Loy, illustration in Playboy, May 1921. Ink on paper, 12 1∕2 × 9 5∕8 in. (31.7 × 24.4 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 1.70 Mina Loy, Girl with Red Hair, ca. 1921. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 13 5∕8 × 9 3∕4 in. (34.61 × 24.77 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982 (1984.433.249).

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poet Mina Loy was to release ‘flocks of butterflies … from their cages’ with the turn of a gold spigot. Afterward the butterflies would flitter through the magnificent Garden.” As had become her practice, Loy was dégagé but distant. That summer Loy returned to Florence. En route, she met James Joyce in Paris and drew his portrait (fig. 1.71), which would appear alongside Djuna Barnes’s article on him in Vanity Fair in April 1922. In the spring she left Florence with her daughters for Berlin, where the exchange rate rendered artists relatively well off. On their way they stopped to meet Scofield Thayer, in Vienna, who was thinking of hiring Loy to assist him in Europe. “I should require some one of taste and intelligence to carry out these matters for me.”71 Thayer introduced Loy to Sigmund Freud (fig. 1.37), and they shared an evening at the theater, after which Loy drew Freud’s portrait. In Berlin Loy began to regain her footing, taking classes with Alexander Archipenko and embarking on an affair with a young Russian poet. She also wrote an essay on Stein and “Apology of Genius” (included in this volume), her treatise on artistic suffering. Scofield Thayer accepted Loy’s poem “The Golden Bird” (included in this volume), which she wrote in response to seeing Brancusi’s work in Paris, and reproduced it in the magazine facing the sculptor’s transcendent photograph of the work (fig. 2.9 and page 121). Through writing the poem she took in hand Brancusi’s exquisite exemplar of the power of distillation and made it her own.

In the spring of 1923, Mina left Berlin for Paris. With Man Ray’s assistance, she settled into a modest apartment (fig. 1.72). She covered its walls and ceiling with gray paper and blue stars72and set herself to making a living. Paris nurtured an extraordinarily fertile chapter in her life as an artist and brought her the economic independence and success to which she aspired. Yet, very soon after her arrival, she received news from Italy that erased the promising blush of her fresh start. Haweis had been trying to reach her for over a year. His first letters contained the sad news that Giles had contracted a rare cancer, and his last confirmed that Giles had died the previous June, despondent over Loy’s absence. Loy was devastated. She took Joella out of school and plunged into the darkest depression of her life. Yet she had to carry on, at least economically, and filled her days and nights with work. She even managed to submit a painting to the Salon that year, entitled Marchands de New York.73 She was at her height as a poet that terrible year, with Contact Press’s publication of her Lunar Baedecker [sic] (fig. 1.73); her slow release, in the Little Review, of segments of her epic poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”; and the publication of her “Apology of Genius” in the Dial in 1922 (fig. 1.74). When McAlmon offered to publish Ernest Hemingway that year, he stated his pleasure at being part of a series of books that included such expatriates as Loy, Hartley, and William Carlos Williams.”74 In his review of Contact books, the Scottish poet Edwin Muir offered compromised approval of Lunar Baedecker [sic], “a very unequal, but an arresting book.” Muir captured the strain between the two poles of her vision,

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FIG. 1.71 Mina Loy, drawing of James Joyce, accompanying article by Djuna Barnes, Vanity Fair, April 1, 1922.

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FIG. 1.72

FIG. 1.73

Man Ray, Joella Levy, ca. 1927–30. Gelatin silver print on paper, 11 3∕16 × 8 7∕8 in. (28.42 × 22.54 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001, 200162-792.

Contact Press advertisement, 1923. Private collection.

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the spiritual hunger that he called mysticism, and her unrelenting reckoning with the debasement of human existence. This tension produced flashes of an intensity so genuine “that her utterance arrests us.”75 Yvor Winters wrote of “Apology of Genius”: “in itself a proof of genius … a genius that rises from a level of emotion and attitude which is as nearly common human territory as one can ever expect to find in a poet.”76 Loy had reclaimed her full standing as a writer. Paris in the heyday of the 1920s provided a remarkable economic and social base for the avant-garde. Robert McAlmon’s account of an evening at the Stryx recreated the magic of Paris in this decade: “The Stryx had placed a long table across the street at which various people were collecting. Jane Heap and Mina Loy [fig. 1.75] were both talking brilliantly: Mina, her cerebral fantasies, Jane, her breezy travelling-salesman-of-the-world tosh which was impossible to recall later.”77 In 1923, Loy and her daughters were dining out with the likes of Brancusi (fig. 1.76), Mills, Pascin and Hermine David, Toklas and Stein, and Bill and Flossie Williams. In his autobiography,

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FIG. 1.74 Little Review, Spring 1923. Private collection.

FIG. 1.75 Dial Magazine, July 1922. Private collection.

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FIG. 1.77

FIG. 1.76 Unidentified photographer, Mina Loy and Two Unidentified Women with Brancusi and His Dog Polaire, in Front of a Painted Canvas at the Throne Fair, ca. 1922–23. Gelatin silver print, 3 1∕2 × 2 3∕4 in. (8.8 × 7 cm). Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, inv. PH 1212 A.

Unidentified photographer, Jane Heap, Mina Loy, and Ezra Pound in Paris, 1923. Gelatin silver print on paper. Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Williams’s diaristic account of his trip to Paris in 1924, he reports, “Floss and I to Mina’s. She tried to do my portrait in pencil while Floss slept. I fell asleep. Then I slept while she did a fine, if too delicate, one of Floss [fig. 2.4]. … She tried my portrait again while Joyella [sic] talked and sewed curtains.”78 Loy attended noteworthy happenings in the city, including the debut of Ezra Pound’s opera Le Testament de Villon (fig. 1.77).79 Sylvia Beach, proprietress of Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, the hub for English-speaking expatriates, identified Mina as a standout in the Left Bank crowd (fig. 1.78). “We have three raving beauties in ‘the Crowd,’ all in one family, which was not fair. Mina Loy, the poetess, and her daughters … were so lovely that they were stared at wherever they went, and were used to it. … When you went to Mina’s apartment you threaded your way past lamp shades that were everywhere: she made them to support her children. She made all her own clothes. She wrote poetry whenever she had time” (fig. 1.79, fig. 1.80).80 Loy was also at work on a new form of picture making that consisted of cut-paper bouquets mounted in antique period frames she found in the Marché aux Puces flea

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FIG. 1.78 Unidentified photographer, Group Portrait of American and European Artists in Paris (Back row, left to right: Bill Bird, unknown, Holger Cahill, Lee Miller, Les Copeland, Hilaire Hiler, Curtis Moffat. Middle row: Kiki de Montparnasse, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, unknown, Ezra Pound. Front row: Man Ray, Mina Loy, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau), 1923. Gelatin silver print on paper, 8 × 11 15∕16 in. (20.3 × 30.3 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 1.79 Unidentified artist, Joella, Fabienne, and Mina Loy at Paris Carnival, ca. 1926. Gelatin silver print on paper, 7 × 4 9∕16 in. (17.8 × 11.6 cm). Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.80 Berenice Abbott, Fabienne Lloyd, 1928. Gelatin silver print, 9 5∕16 × 6 15∕16 in. (23.6 × 17.6 cm); mount: 15 11∕16 × 12 1∕2 in. (39.85 × 31.75 cm), irregular. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001, 2001-62-11.

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FIG. 1.81 William B. M’Cormick, “Review of Jaded Flowers Exhibition at Cargoes Gallery,” published in New York Sun, 1925. Ink on paper, 10 5∕8 × 5 3∕4 in. (27 × 14.6 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 1.82 Unidentified photographer, Mina Loy’s fresco at Peggy Guggenheim’s Villa in Provence, France, 1925. Photograph, 4 1∕2 × 7 5∕8 in. (11.4 × 19.4 cm). Private collection.

market. These Jaded Blossoms (fig. 1.81), as she would soon call them, were aptly named. They were her memorial bouquets to Cravan and Giles, laborious, handmade renderings of the spiritless fatigue of her existence. Around this time Mina took up in earnest her acquaintance with Peggy Guggenheim, who thought Mina’s innovations were brilliant. Loy and her daughters were frequent guests at Guggenheim’s country retreat, and Loy painted a mermaid mural there (fig. 1.82). Loy loaded Peggy’s trunks for New York with her work: paintings, drawings, Jaded Blossoms, lampshades, and bottle lamps, hoping she could sell them to establish her financial stability. While ignoring Loy’s specific request that her art not be sold in department stores,81 Guggenheim secured exhibitions at Macy’s and Namm Gallery in Brooklyn. All the Jaded Blossoms, lamps, and lampshades were sold. A review in Women’s Wear Daily cited the Namm show as “an original little collection of art works to be classed as pictures, though they are not paintings.”82 Loy’s Jaded Blossoms on exhibit at Cargoes Gallery were also reviewed favorably in the American, the New York Times,83 and the Little Review, which summed the work up best: “Mina Loy whose colorful and charming cut paper flower pieces are attracting so much attention at the Cargoes Gallery, is a poet as well as an artist-craftsman, a combination easily understandable to everyone who has

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seen her fashionable early American pasted-paper decorations. Her verses have appeared here in The Little Review and The Dial, which bespeaks their quality.”84 Guggenheim also arranged a one-person drawing exhibition for Loy at the Little Gallery at the Mattatuck Historical Society in Connecticut, where Loy’s drawings of Assagioli, Kemp, Marinetti, Papini, and Stein went on view. The Bulletin of the Mattatuck Historical Society for that month (April 1925) describes the show “as a splendid showing of draftsmanship,” referring to its additional attraction of “an element of mystery which surrounds the artist by whom the drawings are made.” In a rebuttal of the widespread disregard for modernism that held sway at this time in America, the author went on: “it is doubtful whether many artists of the present time, even the most academically trained ones, could gather together an exhibition of their own drawings that could surpass the ones now on exhibition at the Little Gallery” (Vol. 1, April 1925, no. 6.). Despite their differences,85 in 1925 Guggenheim and Loy opened Galeries Mina Loy (fig. 1.83), a lamp and lampshade shop (fig. 1.84), and sometime gallery (fig. 1.85), on the rue du Colisée. Loy’s lamp and lampshade designs would bring her international recognition as a decorative artist (figs.

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FIG. 1.83 Mina Loy and Peggy Guggenheim at 52 Rue du Colisée Shop, ca. 1926. Gelatin silver print on paper. Private collection.

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FIG. 1.84 Mina Loy, Untitled (Figure for Lampshade Fashion Design), ca. 1926–1930. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 10 1∕4 × 1 1∕2 in. (26.04 × 3.81 cm). From the collection of J. and J. Gordon.

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FIG. 1.85 Laurence Vail exhibition brochure, Galeries Mina Loy, Paris, 1926. Private collection.

FIG. 1.86 Galeries Mina Loy stationery, 1926. Private collection.

FIG. 1.87 Mina Loy, Paris business card, 1926. Private collection.

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FIG. 1.88 Joella Haweis Bayer, photograph of Mina Loy, Ship Lamp (Le Corvette), 1927. Gelatin silver print on paper, 10 3∕4 × 7 in. (27.31 × 17.78 cm). Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.89 Joella Haweis Bayer, photograph of Mina Loy, Calla Lily Lamp “Arum Lumineux,” ca. 1927. Gelatin silver print on paper, 7 7∕8 × 4 15∕16 in. (20 × 12.5 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.90 Joella Haweis Bayer, photograph of Mina Loy, Tulip Lamp, ca. 1925. Gelatin silver print on paper, 5 5∕16 × 4 1∕8 in. (13.5 × 10.4 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.91 Joella Haweis Bayer, photograph of Mina Loy, Floral Lamp Shade, ca. 1927. Gelatin silver print on paper, 7 15∕16 × 5 in. (20.1 × 12.7 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.92 “Novel Floral Decorations That Light Up Modern Interiors,” published in The Daily Telegraph, October 11, 1929. Private collection.

FIG. 1.93 “Les Abat-Jour de Mina Loy,” Art et Industrie, 1927. Private collection.

FIG. 1.94 “Prize Lamp Shades from Nina [sic] Loy of Paris,” Art and Decoration, 1927. Private collection.

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FIG. 1.95 Mina Loy, lamp design, n.d. 10 3∕4 × 7 in. (27.31 × 17.78 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.96 Mina Loy, design for airplane lampshade, December 9, 1941. Mina Loy Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library.

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1.86, 1.87).86 The business prospered, and at one point Loy employed a dozen French girls to assist in manufacturing her designs. The shop benefited in the years after the sensation of the 1925 International Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris, which incited a robust craze for modern decorative arts and inspired broad collaboration between artists and designers, bringing international design enthusiasts to Paris. The shop received extraordinary coverage in the press,87 taking orders from England, America, and the Continent. Loy placed advertisements to expand her clientele and attempted to patent many of her designs. Joella ran the business, keeping the staff productive and the finances orderly. Loy thrived on her success and the fiscal autonomy it provided. The profits enabled Loy to purchase furnishings for a new apartment, the charm of which Julien Levy described as an extension of her creative expression: Her apartment was by Loy out of the Marché aux Puces, the famous flea market where one could buy fabulous odds and ends with only a few sous. Designed with many pensées but very few pence, expressing Mina’s imagination, the flat became for me a fairyland dream. Rooms were divided by wirework or wickerwork cages in which birds flew or hopped about. Doors were always glass, the panes covered with translucent material so that there was privacy but also light. Indoor plants were living everywhere. Whatever patching of crumbling walls, or decorative coloring there might be was mostly done with scraps of metallic paper — wrappings from countless bonbons pasted together in floral collages. And colored cellophane was everywhere. … It was an encounter with beauty that had no practical, moral or prestige implications whatsoever.88 Mina had finally secured a home of her own (fig. 1.97). Her astute essay “Modern Poetry” was printed in Charm (fig. 1.98) that year, and she finished her epic “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.” This short season of contentment would soon wane (fig. 1.99). In 1927, Julien Levy, a Harvard graduate and friend of Duchamp and Robert McAlmon who hailed from a family successful in New York real estate, appeared in Paris and set his sights on Joella (fig. 1.100). The couple married within the year and departed for New York, leaving Loy alone to run the business. In Joella’s absence she spent more time with Djuna Barnes, becoming a frequent habitué of Natalie Barney’s Académie des Femmes, where she read her own work and gave a lecture on Stein.89 Barney described Loy in her autobiography Aventures de l’esprit, written that year: “This ethereal being, totally absorbed with the human condition as exemplified by her own evolution, by the shocks undergone … comes only to engage society for five minutes … to explain her detachment from the world, before moving on.”90 Many years later, when they were both in New York, Barney wrote to Loy recollecting her reading of “The Widow’s Jazz” at her salon as having lingered in her conscience for decades.

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FIG. 1.97 Mina Loy, Untitled (Sleeping Figure), ca. 1929. Pencil on paper, 3 × 7 in. (7.62 × 17.78 cm). From the collection of J. & J. Gordon.

FIG. 1.98 “Modern Poetry,” Charm Magazine, September 1929. General Research Division, The New York Public Library.

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FIG. 1.99 Unidentified photographer, Mina Loy in Paris, ca. 1925. Gelatin silver print on paper, 4 1∕16 × 2 7∕16 in. (10.3 × 6.2 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 1.100 Jay Leyda, Julien Levy, ca. 1932. Gelatin silver print, image and sheet: 4 7∕8 × 4 in. (12.4 × 10.2 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001-62676.

Loy soon became overwhelmed with managing her business. Levy’s father eventually bought Peggy out, and Loy hung on for three more years. Beset by untrustworthy employees and accountants, the pirating of her copyrighted ideas by her competitors, and an economy distressed by the stock market crash in 1929, she acquiesced to defeat. She closed the shop in 1930 and worked for the next six years as the European agent for Levy’s soon-to-be-famous gallery that focused on photography and Surrealism. Loy was effective in her newfound role. She hunted down interesting artists for the gallery, cajoled excellent work out of their studios, and arranged shipping, framing, and payments to the artists. She became ensconced in an entirely new milieu of artists, including Eugene and Leonid Berman, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, René Magritte, and Pavel Tchelitchew, whose art would come to define Surrealism. While Mina admired and befriended these artists, she believed their work was “black magic,” and she questioned their pursuit of sensation, what she wrote of as concessions to “that series of ocular surprises propelling the history of art.”91 Loy’s job enabled her to continue to paint, and as she became more engaged with the Surrealists and their imaginative worlds, she embarked on an entirely new writing project. In 1926, the American novelist and art critic Robert Coates published the ambitious but flawed Surreal novel Eater of Darkness. Coates’s effort must have piqued Loy’s interest as an art form, as he

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melded fantasy landscapes with real, and ambitiously torqued reality to create a psychedelic revelry. Loy set herself the task to create a Surrealist novel with much greater imaginative reach. Her work Insel reads like a drug-induced odyssey between the known and psychedelic worlds. Its protagonists are thinly veiled stand-ins for Loy and the German painter Richard Oelze, and while there are many touchstones that can be traced to real issues in Loy’s life, including dialogues and descriptions of art and lampshade designs,92 her writing is so essentially Surreal it is difficult to discern fact from fiction. Loy admired Oelze as a painter. His mature work occupied the welltrod ground found in Surrealism: landscapes that leaned toward abstraction, and distinguishable and indistinguishable images morphing through deep space. His best-known painting, Expectation (fig. 1.101), can be interpreted as a chilling reflection on the tenuous nature of Western civilization in 1935. A large crowd has gathered close together on a hillside, their backs to the viewer, gazing up into the sky across a valley at a foreboding dark horizon. The painting resided in Loy’s apartment for some time. As she wrote to her daughter Fabienne in 1936, “Whenever I’m in the room with it I catch myself looking at that sky — waiting for something to ‘appear.’ ”93 Oelze’s art and her own writing had inspired her to create an alternate universe. Speaking as a narrator in Insel of this aspiration, it was as if she were describing her own recent paintings: “If I were to go back, begin a universe all over again, forget all form I am

FIG. 1.101 Richard Oelze, Expectation (Erwartung), 1935–36. Oil on canvas, 32 1∕8 × 39 5∕8 in. (81.6 × 100.65 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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FIG. 1.102 Mina Loy, Julien Levy Gallery Exhibition Announcement, 1933. Private collection.

familiar with, evoking a chaos from which I could draw forth incipient form, that at last the female brain might achieve an act of creation.”94 Levy had for some time implored Loy to buckle down and produce an exhibition of new paintings that he could use to reintroduce her in New York. While she was in a dither about embarking on the enterprise, he offered her one exhibition slot after another, all of which she skirted. Finally, in the fall of 1932, after he visited her in Paris and approved two paintings, Loy agreed to a show in February 1933. Levy took the first two works back to New York and was able to secure her inclusion in Chick Austin’s Exhibition of Literature and Poetry in Painting since 1850 at the Wadsworth Atheneum.95 It is a cohesive body of paintings (fig. 1.102). One reviewer identified the suite “as a sonnet sequence.”96 Remarkable for their inner evanescence and startling for their originality, the suite introduces an ensemble of heavenly hosts framed against the backdrop of the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere closest to earth. The figures are without bodies, merely head, hands, and arms freed from the corporeality Loy found so problematic. She created a new type of painting technique using a mixture of sand, gesso, and plaster, a “fresco vero,” that created the luminosity essential to her conception of the series. “Blind angels” appear in most of the paintings, perhaps inspired by the recent publication of Wyndham Lewis’s play Enemy of the Stars. While her acolytes of heaven occupy a cerulean cosmos, they are illuminated from within. The theory of the “aura” and the “astral body” were commonplace in many spiritist treatises. The aura was thought to be an immaterial radiation emanating from the head, a visualization of a mental and emotional state. It was Levy who christened the series Mina’s bleuaille — the term most likely drawn from a line in Tristan Tzara’s simultaneous poem “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” — which can be translated loosely as “halo tinged with blue in the beam of light.”97 Their visages convey not human character but the transcendent qualities of awe, fear, wonder, hope. The decision to frame the show in heavy white frames compounded its atmospheric tenor. The Bewitched (fig. 1.103) was most likely her first effort to create the plaster substrate. The development of its central figure can be traced from Loy’s Woman Weaver (fig. 1.104) and the verso of her exhibition announcement drawing, in which the figure (fig. 1.105) is transformed into a seated, crosslegged bodhisattva, its elongated forehead Loy’s adaptation of their iconic helmets. This weaver’s hair frames the face in a style that emulates Joella’s stylish cutting of her hair just before her marriage. Loy went on to further develop her and Julien’s portraits in Dawn (fig. 1.106), the male figure receiving celestial inspiration, while the female gazes stoically toward the horizon. The largest painting of the group, Teasing a Butterfly (fig. 1.107), is populated by a cluster of “tormentors,” perhaps the shop’s staff and lawyers Loy bemoaned in her letters, which hover above a faint, fluttering butterfly that can be interpreted as a self-portrait.98 In Stars (fig. 1.108), Loy created classicized masklike faces that receive enlightenment in the form of stars. They appear occupied with crafting what Loy identified in “Apology of Genius” as “the Imperious Jewelry of the

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FIG. 1.103 Mina Loy, The Bewitched, 1932. Mixed media on board, 27 1∕2 × 35 in. (69.85 × 88.9 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.104 Mina Loy, Woman Weaver, 1930. Graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, and wash on paper, 29 × 22 in. (73.66 × 55.88 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.105 Mina Loy, Untitled (verso of Levy Exhibition Announcement, 1933), ca. 1933. Pencil on paper, 21 × 16 3∕4 in. (53.34 × 42.55 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.106 Mina Loy, Dawn (L’Aube), 1932. Mixed media on board, 25 1∕2 × 34 1∕2 in. (64.77 × 87.63 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.107 Mina Loy, Teasing a Butterfly, 1932. Mixed media on board, 33 × 45 in. (83.82 × 114.3 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.108

FIG. 1.109

Mina Loy, Stars, 1932. Mixed media on board, 31 × 34 in. (78.74 × 86.36 cm). Private collection.

Mina Loy, Light, 1932. Mixed media on board, 25 × 19 1∕4 in. (63.5 × 48.9 cm). Private collection.

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Universe, the beautiful.” In Light, two angels are set aflame (fig. 1.109), the embodiment of biblical inspiration. The animated half-moon faces incorporated into Moons I (fig. 2.12) are only banal adaptations of those commonly found on tarot cards (fig. 1.110). The subjects of the Levy show paintings — stars, moons, illumination — were all contiguous with Loy’s work as a lighting designer in the previous decade. The exhibition received scant but affirming review in the press. The reporter for the New York Evening Sun wrote, “Miss Loy does not paint measurable facts but immeasurable feelings. … Those who respond to Blake and Arthur Rimbaud and other such mystics may also come to terms with Miss Loy. No others need apply.”99 Critics agreed that her paintings had the same “imaginative feeling” as her poems.100 Only one painting sold, to a private collector in Philadelphia, but Levy became excited about the prospects for Loy to have a great success on the heels of Florine Stettheimer’s designs for Stein’s opera.

FIG. 1.110 A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Moon Tarot Card (from the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck), originally published by the Rider Company in 1909.

FIG. 1.111 Mina Loy, Untitled (Surreal Scene), ca. 1935. Gouache with collage on panel, 20 3∕4 × 16 3∕4 in. (52.71 × 42.55 cm). Private collection.

In thinking over the possibility of another Loy exhibition for next year, I become more and more convinced that it is a good psychological moment. The vogue here has changed radically (through Florine Stettheimer’s designs for Gertrude Stein Opera). Whereas last year your pictures were criticized for being feminine and personal, now everybody is crazy for pictures which are “féerique” and candy box and magical. The dealers are fighting with each other to give a Stettheimer show. You would like her pictures. They are your style but not as good as yours. (If you do decide to paint more, I would suggest adding color this time, avoiding too much “bleuaille” so as to strike the eye more keenly.)101 Levy profoundly misjudged how his comments would be received. In holding up the success of another artist, Stettheimer, whose success was shared via a project with Loy’s beloved friend Gertrude Stein, and in his directive for her to add color to her work, Levy’s remarks led to the darkest paintings Loy had ever made, her Drift of Chaos series. The only bright painting attributed to Loy at this time is Untitled (Surreal Scene) (fig. 1.111), a painting that has long been attributed to her although it remains an anomaly in her oeuvre and new research strongly indicates many of the details are in keeping with Fabi’s drawing techniques. Mina and Fabi may have constructed the painting together, as a form of cadaver exquis, the Surrealist game in which multiple artists complete a work together. It is unknown whether the work was made in Paris or New York, but it eventually came to be owned by Levy, most likely a gift from Loy. Following quickly on the heels of finishing the paintings for the 1933 exhibition, Loy began to wrestle with the abstractions and distortions found in Surrealist photography and painting in a series of Chaos paintings, inspired by her imaginative reaches in Insel. Scholar Linda Kinnahan makes a convincing argument that the photographer Umbo (Otto Umbehr), whose work Uncanny Street (fig. 1.112) from the 1930s was purchased in Europe and owned

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by Levy, may have influenced Loy’s paintings populated with characters rendered “low in shadow,”102 abstracted to shift the known into the uncanny. While the beginning of the Drift of Chaos series (see figures 1.114, 1.144–1.146, and 2.13–2.14) was grounded in Surrealist compositional devices — fragmented subjects, shifting perspective, and ambivalent grounds — it quickly moved to her establishment of a dark, aqueous netherworld inhabited by Charon, Sphinx,103 giants, mayflies, féerique putti, and specters, and traversed by lone figures and kings and queens in tiny skiffs and dragon boats. Loy described her endeavor through the protagonist in Insel: “I felt, if I were to go back, begin a universe all over again, forget all form I am familiar with, evoking a chaos from which I could draw forth incipient form that at last the female brain might achieve an act of creation.”104

These paintings have a strong correspondence in measure and imagery to her poem “Ephemerid,” written around this time. Only a handful of the paintings are known to exist today, but black-and-white photographs that Loy had professionally made in Paris provide evidence of the series. One work, now lost (fig. 1.113) reveals that at least some studies were brilliantly colored. The photographs are titled and numbered up to eight. Another group of sixteen smaller paintings are also numbered; and there are two additional paintings identified as River Styx I and River Styx II (figs. 1.141 and 1.142). The Chaos paintings also have associative subtitles indicating some form of narrative. While the first is untitled, the rest proceed as follows: Hermes, Venus, Oyster Woman,105Chantiers des Mondes, and Butterfly Woman (fig. 1.114).106 While Loy was working hard in the studio, she was also trying to sell her own work, and she and Fabi were struggling to make ends meet. She wrote to Levy in July 1934, “I should like to have my old pictures sent back [as] I am going to try to get a show there [London] to make some money. … I will let you know where to send them.”107 In the meantime, she reached out to Ethel Harter, the Duchess Violette of Rutland, and Lady Colefax in England, telling them of her plight, and inquiring if they could sell her or Fabi’s art,108 or place it at auction or in charity exhibitions.109 Lady Colefax sold three of Loy’s works and was able to sell one of Fabi’s works to her Majesty the Queen’s Collection.110 Loy also asked Duchamp and Mary Reynolds if they would be willing to take her work to London when they attended an exhibition Reynolds was having there. Despite everyone’s efforts, these initiatives were not enough to solve Loy’s financial problems, and she decided it was time to move to New York. Levy wrote with the suggestion that if she were to bring over an art shipment, it would save him freight charges and the difference could pay for her ticket. He also let her know “that Genia [Berman] had found a large room and bath in the Village for $40 per month and that Joella was positive that she can immediately find a job for Faby.”111 With war rumbling in the distance, Loy sent Fabi ahead to New York and sold her apartment at a loss. In 1936 she set out for America, the trip marking the end of the independence Loy had fought so hard to obtain as a woman and an artist, crossing the Atlantic for the last time.

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FIG. 1.112 Umbo (Otto Umber), Uncanny Street I (Unheimliche Strasse I), 1928. Gelatin silver print, image and sheet: 11 5∕16 × 9 in. (28.8 × 22.9 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001, 2001-62-1154.

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FIG. 1.113 Mina Loy, The Queen, ca. 1933. Ink on paper, 11 × 16 in. Location unknown.

The French have a word for the disorienting effect of “losing one’s country,” dépaysement, and Loy was hit hard by its aftermath. She had created three significant bodies of paintings and a novel before leaving Paris, and she arrived in New York with nothing to do and no daily routine. She was adrift creatively, socially, and economically.112 Loy received $40 a month from her mother, which covered her rent but left her no money for expenses. Fabi went to work, but their circumstances continued to decline, and in 1940 they moved into a rooming house where they used a common kitchen and shared a bedroom. Recollections of Loy by her contemporaries during this time were that she was deeply depressed. Her writing from this period waded in on spiritual considerations in such poems as, I Almost Saw God in the Metro and Ephemerid. As Loy had no art supplies, she began to doodle, drafting inventions on scraps of envelopes and stationery. Her inventions ranged from children’s toys to greeting cards: a Valentine with a wind-up beating heart, tubular Christmas tree lights, Chatoyant (a structural material that was a combination of plastic and metal that she thought could be used in manufacturing) (figs. 1.118–1.121), more lampshades, a device to clean outside windows from inside (fig. 1.122, fig. 1.123, fig. 1.1.24), and the Corselet (Armour for the Body) (figs. 1.115–1.117), “an efficient supplement to physical culture exercises to correct middle-aged figure curvature” (see pages 84, 85). It was to be worn while sleeping, with cushionettes that connected at the base of the spinal column and the spot known as the “dowager’s hump.” The Corselet could be complemented by wearing a “sandalette,” also designed by Loy, worn round

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FIG. 1.114 Mina Loy, Drift of Chaos II (Hermes), 1933. Oil on panel, 36 × 47 in. (91.44 × 119.38 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.115 Mina Loy, The Corselet (Armour for the Body), n.d. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.116 Mina Loy, The Corselet (Armour for the Body), n.d. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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FIG. 1.117 Mina Loy, The Corselet (Armour for the Body), n.d. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.118 Mina Loy, Chatoyant Invention, ca. 1945. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.119 Mina Loy, Chatoyant Invention, ca. 1945. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.120 Mina Loy, Chatoyant Invention, ca. 1945. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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FIG. 1.121 Mina Loy, Chatoyant Invention, ca. 1945. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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FIG. 1.122 Mina Loy, Window Washer Invention, June 29, 1946. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.123 Mina Loy, Window Washer Invention, June 29, 1946. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.124 Mina Loy, Window Washer Invention, June 29, 1946. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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FIG. 1.125 Mina Loy, Study for Monument to Basketball, n.d. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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the foot to reduce the strain felt down the leg by “oldish” women. Her vision of humanity remained unflinchingly practical. Loy’s archive of inventions reveal that her inventive thinking was as timeless as her artistic thought, broad in scope, and culturally prescient. She designed a monument to the game of basketball in the form of a raised Black arm holding a basketball aloft (fig. 1.125). It could stand today in any public plaza as a hallmark for the sport and as a symbol of Black Power. She marketed her Alphabet Toy (fig. 1.126, fig. 1.127) to F.A.O. Schwartz to no avail. While Helena Rubinstein did purchase Mina’s invention of a lipstick case, there were no takers on any of her other ideas (fig. 1.128). Fabi married in 1944, and she took her mother to live in the town house of her husband, Hans Frankel, who tolerated Mina’s eccentricities well. Eventually Fabi and Frankel separated. Joella had moved to Aspen in 1946, with her new husband, Bauhaus artist and architect Herbert Bayer. When Fabi went to visit her, she met the architect Fritz Benedict, whom she went on to marry, also moving to Aspen. Loy was moved to a communal house on Stanton Street on the Bowery, extremely pleased to be alone again. In 1946, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. While enticing mythologies have arisen about Loy living as an eccentric recluse in New York, her friends recalled that throughout the 1940s she was socially active. She stayed in contact with loyal friends such as Barnes,

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FIG. 1.126 Mina Loy, Alphabet Toy, August 6, 1940. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature,Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.127 Mina Loy, Alphabet Toy, August 6, 1940. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Duchamp, and Stella, and new acquaintances such as Francis Steloff. In these New York years she had two exceptional friendships that nourished her as an artist, one with her long-standing friend Marcel Duchamp (fig. 1.129), and the other with an entirely new friend, Joseph Cornell (fig. 1.130). Loy and Cornell had become acquainted through Levy. Cornell attended Loy’s 1933 exhibition at the Levy Gallery, which was utterly transformational for him. It is thought Cornell made at least one if not two palm-sized boxes as gifts for Loy, in gratitude. He inserted her photographic portrait by Man Ray behind blue-tinted glass, covered by shards of broken mirror, which reveal and fragment Loy’s image, titling the work after a line in her “Apology of Genius,” Imperious Jewelry of the Universe (fig. 1.131). The second, perhaps a fiction, was described in Insel as being given by the narrator to Insel: “ ‘Here … after all I will give you the little box.’ This box he desired, it was black, was a small object by the American Surrealist, Joseph Cornell, the delicious head of a girl in slumber afloat with a night light flame on the surface of water in a tumbler of bits cut from early Ladies’ Journals. … Under the glass lid a slim silver slipper and a silver ball and one of witch’s blue came raining down on the gray somnolence when one lifted it up.”113 The influence of Loy’s exhibition was ongoing for Cornell, and twelve years later, in November 1946, he wrote to her to share that a reflection on the side of a passing truck had brought it back to him. “The indelible impression of your sky-blue paintings” … All of the above seems sometimes so evanescent and nebulous that I have never even mentioned the trifle to anyone. But terms like “evanescent” and “nebulous” are defeatist, are they not, to those who like ourselves are tortured most of the time by their reality? I have generally paid a pretty high price for the above kind of experience, however silly this might sound to some. But way down deep these things can be unconscious, although sturdy, weapons against discouragement. And though my attempt at communication sometimes seems as shabby as the paint on the “enseigne” I can still rejoice that a glorious “light” once illumined it for me. This friendship became the most intimate spiritual relationship of Loy’s life. Cornell was a devout Christian Scientist and believed, as Loy did, that their call as artists was a divine one. Their alliance was a fraternity of mutual admiration nested in a cult of the veneration of beauty and cosmic good, what they called “white magic.” Mina wrote in her review of Cornell’s Aviary exhibition at the Egan Gallery in 1949, “So long I have sought a sentence to reproduce the sublimity of Cornell’s objects. Without success. Still, we can take the sublime for granted. After all, it is a sensation. Visitors to this exhibition might gasp on confrontation.”114 Loy visited Cornell in his home on Utopia Parkway, meeting his mother and brother Robert. Cornell took Fabi under his wing, sending her collages and sharing with her his encouraging dreams of young girls’ aspirations.

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FIG. 1.128 Mina Loy, advertising copy for a line of Helena Rubinstein perfumes, July 15, 1940. Private collection.

FIG. 1.129 Denise Browne Hare, Marcel Duchamp Wearing “Sexy” Crown, Designed by Mina Loy, 1955 or 1959, ca. 1955. Marcel Duchamp Papers, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives. Gift of Jacqueline, Paul, and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother Alexina Duchamp.

FIG. 1.130 Unidentified artist, Portrait of Joseph Cornell, ca. 1940. Joseph Cornell Study Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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Loy and Cornell had an active studio exchange, sending one another inspirational tidbits and shared ideas and work that nurtured the other’s interests: Nov 14 NYC Dear Joseph, Here’s the religious poem I forgot to send. Am still trying to come alive & still hoping to see you soon — Yrs, Mina Loy Best wishes to you all And from Joseph July 3, 1951: Dear Mina, I had a beautiful early morning in the back yard under the Chinese quince tree — very early, in fact not much after five; and I could not help but think of you, looking up at the moon, when the first rays of the sun turn its gold into silver. A long time ago, you may remember you told me that your destiny was raveled up somehow with the lunar globe but even aside from this I have always experienced something wonderful evoked in this mood. Enclosed a “Hot-Cross Bum” item. Con Amore, Joseph Cornell was a patient and solicitous friend, and when Mina would fall emotionally out of reach, he continued to send her gifts and updates and reach out to Fabi to affirm his support. In a letter dated “Yesterday,” Mina wrote to Joseph thanking him for his Crystal Cage. Most likely he sent her a copy of View magazine, published in 1944, which included a version of this valise, which he adapted over a thirty-year period, from 1943 through the 1960s. “I was very happy to get your Crystal Cage. There was one star left in the next morning sky, and truly you had done something to that star.”115 Cornell had incorporated into The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice) (fig. 1.132) a newspaper clipping from the Christian Science Monitor, dated June 13, 1939, the year of the outbreak of World War II, a story of a little girl on a quest. It is as though he was thinking of Mina when he elected it for inclusion. “A little girl had just one great great desire — to find God and his loveliness. Whenever she heard anything particularly beautiful, there welled within her heart a great yearning to understand better the source of all beauty.”116 Cornell’s project may also have been the inspiration for a late cut-paper assemblage of Mina’s, Untitled (The Drifting Tower) (fig. 1.133), a forerunner to her invention of yet another form of painting. Loy spent four pleasant and creatively inspired years on the Bowery. In 1948, Fabi drew up a reckoning for Joella of their mother’s expenses. They were very basic: dental and medical costs, food, and clothing. The latter included items such as silk stockings, red leather shoes, and daring red dress slips. It also included PAINT (fig. 1.134, fig. 1.135, fig. 1.136)!117 Loy seemed to thrive in her new group setting, reenergized by the sociability of the household and her proximity to the grit of the Bowery. From her window and in cafés

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FIG. 1.131 Joseph Cornell, “Imperious Jewelry of the Universe” (Lunar Baedeker): Portrait of Mina Loy, DaguerreotypeObject (Man Ray photograph of Mina Loy), 1938. Silvered glass, glass shards, cutout printed illustration, and gelatin silver print, in artist’s frame; case: 5 3∕16 × 4 3∕16 × 1 in. (13.2 × 10.6 × 2.5 cm), frame: 11 × 10 1∕16 × 2 1∕8 in. (27.9 × 25.6 × 5.4 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001, 2001-62-3.

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FIG. 1.132 Joseph Cornell, The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice), 1943–60. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Museum of Modern Art Archive, New York, MoMA PS1 Archives, II.A.973, INPS1.698.14.

she took to jotting down images of strangers and her neighbors (figs. 2.19– 2.35). Her visual milieu came to include those on the Bowery, more like herself, who through their financial, ethnic, or creative stations in life were consigned to live in tenements: shopgirls, laborers, actors, entertainers, and cross-dressers. But the primary protagonists of the series were the neighborhood bums. Loy’s poems of this period — “Property of Pigeons,” “Hot Cross Bum,” “Show Me a Saint Who Suffered” — illuminate her psychological and emotional engagement with her subjects. Her lifelong empathy for outsiders in an upturned world rife with poverty and displacement was personal. Her homeless neighbors bought her cigarettes and called her “the Duchess.” It was an invigorating change from the ennui of her familial household. Loy proceeded to realize her new idea for painting: three-dimensional relief constructions made of refuse. While she had been gathering detritus for a number of years, the Bowery proved a resplendent resource for her scavenging. Her apartment was soon filled to the brim with egg cartons, tin cans, and other cast-off materials. This body of work positioned Loy at the

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FIG. 1.133 Mina Loy, Untitled (The Drifting Tower), ca. 1950. Cut-paper and mixed-media collage on canvas, 28 3∕4 × 39 in. (73.03 × 99.06 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.134 Fabienne Lloyd, letter to Joella Bayer, January 1948. Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.135 Fabienne Lloyd, letter to Joella Bayer, January 1948. Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.136 Fabienne Lloyd, letter to Joella Bayer, January 1948. Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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periphery of a new avant-garde, the young New York Pop and assemblage artists. Loy preceded Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly, with her street-scavenging savvy. Perhaps most compelling of all was her restoration of the human figure to art at a time when abstraction reigned in the art world, a not inconsequential consideration as Duchamp was simultaneously working on his own secret tableau, Étant Donnés. In 1953 Fabi brought Loy with her to Aspen, under the pretense of a visit. It had become too difficult to manage Loy’s affairs at such a great distance. Loy closed the door to her studio and unwittingly began her final exile. She left the entire series on Stanton Street. The abandoned studio went into the care of her neighbor Stephen Ferris. Loy and Ferris became avid letter writers, and Ferris encouraged her to carry on with her art in Aspen. While in exile, Mina begged and cajoled anyone she could write or call to see the works left there.118 It would not be until 1959, six years later, that Duchamp and Levy secured her an exhibition at the prominent Bodley Gallery. Under David Mann’s direction in its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, the gallery exhibited artists such as Andy Warhol, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Ethel Schwabacher, and Yves Tanguy. Stuart Preston of the New York Times wrote that Loy’s assemblages were a formidable opponent not only of mainstream art but also of the larger politics of art at the time: that her bringing together of Dada and social comments was “downright sinister” and that they contained a slightly apocalyptic undercurrent of social critique.119 Mann corresponded with Loy, updating her on the response to the exhibition. Loy took a great interest in the press and the responses of her friends, writing to Cornell that she heard he did not admire the show but that others had been very moved by it. Loy’s hard work and innovation were recognized, and she was awarded the Copley Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement in Art. The exhibition included Untitled (fig. 2.17). The subjects of this poignant portrait bear a striking resemblance to Loy and Duchamp (fig. 3.31). Berenice Abbott’s photograph of this work provides an excellent glimpse of a complex composition of Black dancers. Peggy Guggenheim purchased Househunting (fig. 1.137) from the Bodley Gallery show. The confrontational nude figure is depicted with a lunar orb around her head, filled with a ladder, balls of yarn, and knitting needles, and she clutches sheaves of wheat to her breast. Most unusual are the cherubs that dangle from her ears, signaling the work as a self-portrait, as Loy was frequently noted as wearing large, unusual earrings. Nectar (fig. 1.138) was a popular peach-colored syrup used to make fizzy soda-fountain drinks. The painting could be a prototype for a clever advertisement for the product. Bums Praying (fig. 3.32) harkens back to Loy’s Levy exhibition series.120 Christ on a Clothesline (fig. 2.19) presents a deflated Christ121 pinned to a clothesline. The complex, highly detailed, beautifully hued background confirms Loy’s prowess as a trompe l’oeil (tromper Loy)122 artist. Through her masterful painting, every brick and metal surface has been finely and convincingly rendered. The figure’s drawn face belies the toil of life and redemption. The subject is a fascinating one and attests to the reserve of knowledge from

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FIG. 1.137 Ray Wilson, Peggy Guggenheim Seated on Her Four-poster Bed. On the wall is a relief by Dada collagist Mina Loy. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

FIG. 1.138 Mina Loy, Nectar, ca. 1950. Mixed media on board, 35 3∕4 × 44 in. (90.81 × 111.76 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 1.139 Jonathan Williams, Mina Loy, 1957. Photograph on paper. Private collection.

which Loy was able to draw at this late stage in her career. During the Depression in London, owing to vast unemployment and its resulting destitution, thousands of people became homeless, giving rise to an offhand form of charity: in order to keep from freezing to death at night, the homeless could pay to be hung shoulder to shoulder over a clothesline to sleep in a warehouse. Communal Cot (see fig. 3.1) may reference a similar situation in which, for a higher fee, the homeless paid to lie in abutting coffin-like boxes with their knees folded close to their chests, generating enough heat to keep them alive. Communal Cot is a compendium of distinct faces and postures. Loy further adapted some of these characters into a larger format work titled No Parking (fig. 3.18), which was reproduced on the exhibition announcement. Frances Steloff admired this painting and displayed it in the window of the Gotham Bookshop. The clown-like bums have wrapped themselves around a garbage can, over which a butterfly (Loy) hovers, grounded in the grit of humanity’s refusé. Loy continued to make constructions in Aspen (fig. 1.139), gathering her garbage supplies along the town’s back alleys. She never adjusted to her new circumstance, remaining an outsider, although she stayed in touch with her friends back east by letter and telephone, particularly Barnes and Cornell.123

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Only a few artworks remain from the Aspen years.124 The aspirational gold prospector became Loy’s final subject, in Prospector I (see fig. 3.26) and Prospector 2 (see fig. 2.18). These paintings are brilliant distillations of Loy’s lifelong preoccupation with hands and faces. One figure, his head and hair a tangled mop, spies his treasure from the top edge of the composition. Cast below him is a field of scattered “coins,” crushed cans and lids. There are also three wholly abstract constructions that Joella sent east to Levy (see fig. 3.22, fig. 3.23, fig. 3.24). One construction is a field of tin can lids that float across a plain backdrop, punctuated by the logo of a Snow Crop orange juice can. The work insinuates a mountain ridge nestled between numerous stars or planets, perhaps Loy’s reimagining of Aspen nestled in the night sky. For another, she placed two round metal scraps, with star-shaped punch holes excised from them, against a cardboard sheet. They read as moons shot through by a star. Loy once said art was a protest. As an artist she elected to inveigh against convention, patriarchy, obscurity, mediocrity, black magic, poverty, and most of all silence. To be an artist meant one had the power and the means, to have a voice, a voice that mattered. On a fragment of paper in her archive she wrote, “We only excel in our moments of creation — the rest of the time we are unconscious — the material world is the cemetery of solids that have aggregated and dropped from the eternal motion of creation.”125 In September 1966, Mina Loy fell silent. In death she ascended into the sky to reside, as she had in life, a circumpolar star, ever present, but out of common sight (fig. 1.140).

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FIG. 1.140 Mina Loy, Untitled, n.d. Graphite on paper, 10 3∕4 × 8 1∕4 in. (27.31 × 20.96 cm). Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives.

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Moreover, the Moon — Face of the skies preside over our wonder. Fluorescent truant of heaven draw us under. Silver, circular corpse your decease infects us with unendurable ease, touching nerve-terminals to thermal icicles Coercive as coma, frail as bloom innuendoes of your inverse dawn suffuse the self; our every corpuscle become an elf.

Mina Loy, Moons I (detail of fig. 2.13), 1932. Mixed media on board, 26 1∕4 × 35 1∕4 in. (66.68 × 89.54 cm). Private collection.

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FIGS. 1.141–150 Maurice Poplin photographs, 1933. Dimensions and locations unknown. Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 1.141. Mina Loy, Drift of Styx I

FIG. 1.142. Mina Loy, Drift of Styx II

FIG. 1.143. Mina Loy, The Sentinels

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FIG. 1.144. Mina Loy, Drift of Chaos I

FIG. 1.145. Mina Loy, Drift of Chaos IV (Oyster Woman)

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FIG. 1.146. Mina Loy, Drift of Chaos V (Chantier des Mondes)

FIG. 1.147. Mina Loy, Sunset Creatures

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FIG. 1.149. Mina Loy, The Green Sphynx

FIG. 1.148. Mina Loy, Light Bursts Out of the Window

FIG. 1.150. Mina Loy, The Snow Looks in at the Window

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“The Starry Sky” OF WYNDHAM LEWIS who raised these rocks of human mist pyramidical survivors in the cyclorama of space In the austere theatre of the Infinite the ghosts of the stars perform the “Presence” Their celibate shadows fall upon the aged radiance of suns and moons — The nerves of Heaven flinching from the antennæ of the intellect — the rays that pierce the nocturnal heart The airy eyes of angels the sublime experiment in pointillism faded away The celestial conservatories blooming with light are all blown out Enviable immigrants into the pure dimension immune serene devourers of the morning star of Job Jehovah’s seven days err in your silent entrails of geometric Chimeras Mina Loy, Snow Crop (detail of fig. 3.23), ca. 1955. Tin can lids mounted on board, 25 × 19 3∕16 × 3 in. (63.5 × 48.77 × 7.62 cm). Private collection.

The Nirvanic snows drift — — — to sky worn images

MINA LOY ART OF THE UNBEAUTIFUL TRUE ANN LAUTERBACH

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 18191

LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it. OPEN your arms to the dilapidated, to rehabilitate them. Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” 19142

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PRELUDE: THE REAL AND THE TRUE One role of the human Imaginary might be to bind the real to the true, where the real is understood to be the sensuous variety of the empirically perceived and embodied world, and the true as a moral or ethical interpretation of that real. What is unreal is fake or fictive; what is untrue is false or mendacious: a lie. The true has been at times aligned with the spiritual and sacred, with an absolute Truth as well as with the language of modern jurisprudence; the real is aligned with bare facts, the actual, as they accumulate a day’s events, its weathers and wars and accidents, its discoveries and births and deaths, into the historical accounting of those days. We make art and poetry, novels and films, as a way to knit these two foundational arenas into a single apprehension. Mina Loy’s work seems to me to attest to this desire to discover or reveal how encounters with reality could be rendered into the realm of the true, however unbeautiful that turned out to be. Born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London in 18823 to a Jewish father, Sigmund, and a strict Christian mother, she grew up resisting normal expectations for young Victorian women. While studying art in Munich, she changed her name, shedding three syllables (and her Jewish patronym) in favor of the unencumbered three-syllable Mina Loy, whose agile phonemes suggest the alacrity with which she would alter not only geographical place, but her chosen modalities of life; it also suggests what would become an acute, distinctive attention to the cadence, diction, and rhythm of her poetics. We might say that changing her name was her first act of aligning the real to the true. Throughout her life, she would stitch these two arenas — the objective real and the subjective, interpreted true — into poems, inventions, objects and artworks; in each, the question of Beauty would trouble her aesthetic, material, and spiritual bearings, during the turbulent early decades of the twentieth century.

A SEARCH FOR FORM: PORTRAITS Form is the expressive encroachment on the uncreate from which — Appearance with its several significances derives. From the untraceable precedent all form emanates; as sentry to the presence of creation. Mina Loy, “Mi & Lo”4 Mina Loy traveled and landed and traveled again for much of her life, living at times in London, Munich, Paris, Berlin, Florence, Rome, New York. She wasn’t exactly itinerant, and she wasn’t in a political sense an exile, but she was initially estranged from her native country and from her immediate family. She was an outsider among the self-conscious outsiders with whom she associated,

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the teeming aggregate of artists and writers who constituted the formidable generation lost — and found — in Europe and America in the early decades of the twentieth century and who would become star figures in the invention of modernism. Unlike many in her cohort, Loy was financially and socially secure for only brief periods, a fact that gave the choices she made in her life an essential precarity; she was always inventing survival tactics. As poet and artist, Mina Loy is exhaustingly inexhaustible; she can be summoned in parts, but she cannot be summarized. Perhaps this is one reason why there are so many portraits of her, and why those same images adorn the covers of books by and about her that have been published since her death in 1966: the image of her beautiful face might give insight and focus to the variousness of her work and the complexity of her life. Her own early self-portrait Devant le Miroir (see fig. 1.17), a drawing from 1905, shows us finely arched dark brows and a swirl of voluminous dark hair; a full, sensuous mouth and long neck. But her eyes, widely spaced and oval, look back with an expression of coolly detached appraisal. This combination of physical sensuality and keen critical judgment was accurate; she knew herself well. In one of Man Ray’s photographic portraits of her (fig. 2.1), she is wearing a large hat and long earrings, smiling, but her gaze is wary, slightly self-conscious and guarded. She did not like to be treated as a work of art. She wrote to Carl Van Vechten, “Can’t you write about me as a hidden wrinkle? … the only woman

FIG. 2.1 Man Ray, Portrait of Mina Loy, ca. 1920. Gelatin silver print. Private collection.

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who has been decided enough to forego — easy success — etc etc — untempted by the potency of beauty — who has succeeded in holding on to herself until she found herself all alone on the Costa — it’s true!”5 Loy made many portrait drawings, some mere sketches, unfinished, some fully realized. She drew strangers and friends; she drew Man Ray (fig. 2.2) and Jules Pascin (fig. 2.3); William Carlos Williams’s wife, Flossie (fig. 2.4), and Stephen Fry (fig. 2.5). She was fascinated by the human face, which, she said, is “our most potent symbol of personality.”6 Loy also wrote many portrait poems, of persons known and unknown, fictive and real; she often gave fictive names to real persons. Her greatly admired verbal portrait of Gertrude Stein, whose Paris salon she frequented, is as witty and economical as it is accurate but makes no reference to Stein’s monumental physical presence. Loy’s novel Insel (fig. 2.6) is a portrayal of her difficult, complex friend the German Surrealist painter Richard Oelze. In it, her prose is dense

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FIG. 2.2 Mina Loy, Portrait of Man Ray, ca. 1925. Graphite on paper, 20 × 12 in. (50.8 × 30.48 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 2.3 Mina Loy, Portrait of Jules Pascin, ca. 1923. Ink on paper. Location unknown.

FIG. 2.4 Mina Loy, Portrait of Flossie (Florence) Williams, 1924. Graphite on paper, 19 1∕2 × 16 in. (49.53 × 40.64 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 2.5 Mina Loy, Stephen Fry, ca. 1950. Graphite on paper, 17 × 12 1∕2 in. (43.18 × 31.75 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 2.6 Mina Loy, Insel, Black Sparrow Press, 1991. Private collection.

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to the point of a claustrophobic enjambment of observation and response; invariably, in her writing, she would emphasize and illuminate the relation between seeing and saying, visual observation and verbal thought. “Poetry,” she wrote, “is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.” She wanted to find a way to make distillations of phenomena that would allow for a fusion between the subject observed and the sensibility of the observer. “Poetic rhythm, of which we have all spoken so much, is the chart of a temperament.”7 Her poem portrait of Edgar Allan Poe (included in her first collection, Lunar Baedeker, from 1923) foregrounds this bewitched sound of her temperament:

Poe A lyric elixir of death embalms the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves on moon spun nights sets icicled canopy for corpses of poesy with roses and northern lights Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles sing burial rites

No overall visual image can be extracted, and no clear narrative emerges. We have instead a constellation of repeating sounds: the “I” of nights, icicles, lights, nightingales, aisles, rites; the contraction of “elixir” into “ilix”; the repeated “o” of canopy, poesy, roses. These alliterations gather into song, a “burial rite” for the master of dark vision, illumined in “moon spun nights.” Chilly and chilling, the poem suggests Loy’s unflinching engagement with the difficult, often bleak subject matter that would characterize much of her poetry and her later works of art.8 Loy’s poem portrait of Nancy Cunard, the vibrant and complex socialite heiress, is equally allusive and elusive:

Nancy Cunard Your eyes diffused with holly lights of ancient Christmas helmeted with masks whose silken nostrils point the cardinal airs,

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The vermilion wall receding as a sin beyond your moonstone whiteness, Your chiffon voice tears with soft mystery a lily loaded with a sucrose dew of vigil carnival, Your lone fragility of mythological queens conjures long-vanished dragons — — their vast jaws yawning in disillusion, Your drifting hands faint as exotic snow spread silver silence as a fondant nun framed in the facing profiles of Princess Murat and George Moore

Here we have a portrait that brings us to a sense the heiress, not how she looked, exactly, but how she was perceived, as if Loy were a kind of mobile verbal lens on Cunard’s cultural-social psyche (the poem appears in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, hereafter LLB96, 103). Each concrete noun is not so much modified as altered by its accompanying adjective: silken nostrils, moonstone whiteness, chiffon voice, sucrose dew, exotic snow, lone fragility, fondant nun. These unexpected couplings frequently inflect her poems with a characteristic quality of resistance to immediate understanding or meaning; meaning arises out of a constellated ensemble of differences. The reader pivots uneasily through a variety of trajectories, not unlike viewing a Futurist painting attempting to capture images of abstract force — “dynamism” — without a discernible object (see, for example, Luigi Russolo’s Dynamism of a Car from 1913) (fig. 2.7). What is notable here is Loy’s mix of hard and soft, “the lone fragility / of mythological queens” with the helmeted mask, “vermilion wall,” and “vast jaws” of dragons, so that her portrait of Cunard refuses to settle into a single image or idea of the beautiful, rebellious, activist heiress, with whom she had much in common, except for financial security. Loy understood, as Gertrude Stein so insistently demonstrated, that language could be treated like a tactile material; it could be opaque or transparent, rough or smooth, capable of being cut through or folded, so that a poem might achieve the status of an object.9 It need not represent or describe visual appearance in order to convey presence, or create meaning. Indeed,

FIG. 2.7 Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of an Automobile, 1912–13. Oil on canvas, 55 × 72 in. (139 × 184 cm). Musée National d’ Art Moderne, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, Inv. AM 2917 P.

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FIG. 2.8 Mina Loy, Portrait of Constantin Brancusi, ca. 1924. Ink on paper. Location unknown.

FIG. 2.9 Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird, ca. 1920. Gelatin silver print on paper, 8 15∕16 × 5 13∕16 in. (22.7 × 14.7 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.37).

frequent use of abstract nouns and hard consonantal phrases gives to her poems’ surfaces a lapidary resilience; individual lines move in a propulsive, discontinuous logic that suggests but seldom resolves into causal narrative sequence They at times resemble Calder mobiles, turning in time-space. Although frequently propelled by synapses of sound, they are rarely lyrical, if by that word we mean a melodic consonance arising from rhythms whose pleasurable sonorities signify (feminine) affective subjectivity. This combination of a powerful awareness of the materiality of language and her attention to its sonorous effects gives her poetry a unique visceral presence and a resistance to easy interpretations. Among Loy’s many portrait drawings is a dramatically realized head of Constantin Brancusi, from around 1924 (fig. 2.8); she renders him as a bearded romantic hero with searing eyes. But perhaps her most complex and achieved word portrait is not of the great sculptor himself but his work Golden Bird (fig. 2.9). Loy has shaped this poem to mimic the sculpture’s elongated form; she has chosen a diction drawn from diverse lexicons: classical and religious

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Brancusi’s Golden Bird The toy become the aesthetic archetype As if some patient peasant God had rubbed and rubbed the Alpha and Omega of Form into a lump of metal A naked orientation unwinged unplumed — the ultimate rhythm has lopped the extremities of crest and claw from the nucleus of flight The absolute act of art conformed to continent sculpture — bare as the brow of Osiris — this breast of revelation an incandescent curve licked by chromatic flames in labyrinths of reflections This gong of polished hyperaesthesia shrills with brass as the aggressive light strikes its significance The immaculate conception of the inaudible bird occurs in gorgeous reticence …

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FIG. 2.10 Mina Loy, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” in C. Brancusi, by the Romanian critic Vasile Georgescu Paleolog, Editions Forum, Bucharest, 1947. Private collection.

FIG. 2.11 Constantin Brancusi, Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, Berenice Abbott, Mina Loy, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson in the Studio, 1921–22. Gelatin silver print on paper, 5 × 7 in. (12.7 × 18 cm). Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, Inv. PH 926 A.

tropes (“Alpha and Omega,” “Osiris,” “peasant God,” “Immaculate conception,” “the breast of revelation”); and appraisal (“the aggressive light / strikes its significance,” “in gorgeous reticence”), as well as conventional visual description: (“an incandescent curve / licked by chromatic flames / in labyrinths of reflections”) (fig. 2.10). Her admiration for Brancusi’s aesthetic archetype is clear, but the poem also suggests ambiguity toward pure abstraction. Brancusi’s vision, an “absolute act,” involves “a naked orientation” that renders the actual “real” bird not only inaudible (even as the brass gong is shrill with light) but incapable of flight. Pure abstraction would not appeal to Mina Loy’s fundamental commitment to the observed world in all its literal “hideous” and “dilapidated” detail, nor its erotic and spiritual mysteries, both of which preoccupied her. Her search was for forms that could touch all aspects of experience, and perhaps begin to collapse the obdurate binaries of Western thought, male/female; mind/ body; material/spiritual; objective/subjective (fig. 2.11). In a passage from her novel, the female narrator, a writer, sometime artist, and art dealer named Mrs. Jones (a.k.a. Loy) tells the protagonist, the painter Insel, who has just praised her pictures: “I felt, if I were to go back,

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begin a universe all over again, forget all form I am familiar with, evoking a chaos from which I could draw forth incipient form, that at last the female brain might achieve an act of creation.”10

ACTS OF CREATION In the raw caverns of the Increate we forge the dusk of Chaos to that imperious jewellery of the Universe — The Beautiful — While to your eyes A delicate crop of criminal mystic immortelles stands to the censor’s scythe.

(“Apology of Genius”) The hypermaterialism of the new century with its secular celebration of worldly goods and new industries to support them threatened to make theological and spiritual questions irrelevant, if not moot. The nineteenth century’s embrace of Enlightenment ideals, its belief in science as the chief means of human progress, would force the transcendental and metaphysical into retreat. Yeats’s 1920 poem The Second Coming, with its rough beast / slouching toward Bethlehem, encapsulated the brute vision of a fallen world. Loy’s poem from about 1915 Human Cylinders anticipates the image of a beast, only hers is “little, whining,” clearly the creation of the “human cylinders / Revolving in the enervating dust / That wraps each closer to the mystery / Of singularity” — From among us we have sent out Into the enervating dusk One little whining beast Whose longing Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow And one elastic tentacle of intuition To quiver among the stars The impartiality of the absolute Routs the polemic Or which of us Would not Receiving the holy-ghost Catch it and caging Lose it

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FIG. 2.12 Mina Loy, Moons I, 1932. Mixed media on board, 26 1∕4 × 35 1∕4 in. (66.68 × 89.54 cm). Private collection.

Or in the problematic Destroy the Universe With a solution.

We begin to sense an essential agonistic tension between Loy’s longing to find a language of spiritual transformation and her recognition of the wholly human capacity for destruction. Unlike her Futurist companions, she was not optimistic about the new machine age. She often seems to want to find herself at a point of primeval origin from which new forms might emerge. In poems and pictures, her vision is of mutating possibility found in the instability of fixed forms: a kind of mystical phenomenology, where basic atomic materials of the universe have within them an immanence, a consciousness perhaps, that cannot be identified except as and in transition. The poem “Ephemerid” opens with the lines “The Eternal is sustained by serial metamorphosis, / even so Beauty is / metamorphosis surprises!” Loy’s attraction to mutating forms and the possibilities of

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meanings released by them is manifest everywhere: in her love of puns, anagrams, and pseudonyms; in the hybridity of her visual materials and techniques; in her inventive designs for lampshades, toys, and innumerable practical devices. In the 1930s, Loy made a series of paintings, in which two masklike disembodied profiles of emergent humanoid creatures are suspended in atmospheric, celestial landscapes. The first of these generated Moons I (fig. 2.12), depicting heads with smoothly curved backs, as if cut from a single globe, facing each other; their eyes are empty sockets. Out of the swirling atmosphere in which they float, their hands, with elongated fingers, are threaded with a string of stars; they seem to be playing a game of celestial cat’s cradle. In Moons II the two profiles are adjacent; their hands wrap each other, as if in consoling embrace; they appear to be in the process of metamorphosis from cloud dust to lunar figures. In Angels, a monochrome from the following year, the figures’ elongated fingers seem to have emerged from patterns of feathery proto-wing shapes; they are suspended, as if in an agitated medium of transformation.

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FIG. 2.13 Mina Loy, Drift of Chaos VI (Butterfly Woman), 1933. Oil on board, 20 × 33 1∕4 in. (50.8 × 84.46 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 2.14 Mina Loy, Drift of Chaos III (Venus), 1933. Oil on canvas, 15 × 31 in. (38.1 × 78.74 cm). Private collection.

In her Drift of Chaos sequence of paintings from 1933 (see fig. 1.114 and figs. 1.144–1.146), Loy again visits an imagined world of nascent forms. In Drift of Chaos VI (Butterfly Woman) (fig. 2.13) we view a nocturnal seascape. Fragmentary objects, almost winged — visually reminiscent of Giotto’s flying putti — float above a long horizontal shape with what looks like a man’s head and gossamer beard-veil, in which stars — the Milky Way — are reflected. Out of this watery translucence, another figural shape spins vertically upward, its lower half twisted into a mermaid’s tail-cocoon. At the horizon, the cusp of a moon appears, either rising or setting; two slightly architectural, rectangular shapes sit across from it — as if remnants of rationality. In a closely related image, Drift of Chaos III (Venus) (fig. 2.14), two large indeterminate shapes — ice floes, or waves, or boulders — sit on the dark, inky water in the middle distance. From the larger of the two, a third piece seems to have broken free; we discern in its shape a nascent female form. Above these, luminous fragments fly, remnants, or beginnings. Each image registers Loy’s essential focus on mutating, combinatory bodies; she anticipates the later work of artists such as Louise

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Bourgeois (fig. 2.15), Lynda Benglis, and Cindy Sherman, who would bring to their visual works an engagement with psychosexual ambiguity; a new, mordant awareness, a new feminism. The domestic space and its objects are blown apart; women will discover their autonomy.11

UNBEAUTIFUL TRUE No doubt artists in the 20s and 30s (and later) persisted in making strong truth-claims for their work; but the nature of the truth they laid claim to was now so disputed and often so obscure — so lacking an anchorage in the experience of the eye — that the concept itself seemed more and more a rhetorical leftover, unconnected to the detail or structure of pictorial practice. T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth, 201312 In an undated manuscript, titled “Universal Food Machine” (probably written in the 1940s), when Loy was living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she wrote: All evil thought, all cruelty, the paralyzed vitality of loneliness, the crushed vibrations of drudgery and the bewilderment induced by enigmatic injustices are broadcast through our universe and received by the collective human organism. Think not that all the agonies such as for instance those sustained in War end with the dying of the bodies which endured them, for they are “on the air” and like a poison gas enfeeble the survivors. The decomposing bodies are buried to avert contagion, but the decomposition of the spirit, impalpable to our senses, is an unconfinable and a lasting corruption.13 If mysteries of creation drew Loy toward transforming celestial skyscapes in search of originary mythic forms, a clear-eyed, unflinching awareness of the harsh realities of the human world was foundational to her art. This fact sets her somewhat apart from her circle of avant-garde luminaries, their search for the alpha and omega of form. Increasingly, Loy seemed more at ease among the anonymous and impoverished citizens of the urban streets of lower Manhattan. This isn’t the place to detail Mina Loy’s complicated relation to place, her ambiguity toward domestic and familial roles, her restless search for something like belonging, sometimes realized in her life in intimate, erotic (rather than geographical or familial) attachments. She had many friends, lovers, and acquaintances who admired her beauty as well as her intelligence and multiple gifts, but she was often impecunious and, as she aged, less and less at ease with the contingent of mostly privileged international travelers and cosmopolitan figures — among them Peggy Guggenheim, Mabel Dodge, Carl Van Vechten, and Walter and Louise Arensberg — who had supported her efforts to find financial and artistic security.

FIG. 2.15 Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1945–47. Oil and ink on linen, 36 × 14 in. (91.4 × 35.6 cm). Private collection, New York.

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Classical notions of beauty as idealized, perfected form had been abandoned, or set aside, in the throes of the need to make it new. This was Ezra Pound’s mandate for poets, but it may as well have applied to all the arts. Newness meant rupture, energy, vitality, immediacy, dissonance. Nature and art had come asunder; Keats’s Romantic alignment of beauty and truth, realized in personified figures on a Greek pot, had little bearing on the moral and ethical contingencies of the new century. T. S Eliot’s city in fragmented ruin, Picasso’s astonishing paintings and sculptures of distorted humanoid monsters (fig. 2.16), the dissonant strains of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) would come to represent the aesthetics of the new century. Loy’s sense of a dystopian, distorted reality recurs like a motif, as encounters with the fearful apparatus of discontinuities, rupture, loss, and pain that make up the grotesque vision:

FIG. 2.16 Pablo Picasso, Bather with Beachball, Boisgeloup, August 30, 1932. Oil on canvas, 57 7∕8 × 45 1∕8 in. (146.2 × 114.6 cm). Partial gift of an anonymous donor and promised gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, The Museum of Modern Art, NY/USA.

The black brute-angels in their human gloves bellow through a monstrous growth of metal trunks. (“The Widow’s Jazz”) * She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass. (“Lady Laura in Bohemia”) * The monstrous sapphire lies in her lavish dowry (“The Mediterranean Sea”) * through the monstrous air of this red-lit thoroughfare (“On Third Avenue”) * nameless nostalgia through slush, enigma along gloom (“Ephemerid”)

It is perhaps not entirely surprising that when Mina Loy returned to America in 1937, she would eventually find herself living on Manhattan’s Bowery among the indigent “bums” and alongside populations of recent immigrants. Estranged

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from her family, her native country, and her adopted city of Paris, once again financially insecure, she would feel “at home” with those who suffered from alienations and depredations wholly unrelated to the radical aesthetic experiments of her cosmopolitan circle of friends. The poems written in New York in this period would speak directly about these displaced figures and objects, animate and inanimate, with whom she seems to have felt strong empathy. The graphic materiality of urban detritus, both human and inhuman, would be transformed into poignant testimonies of sympathy and tenderness toward “the heedless incognito / of shuffling shadow-bodies / animate with frustration.”14 Loy’s was a kind of witnessing that had little connection to so-called objective journalistic reporting in Henry Luce’s recently founded Time magazine, or the realistic fiction of such writers as John Steinbeck. Her attentiveness and open empathy, her own exile and precarity, inform some of her most sustained and powerful poetic and visual creations: “On Third Avenue,” “Property of Pigeons,” “Letters of the Unliving,” “Aid of the Madonna,” “Hot Cross Bum.” In this last, a long sequence of short stanzas, she invokes the grim street life of the “bums”: And always on the trodden street — the communal cot — embalmed in rum under an unseen baldachin of dream blinking his inverted sky of flagstone prone lies the body of the flop where’er he drop.

She was never sentimental about difficulties; she was capable of finding “beauty” in the most dire situations of anguish and pain. Loy’s collage Communal Cot (1949) (see fig. 3.1) revisits the same scene as the poem, here bringing images of poverty and homelessness into uncanny relief. Made of cardboard, paper, and rags, the ten wrapped bodies lie in various gestures, like so many sleeping Pietas or fallen pawns on a chessboard; a rectangular grid of sidewalk “flagstones” is rendered from perishable cardboard. Each of these tiny figures is given an identity through her attention to minute details of bodily gesture, facial expression, and the folds of the cloth. The real touches the unbeautiful true and transforms them into art. For Loy, Beauty is a figure or presence, but it is neither steady nor eternal; it comes in unexpected irresolute flashes and dissolves into “the uncolor of the unknown.” Her poems invoke Beauty but then cast it into environments of “metamorphosis surprises.” The visual occurs intermittently, more motif or gesture than in the service of mimetic representation; the poems often enact a kind of migrating perceptual verbal dance:

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As a commodious bee the eye gathers the infinite facets of the unique unlikeness of faces; the diamond flesh of adolescence sloping toward perception: flower over flower, corollas of complexion craning from hanging-gardens of the garment-worker.

(“Mass Production on 14th Street”) Mina Loy had disavowed both her father’s Judaism and her mother’s strict Christianity, but she was not entirely averse to nor ignorant of biblical stories and sacred imagery. (She had converted to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science in 1909, attracted no doubt to the radical view that mind could overcome the extremities of bodily anguish without recourse to the symbolic apparatus, dogmas, or doctrines of the church.) The capture or distillation of transformative energies into material objects and poetic imagery is one of art’s great projects, and one to which Loy frequently returned: So this was Life; being a sort of magnet to a sort of universal electricity, while in some deeper stratum of consciousness there lies embedded a familiarity with eternal existence withheld from our every-day consciousness; but the origin and nature of that, which, retaining its identity, experience all this, remains as great a mystery as ever. (“Incident”)15 In some of Loy’s late poems and images, we find elements of the grotesque, the current of figurative exploration that finds in hybridity, exaggeration, and abjection a repository of images dating from Roman times, and continuing into our present. The great English polymath art critic John Ruskin (whose monumental works Mina Loy undoubtedly would have been familiar with) referred to the grotesque as images “arising from the confusion of the imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly grasp.”16 These images invariably reject the idea of the beautiful as perfection realized in unified or idealized form. Instead, we find the true in hybrid, invented forms, in gaps and unlikely adhesions, in the incommensurability of lived experience. The profile of a woman’s face stares intently up toward the man across an architectural element that bifurcates the whole picture (fig. 2.17). The man’s head is in front of this element; he is looking not at the woman but into an indeterminate distance. We might wonder if the man is actually there

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FIG. 2.17 Mina Loy, Untitled, ca. 1950. Cutpaper and mixed-media collage on board, 23 1∕4 × 27 in. (59.06 × 68.58 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 2.18 Mina Loy, Prospector 2, 1954. Mixed media on paper mounted to panel, 58 1∕4 × 35 1∕2 in. (147.96 × 90.17 cm). Private collection.

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in the same space as the woman, or if he is a kind of mirage configured out of the molten, scumbled wall behind them. In another work (fig. 2.18), a head with wild Medusa-like hair appears to be emerging from a rust-colored arched screen, along with a pair of protruding hands, held high, at shoulder height, as if he were gripping and peering over a plinth. The metonymic figure’s right hand is turned or twisted, its thumb and forefinger appearing to clutch, whereas the figure’s left hand appears to be at rest. The figure’s face is intensely expressive, eyes down, mouth open, as if in alarmed awe, reminiscent of a medieval gargoyle. Below this partial figure, there is a scattering of objects, almost none of which can be identified; they having undergone a metamorphosis from named thing to scrap, neither beautiful nor useful; abject detritus. Loy’s sometimes cryptic poetic condensation is here realized visually. We are looking at a “scene” in which there is implied a narrative, but we have arrived too late; the event has already happened; this is after the fact, and all that is left is a face, halted in awe; its two hands; and a scattering of turd-like objects on a ground that has become a wall, the perspectival logic upended: the horizontality of a floor, or

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FIG. 2.19 Mina Loy, Christ on a Clothesline, ca. 1949. Cut-paper and mixedmedia collage, 24 × 41 1∕2 × 4 1∕2 in. (60.96 × 105.41 × 11.43 cm). Private collection.

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street, rendered in the classical verticality of portraiture and the arched architectonic windows of a church. The grim, ludic comedy of the grotesque strain of Loy’s sensibility becomes fully manifest in the few paintings and montages that have survived from the late 1940s and 1950s, perhaps most powerfully in the three-dimensional construction Christ on a Clothesline (fig. 2.19). The legend of Saint Veronica sits uneasily in the story of the final journey of Jesus. It tells of a woman, Saint Veronica, wiping his face of sweat and tears with her veil, as he is being carried along the Via Dolorosa to Calvary in the Sixth Station of the Cross, and that the image of his face then appeared on the veil without the aid of human hand. This relic, called the Veronica, became, in the Middle Ages, central to the Roman Church. The materiality of the veil and its direct imprint of the image of the face of Jesus was counter to the symbolic transubstantiation of blood and body into wafer and wine that accompanied Communion.17 When we look at Mina Loy’s astonishing work, this ancient story comes back, as the Cross is transformed into the titular clothesline, the figure of Christ pinned to it, his arms hanging limply at his sides like stockings, his head suspended in front of the long swaying cloth that resembles a domestic sheet or towel. His long face is gaunt, his eyes shut. The head appears superimposed on the cloth rather than drawn directly on it, the shadow along his cheeks and jaw suggesting that it is slightly in front of the draped garment. Behind this figure is a mottled cityscape. It appears that the clothesline has been erected on a rooftop; the background is punctured with protruding pipes arising from the floor; a multicolored wall of a structure with a slanted roof line is directly behind the figure, which cuts off, at its left edge, a many-windowed building in the background. The insistent materiality of this image is what reminds us of the Veronica, whose name can be translated from the Latin into “true image.” Loy does not refer to this story, but we know she was well versed in biblical lore. Beyond this distant affinity is of course the powerfully ironic transformation of the Cross into a lowly domestic artifact, the humble string that many women erected on rooftops, from which one could see laundry blowing in the wind. Christ is then, again, the lowly carpenter, Jesus. For Mina Loy, art and poetry were transformative acts, but they did not allow for reality to be finally transcended. In her work, the beautiful does not come to rest; it is not a thing, but an intermittently perceived relation of mind, spirit, and matter; a silver thread laced through a rag: “the expressive encroachment on the increate from which — Appearance with its several significances derives.”18 When this relation is aligned, it becomes true, however unbeautiful the resulting images might be. true (adj.) Old English triewe (West Saxon), treowe (Mercian) “faithful, trustworthy, honest, steady in adhering to promises, friends, etc.,” from Proto-Germanic *treuwaz “having or characterized by good

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faith” (source also of Old Frisian triuwi, Dutch getrouw, Old High German gatriuwu, German treu, Old Norse tryggr, Danish tryg, Gothic triggws “faithful, trusty”), from PIE *drew-o-, a suffixed form of the root *deru- “be firm, solid, steadfast.” Sense of “consistent with fact” first recorded c. 1200; that of “real, genuine, not counterfeit” is from late 14c.; that of “conformable to a certain standard” (as true north) is from c. 1550. Of artifacts, “accurately fitted or shaped” it is recorded from late 15c. Of aim, etc. “straight to the target, accurate, … ” by 1801, probably from the notion of “sure, unerring.” True-love (n.) is Old English treowlufu. True-born (adj.) first attested 1590s. True-false (adj.) as a type of test question is recorded from 1923. To come true (of dreams, etc.) is from 1819.

true (v.) “make true in position, form, or adjustment,” 1841, from true (adj.) in the sense “agreeing with a certain standard.” Related: Trued; truing.19

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FIGS. 2.20–2.36 Mina Loy, Untitled, n.d. Graphite on paper, 10 3∕4 × 8 1∕4 in. (27.31 × 20.96 cm). Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives.

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Lunar Baedeker A silver Lucifer serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnambulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperies Peris in livery prepare Lethe for posthumous parvenues Delirious Avenues lit with the chandelier souls of infusoria from Pharoah’s tombstones lead to mercurial doomsdays Odious oasis in furrowed phosphorous — — — the eye-white sky-light white-light district of lunar lusts — — — Stellectric signs “Wing shows on Starway” “Zodiac carousel”

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Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl crusaders from hallucinatory citadels of shattered glass into evacuate craters A flock of dreams browse on Necropolis From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient Onyx-eyed Odalisques and ornithologists observe the flight of Eros obsolete And “Immortality” mildews … in the museums of the moon “Nocturnal cyclops” “Crystal concubine” ——————— Pocked with personification the fossil virgin of the skies waxes and wanes — — — —

FROM ROGUE TO RAGS MINA LOY’S CONSTRUCTIONS DAWN ADES

FIG. 3.1 Mina Loy, Communal Cot, 1949. Cut-paper and mixed-media collage mounted on board, 27 1∕4 × 46 1∕2 in. (69.2 × 118.1 cm). Private collection, Chicago.

The first time I saw one of Mina Loy’s late constructions was in the exhibition The Arensberg Circle of Artists at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art in New York in 2019.1 Communal Cot (1949) (fig. 3.1) was hanging next to two portraits: a photograph showing her in all her ethereal beauty, and the early, rather imperious pencil self-portrait (ca. 1905) in full Edwardian splendor with magnificent hat. Communal Cot was utterly different: apparently made from bits of rubbish, ten small, frail figures lie splayed or hunched on paving stones. The label underlined the way the materials in the work appear to be trash: they were described as “cardboard, paper and rags.” The contrast between these three works was unnerving. What had happened, what course had her life and her art taken, to touch such extremes? And why, though famous as a poet, was she virtually unknown as an artist? How come her constructions were not included in the massive Art of Assemblage exhibition at MoMA in 1961? To these questions there are no simple answers, but there is a basic problem for the art historian — a great deal of her work has been lost, and little was reproduced at the time. This was partly a consequence of the many upheavals during her life: some personal, others, such as two world wars, not of her making. She left England for the first time in 1900, to study art in Munich, and never returned for any length of time, living variously in Paris, Florence, New York, Mexico, then Paris again, New York, and finally Aspen. She married an Englishman, divorced, and then married another Englishman in 1918, Arthur Cravan (Fabian Lloyd), as peripatetic as herself and her soul mate; his inexplicable disappearance the same year was a disaster from which she never fully recovered. “Once having been over-alive, the rest of life is a hangover.”2 She exhibited, but infrequently, and there seem to be long periods when she didn’t make any work or at least work that counted officially as “art.” The extreme

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differences in what she did make, the lack overall of a signature style, the intriguing absence of any respect for the dominant modes of visual modernism, and uncertainty over the dates of what did survive are so many hurdles to be faced.

*

“Mina Loy, the writer and Artist Englishwoman, has arrived in New York from Florence. Her first drawing done in this country is in this ROGUE.”3 The drawing by Mina Loy in Rogue raises ghosts of the Victorian world she had fled and reveals some of those sharp tools with which she challenged it in her art and poetry (fig. 3.2, fig. 3.3). Titled Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays (fig. 3.4), the drawing appeared in partnership with the regular column “On Philosophic Fashions” by Dame Rogue (alias for Louise Norton, a.k.a. Louise Varése). “Stays” were corsets, a kind of boned armor tightly laced in to the body — remember Scarlett O’Hara going to her first ball in Gone with the Wind — to produce the much-prized wasp waists, as seen in this photograph of Mina Loy’s mother, with her two daughters (fig. 3.5). The mother has turned her back on Mina, who later wrote bitterly of their endless fights, as Mina’s youthful interests in art, philosophy, and literature invariably ran up against her mother’s stiff social conformism (fig. 3.6). “Mother, in one of her excesses of outraged morality, tore up my drawing of a bare Andromeda lashed to a rock. Thereafter the lack of keys, making it impossible to protect things from her, allowed for an incessant raid on the work which had for a time so comforted me. Drawings and poems became the prey of her attacks.”4 In Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays, a “1900” vamp, with laced corset, kiss curls, rosebud mouth, and huge flounces, holds a Venetian mask. She is the product of the “stays,” a woman defined by and contained in the languid art nouveau lines of the drawing, with her pursed lips and pinched waist. Dame Rogue’s text accompanying the drawing, “Très decorseté” [sic] (“totally uncorseted”), addresses the problems the corset poses for women’s health from a well-informed historical perspective, culminating in an attack on a recent revival of the corset in fashion by someone jealous of women’s liberty, who was trying to “keep us out of the polls and politics” by introducing the “pinch-waist, lift-bust, heavy-hip and bustle-back stay.” One of the consequences of wearing corsets was the tendency to faint, because air was cut off to the lungs. The attempt of this jealous male was defeated — in the sense that women refused to follow the fashion. “Ladies believe now that comfort means control and as that is what they are after, they won’t be stayed. Besides what a bad argument a faint mid-way in a campaign speech would be. One would have to be undressed and resuscitated and meantime the main issue might get lost in one’s laces.”5 This lighthearted and faintly satirical form of feminist critique was entirely in line with Mina’s drawing. There were also painful associations for Mina with her mother, who, she believed, resented her, and would faint at the slightest opposition from her headstrong daughter — plausibly because of her stays (see fig. 3.4).6 The parallels between Dame Rogue and Mina’s poems and

FROM ROGUE TO RAGS

FIG. 3.2 Mina Loy, “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” Rogue, April 1, 1915. Private collection.

FIG. 3.3 Mina Loy, “Two Plays,” Rogue, August 15, 1915. Private collection.

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FIG. 3.4 Mina Loy, Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays, Rogue, November, 1916.

FIG. 3.5 Unidentified photographer, Mina Lowy, her mother Julia Bryan Lowy, and her sister Dora Lowy, ca. 1886. Gelatin silver print paper, 7 7∕8 × 4 3∕4 in. (20 × 12 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 3.6 Unidentified photographer, Mina Loy, ca. 1897. Gelatin silver print on paper, 4 7∕8 × 3 7∕16 in. (12.4 × 8.8 cm). Private collection.

FROM ROGUE TO RAGS

drawings are close, and one has a sense that this was a peculiarly well-matched connection. The interlocking ideas about fashion, art, politics, and feminism, in this disguised form of a fashion column, have interesting parallels with “Feminist Manifesto” (see XIII), which Loy wrote in 1914 during her association with the Futurists. In the winter of 1915–16, still in Florence and in the context of trying to support herself and her children, she had started to decorate hats and design clothes as the first step to entering the fashion business, so she was well prepared for Dame Rogue’s ironic look at fashion, modernity, and the female condition. This seems to have been the initial stage of her lifelong habit, whether linked to commercial interests or not, of experimenting with materials in relation to a wide variety of objects she would be in the process of making. The drawing fitted easily into the slightly anachronistic Beardsleyesque style of most of the illustrations and cartoons in Rogue, such as the delightful, risqué drawings by Clara Tice and Frances Stevens. A drawing by Tice of a girl fastening garters accompanied one of the early poems Mina published in Rogue, the funny, angry, and suggestive “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” (fig. 3.7).7 A review in Studio of Loy’s one-woman exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1912, where she showed the watercolor L’Amour dorloté par les Belles Dames (fig. 1.18), which had been praised at the 1906 Salon d’Automne, noted that she “descends artistically from Beardsley and Conder.”8 It is puzzling, though, that there is no trace in the Rogue drawing or in any of the work surviving from or immediately following her Florentine period, of Futurism, although she exhibited four works in the International Futurist Exhibition in Rome in 1914. The works themselves are lost, but their

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FIG. 3.7 Clara Tice, “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” Rogue, August 15, 1915. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library.

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FIG. 3.8 Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism” (detail), Camera Work 45, January 1914. Private collection.

titles indicate at least a theoretical adoption of the key Futurist principle of dynamism: three portraits of Marinetti (two dynamisms and a facial synthesis), and a Dynamism of the Subconscious. Loy and her close friend Frances Simpson Stevens had frequented the Futurists in Florence, and Loy had an affair with the Milanese Futurist leader Marinetti, as well as with Papini, the editor of the Futurist-sympathizing journal Lacerba, while the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà had also made advances. Exposure to Futurist ideas galvanized her thinking about politics, the position of women, and the expression of modernity. But it was in words that her response to Futurism flourished. Apart from the unpublished “Feminist Manifesto,” in January 1914 Alfred Stieglitz published her “Aphorisms on Futurism” in Camera Work (fig. 3.8). The sense of being hurled into space and out of time characteristic of Marinetti’s manifestoes and poetry is captured: “THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.” She similarly calls for a clean sweep of traditions and influences: “CEASE to build up your personality with the ejections of irrelevant minds.”9 Striking, bearing in mind later constructions like Communal Cot, are hints of what Marinetti called her “mania for the absolute,” and tendency to mysticism: “LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity.” She felt she had been woken up by the Futurists, though she insisted they never considered her one. But of any lasting visual influence from her association with Futurism, not a trace. The absence of Futurism or any other of the contemporary modernist isms, such as Cubism or Fauvism, is notable. The absence of a “style,” as she pursued forms of expression true to herself, was neither because she was an “outsider,” nor because she was a traditionalist, but it aligns her with Dada and with Surrealism, which have no identifiable visual style and no hierarchy of medium and genre. She was part of the proto-Dada group around Duchamp in New York in 1916–17; Julien Levy’s New York gallery was an outpost of Surrealism; and she frequented the Surrealists in Paris. But she was no more prepared to join that movement than she had been to join Futurism.10 It is rather that she had no interest in the direction painting and sculpture had taken since the early 1900s — that is, toward various kinds of abstraction following Cubism in which the qualities peculiar to painting are valued for their own sake. This formalism did not appeal because she wanted her work to engage directly with her own experiences and responses, and her extraordinarily acute perceptions of other people. Kreymborg said that her poems were “written with all the earnestness and irony of a woman possessed and obsessed with the sum of human experience.”11 The same pairing of spirituality and humor, the tragic and the ironic, is present in her visual work. There was also another dimension in her practices as an artist: she was an inventor and a designer. Her activities in those fields, often dismissed as interior decoration, evolved to become crucial to the late constructions, and there are some compelling parallels between her multidimensional activities and those of two of her close friends, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, who have not suffered her neglect.

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FIG. 3.9 Clara Tice, Who’s Who in Manhattan, in Cartoons Magazine, August 1917. Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art Library and Archives.

Mina Loy was welcomed in Rogue (fig. 3.2, fig. 3.3), the most provocative and unpredictable of the avant-garde little magazines, and quickly became part of the circle that gathered regularly at the home of the collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg, where the most advanced and challenging ideas in the realms of art and culture were hatched. The circle included Louise Norton and her husband, Allen Norton (Rogue’s editor); Beatrice Wood; Francis Picabia; Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia; and Marcel Duchamp. The notably female if not exactly feminist character of the New York avant-garde was picked up by Clara Tice in her 1917 drawings Who’s Who in Manhattan (exclusively women), among them “Mina Loy: Painter-Poet,” crowned with a particularly tall top hat; her friend Frances Simpson Stevens, “Futurist painter and Horsewoman”; and Louise Norton and Lou Arensberg (fig. 3.9).

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Mina was familiar with the skeptical attitudes to art in Rogue. Dame Rogue, for example, had vented her views on the commercialization of art: “Art has prostituted herself to commerce and ogles at street corners to catch any new trade that passes. … I am tired of Art! — Art for Art’s sake; Art for the Artist’s sake; Art for the People’s sake; Art for My sake; Art for the Millionaire’s sake; I am tired of Art!”12 She and Louise Norton were both parties to the Fountain incident, Duchamp’s great tease at the expense of the new Independents Exhibition in New York, which he had helped found and whose jury-less character he had devised. After the Independents Committee voted to reject the porcelain urinal that had been submitted in the sculpture category, the second issue of The Blind Man (fig. 3.10) was hastily put together to publicize and defend this notorious readymade — a new concept that was to have an incalculable effect on the course of twentieth-century art.13 Louise Norton contributed an ironic but considered aesthetic defense of the object, “Buddha of the Bathroom,” Mina Loy a hilarious verbal “readymade,” scraps of conversations overheard: “Will you bring a perfection, well bring a bottle … Two perfections WELL I want to SEE it … he will know it afterwards … will you bring the bottle. Really, Have I? … Which way? Oh did I? WHEN? Too much? You are abusing myself.” This was written, according to Mina, at the Blind Man’s Ball, “where I saved Marcel. With his robe afloat, the symmetry of his bronze hair rising from his beautiful profile, wavering as a flame, he was — actually — climbing a paper festoon hung from the top of the dome to the musicians’ gallery” (fig. 3.11).14 “Oh Marcel” probably was indeed a kind of transcription, but the clipped, glasslike clarity and the silences are not wholly unlike her poems. Mina is responding to the idea of the readymade in her own way, in words rather than visually. Her own entry to the Independents exhibition was a painting, Making Lampshades, now lost. Making Lampshades referred to the modest lampshade business she opened in New York in the winter of 1916–17. In Paris in the 1920s she took on lampshade making on a larger scale, and her fabulous objects appeared in high-end interior design magazines — virtually the only record of these magical lamps advertised under the name “L’Ombre féerique” (Fairy shadows) (fig. 3.12 a, b, c). Placing cutouts or painting on parchment, she created scenes that, when lit, were like shadow worlds: in one, a parakeet in a cage watches a suspended bauble, an uncanny precedent to Cornell’s bird boxes (fig. 3.13). In others, an “exceedingly lifelike” red fish floats in an aquarium, or trailing fronds appear to drip water. Handmade, the shades were mounted on exquisite stands, some from the collection of antique glass bottles she bought during her regular trips to the Marché aux puces (fig. 3.14). Although she had little time to paint, an exhibition of drawings was arranged at a Long Island gallery in 1925, including portraits of friends such as Brancusi, Gertrude Stein, and Marinetti. Brancusi’s head, although in a traditional, heavily modeled style, is dramatized by the black wash, emphasizing the dark curves of his eyebrows, beard, and lips (see fig. 2.9).

*

FIG. 3.10 Mina Loy, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood, The Blind Man, no. 2 (May 1917). Ink on paper, 11 × 8 1∕16 in. (28 × 20.5 cm). Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Museum Purchase in collaboration with the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives: Barbara Cooney Porter Fund, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund, Bowdoin College Museum of Art; Philip Conway Beam Endowment Fund, Bowdoin College Museum of Art; and the Stones-Pickard Special Editions Book Fund, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library.

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FIG. 3.11 Beatrice Wood, Lit de Marcel (Beatrice Wood; Marcel Duchamp, Mina Loy, Charles Demuth, Aileen Dresser), 1917. Watercolor on paper, 8 3∕4 × 5 3∕4 in. (22.23 × 14.61 cm). Collection of Francis M. Naumann and Marie T. Keller, Yorktown Heights, New York.

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FIG. 3.12 A–C a, b: Mina Loy lampshade advertisement published in Art et Industrie, 1927; c: detail of lamp from article on lampshades, Art and Decoration, 1927. Private collection.

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FIG. 3.13 Lee Miller, Mina Loy, ca. 1930. Gelatin silver print on paper, 6 7∕8 × 9 1∕8 in. (17.46 × 23.18 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001, 200162-1660.

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FIG. 3.14 Joseph Cornell, The Hotel Eden, 1945. Mixed-media assemblage with music box, 15 × 15.6 × 5 in. (38.3 × 39.7 × 12.7 cm). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1973.

At first sight it looks as if the constructions Mina made in New York in the 1940s and 1950s are a complete break with all that went before. They present as being “composed most graphically of refuse” and are seen as a response to her radically changed environment and impoverished postwar circumstances. Descriptions of her homes revel in the contrast between the magical Paris apartment of the 1920s, “by Loy out of the Marché aux puces,”15 full of light, fragments of colored paper, birds, and treasures picked up at the flea market, coinciding with her luxury lampshade business, and the later overcrowded room at Stanton Street near the Bowery, which few were allowed to enter, crammed with “trash”: “Rags, bottles, clothes pins and egg crates”16 at the time she was making the constructions. This colors the way the constructions are seen; and, looked at more closely, the materials are not necessarily originally junk, rags, or found objects. Moreover, the ingenuity and skill in the actual making are far from casual. There is greater continuity in her work and greater care and subtlety in the later constructions than is often allowed for (fig. 3.15).

FROM ROGUE TO RAGS

Loy’s habit of making treasures of unvalued things, experimenting with new or unusual materials, and toying with inventions was lifelong.17 For much of her life collecting (or scavenging) was pursued largely in the context of an activity intended to be commercial — as the source for her lamps or imageries lumineuses, when, it should never be forgotten, Mina was struggling to provide for herself and her daughters. Its final realization in the objects constructed in the lodging house in Stanton Street is thus different, in that these were not conceived as commercial, either as décor or as art. Mina said she was making them to amuse herself, though she was delighted when several sold at the 1959 Bodley Gallery exhibition. Christ on a Clothesline (see fig. 2.19) is one of the most challenging and shocking of her late objects. To be hung out to dry is all very well as a metaphor, but hard taken literally. In this materialized abasement, Christ’s shoulders are suspended by real wooden clothes pegs rather than the nails of the Crucifixion. There are other instances in poetry and painting of bringing Christ into a modern setting — Stanley Spencer’s Christ Carrying the Cross, or his Resurrection, for example, set not in Jerusalem but in his hometown of Cookham; or the poem “Indifference.”18 Closer perhaps than either Spencer bringing his religious beliefs alive, or Studdert Kennedy on the banal indifference of the modern world, is George Grosz’s Christ with Gas Mask of 1927. But though Christ on a Clothesline registers as a scene in the miserable tenements of the Bowery, it is haunted by the image tradition of Descents from the Cross or the Entombment. Perhaps Mina noted the similarity of sheets hanging on a washing line to shrouds. Christ is implicitly linked to the destitute and homeless who became Loy’s subjects and friends. Communal Cot is among the most complex of the late constructions. Ten tiny individual figures have been carefully crafted from papers and fabrics. Whether the fabrics were in fact rags originally is impossible to say — that is what they have been made into, convincingly. They recall an old woman Loy observed leaning against a department store: Hers alone to model the last creation, original design of destitution. Clothed in memorial scraps skimpy even for a skeleton.19

The poem is entitled “Chiffon Velours”: two luxurious fabrics, one silky and transparent, the other soft and velvety, which are still just recognizable in her rags. Each of the bodies in Communal Cot is expressive, with minutely observed poses and gestures, distinct enough to be portraits of the bums Loy knew: the old man (fig. 3.16), for example, at the bottom right (if the work is viewed vertically as in the photograph by Berenice Abbott) (fig. 3.29), the

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FIG. 3.15 Joseph Cornell letter to Mina Loy, August 1, 1943. Ink and collage on paper, approx. 14 × 7 1∕2 in. (35.56 × 19.05 cm). Private collection.

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crown of his head bald, with strands of white hair round his ears and white eyebrows, arms curled up protectively but the lower half of his body lying open, vulnerable but also shockingly suggestive — a phallic miniature black shoe just visible at the fork in the legs (fig. 3.17). From “Hot Cross Bum” (LLB96, 133–44): And always on the trodden street — the communal cot —

embalmed in rum under an unseen baldachin of dream blinking his inverted sky of flagstone prone lies the body of the flop where’er he drop. One still savors the favor of Eros

FIG. 3.16 Unidentified author, Arts Magazine review of Bodley exhibition, 1959. Private collection.

Love (‘Eros’) was essential for Loy in her search for the human in “misfortune’s monsters” and she felt it could yet animate these blighted forms. Puzzling at first in Communal Cot is the hard-to-define attitude to these ragged outcasts, which seems forensic rather than pitying. What they are certainly not is picturesque: the taste that, following the eighteenth-century fashion, endows ruins and the poverty-stricken with aesthetic appeal, making them suitable to be the subject of a picture. It is interesting that critical responses to these unclassifiable works, on their single public exposure in her lifetime, at the Bodley Gallery, cast back to Dada to try to categorize them: “The alliance between dada and social comment is downright sinister,” wrote Stuart Preston in the New York Times.20 There is neither pity, nor indifference, nor aesthetic appreciation in her constructions, but the curiosity of someone with a profound response to the spiritual in the physical; this is not exactly looking beyond the horrors of the destitute, but seeing what is in it that is human, and what God might have to do with it: …this unlikely spill of God’s mysteriously variously retarded children.

Thirty years earlier she had written: “LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.”21 In the Bowery she was living with “the hideous,” not just

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enduring it, but entering it. She knew the bums she represents in Communal Cot and was familiar with their slang for wine and hard liquor. There is nonetheless a kind of social critique in the comparisons she draws between the “inferno faces” of the hellish milieu and the upright, comfortable citizens, well dressed and prospering—for whom she finds the telling phrase: “practicality’s elite”—who don’t wonder for an instant about the life of the bums. So, wonder why defeat by dignity of the majority oft reveals in close-up of inferno face a nobler origin than practicality’s elite

These passages are from the poem most closely associated with Communal Cot, “Hot Cross Bum.” The pun in the title bleeds into the poem as a whole, which is particularly playful in its alliterations, puns, and neologisms. To say this is in poor taste would be to fall into a trap Loy sets: what on earth can be “appropriate” for these visions of human degradation, the “indirigible bums”? Running through the poem is the contrast of their state with the local church, indifferent and forbidding; a grand funeral is taking place where a dull-dong bell thuds out admonishment to worship

This was not her church. Mina and her friend Cornell shared a belief in Christian Science, which has a distinct approach to the human predicament, holding that there is a spiritual reality beyond the material world (fig. 3.17). Unlike the Protestant and Catholic Churches, however, this is not identified with a “beyond” like Heaven but is a demonstrable fact in this world. The idea in Christian Science that the limitations of mortal existence can be overcome is expressed in terms like attaining “the mind of Christ,” that is a spiritual state linked to everyday experience. One of Mina’s notes may be musing on this in relation to our capacity for abstract thought and beliefs that are not generated by immediate facts: “The mind of man cannot conceive independently, accidentally an idea exceeding his concrete experience. Such an idea as immortality is inspired by its actuality for infinite intelligence from which the mind of man derives” (fig. 3.18).22 In the untitled double portrait (fig. 2.17), two figures wearing casual clothes seem to exist within their day-to-day world while also engaging in some mysterious, wordless communion. Is the profile of the woman a self-portrait of Mina Loy, her dark tresses made of meticulously cut ribbons of paper, her emphatic prolife confronting what could be Marcel Duchamp’s gaunt head, turned aside?”

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FIG. 3.17 Mina Loy, Communal Cot (detail), 1949. Cut-paper and mixed-media collage mounted on board, 27 1∕4 × 46 1∕2 in. (69.2 × 118.1 cm). Private collection, Chicago.

FIG. 3.18 Berenice Abbott, Front cover of Bodley Gallery Exhibition Announcement featuring Mina Loy’s “No Parking,” April 14–25, 1959. Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

In her novel Insel, Mina vividly describes her otherworldly experiences in this world, often from intense encounters with other people, which sometimes have a rather literal spiritual illumination. An artist she befriended in Paris in the 1930s, Richard Oelze (fig. 3.19), appears as the eponymous character Insel. He “would halt on the threshold drawing the whole of his luminous life up into his smile. It radiated round his face and formed a halo. … He looked like a lamppost alight.”23 Mina was deeply moved by Cornell’s exhibition Aviary at the Egan Gallery in 1949, which for her demonstrated the ability to make present in the spare and delicate objects the sensations aroused by abstract ideas such as time, or immortality: “It is a long aesthetic itinerary from Brancusi’s Golden Bird to Cornell’s Aviary. The first is the purest abstraction I have ever seen; the latter the purest enticement of the abstract into the objective.” They remained in close contact even after she left the Bowery for Aspen in 1953, but she was not sure he approved her constructions, which approached the spiritual through the physical in a different way from Cornell’s. When he visited her apartment he “was so overwhelmed by her objects … that he retreated into the kitchen,

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where he whispered that given their material condition, his dealer would not want them.”24 When the “Stanton Street constructions”25 were finally exhibited in 1959, it was thanks to the intervention of Duchamp, Julien Levy, and David Mann, an art dealer. For the invitation card Duchamp wrote: “MINA’S POEMS À 2 1/2 DIMENSIONS: HAUTS-RELIEFS AND BAS-FONDS, INC., MARCEL DUCHAMP (ADMIRAVIT).” Marveling at these visual poems poised between two and three dimensions, with characteristic precision Duchamp played on the technical terms for sculpture in high or low relief to allude to other dimensions of high and low — implying the rubbing together of spiritual elevation and the lowest depths of human existence. He must also have been struck by a coincidence. For a decade or so he had been working in utter secrecy on the room installation Étant donnés.26 It is hard to think of anyone else at the time, apart from Loy, who was also experimenting with different ways of producing a facsimile of a human body “in two and a half dimensions,” in other words in high or low relief, with a greater appearance of lifelikeness than is possible in clay or marble, and without resorting to wax (fig. 3.20).

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FIG. 3.19 Richard Oelze, Departure (with the Sled), 1945–55. Colored pencil and fabricated charcoal on black woven paper, 25 1∕2 × 19 1∕2 in. (64.8 × 49.6 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Wallace and Louise Landau Fund, 2007.309.

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No wonder Duchamp “ADMIRAVIT” — admired and wondered at — Mina’s objects. Étant donnés focuses on a human body reproduced three-dimensionally but not in the round, in that it lies flat, within a constructed setting, effectively in relief, thus two and a half dimensions, being neither exactly two nor three dimensional. The same is true of the figures in Mina’s No Parking, of which the central body of the bum is in fairly high relief, fastened to what looks like a wooden fence. Without a frame or box surround, the figures are thus to an extent in our space. To create the look of human skin in Étant donnés the molded body is covered in parchment — animal skin — which was then painted pink. The heads and bodies in Mina’s constructions are usually paper of some kind, real parchment being expensive and obtainable at the time only in Europe. The nude in Étant donnés, head invisible behind a blond forelock, appears, when viewed through peepholes, to be life-size. The same might be true of No Parking (fig. 3.18), and certainly is for some of her constructions. In a photograph taken at the 1959 exhibition Duchamp stands beside Bums Praying (fig. 3.22), so that it is possible to see that there the heads are more or less life-size. Four paper cutout heads in profile surround a fifth bearded head, which is Christ or saintlike, at the center of a window with a curved top, as if in a church. Thickly pleated paper is arranged around each head with subtly different associations ranging from shawls to hair to wings: the two heads with praying hands on the left resemble angels. Scale in Communal Cot is disconcerting. The tiny figures are seen as if from a height, the viewer looking down at them lying on the sidewalk. But the paving stones are huge, out of proportion to the bodies lying on them, so that “our” distance from the scene is confusing, as if we were simultaneously seeing through the wrong and the right ends of a telescope. No Parking was inspired by a recent incident she witnessed when “the contents of a garbage can spilled onto the pavement where derelicts dozed with beatific expressions.”27 The effect she successfully creates here and in other objects is certainly that of poverty and destitution, as caught by the name she gave them, “Refusees,” a brilliant pun on “refuse,” “Refugees,” and “Refusés,” as in the Salon des refusés.28 There is no doubt that Mina did scavenge rubbish and repurpose it. The butterfly poised on the garbage can in No Parking was a paper cup that has been flattened, pressed into shape, and possibly painted. She picked up already squashed and disfigured bottle tops, coins, and cans in the street, which sometimes metamorphosed, like the paper cup, into something else and sometimes transformed in the opposite direction, toward a kind of cosmic abstraction, the circles like planetary bodies (fig. 3.23 and fig. 3.24). There are interesting parallels between Snow Crop (fig. 3.25), for example, and some of Cornell’s boxes such as Penny Arcade with Horse (fig. 3.27). In two of the later constructions made in Aspen, Prospector 1 (fig. 3.26) and Prospector 2 (see fig. 2.18), perhaps inspired by the history of the old mining town, the metal fragments spill from the hands like treasure. The two heads are cut out of painted cardboard, one casting a real shadow, the other with hair fashioned from a mop.

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FIG. 3.20 Marcel Duchamp, Study for Étant donnés 1. la chute d’eau et 2. le gaz d’éclairage, 1948–49. Painted parchment on plaster, velvet, 19 11∕16 × 12 3∕16 in (50 × 31 cm); frame dimensions: 28 11∕16 × 21 3∕16 × 2 3∕8 in (73 × 53.8 × 6 cm). Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Donation 1985, dedicated to Ulf Linde by Tomas Fischer, MOMB.

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FIG. 3.21 Unidentified photographer, Marcel Duchamp at Mina Loy’s Bowery Studio, 1959. Gelatin silver photograph. Location unknown.

FIG. 3.22 Mina Loy, Untitled, ca. 1955. Metal mounted on cardboard, 24 1∕2 × 15 in. (62.23 × 38.1 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 3.23 Mina Loy, Snow Crop, ca. 1955. Tin can lids mounted on board, 25 × 19 3∕16 × 3 in. (63.5 × 48.77 × 7.62 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 3.24 Mina Loy, Untitled, ca. 1955. Mixed media, 18 × 18 in. (45.72 x 45.72 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 3.25 Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Constellation), ca. 1958. Wood, metal, cut paper, glass, and found objects, 13 × 19 3∕8 × 4 1∕4 in. (33 × 49.2 × 10.8 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Josephine Albarelli, 2015, 2015-144-5.

FIG. 3.26 Mina Loy, Prospector 1, 1954. Mixed media on paper mounted to panel, 58 1∕4 × 35 1∕2 in. (147.96 × 90.17 cm). Private collection.

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Rags, rubbish — it does look at first sight as if the constructions are assembled largely from trash, and that this is appropriate for her subject: derelict characters and scenes of the Bowery. However, as Carolyn Burke noted, on closer inspection, there are more complex reasons for the viewer’s recoil: “The careful observer of No Parking and Communal Cot could not help feeling assaulted by the contrast between the delicate modeling of the derelicts’ features and the squalor of the material used to depict them.”29 There are, in fact, many instances of a great delicacy in the treatment of elements in the constructions, for instance in the painted brick wall behind Christ, in the meticulously cut out and painted heads, in the relatively finely modeled face of the collapsed bum in No Parking by contrast with the crude features of the figure propped up against the dustbin. The material used to depict these and other scenes is not necessarily in itself squalid. The disparity Burke notices lies in the subtlety with which Loy deploys her materials, which include but are by no means confined to trash. As well as the found detritus, she worked with paper, cardboard, paint, and fabrics, which she manipulated to create different effects, not least that of great poverty. The heads and bodies in her reliefs are made from paper, not rubbish. Paper may lack the permanence of oil paint on canvas but is not necessarily junk, and its quality of ephemerality contributed to the effects she sought. The objects shock. But the point is that squalor is Mina’s fictive effect. The materials she uses, of many kinds, are manipulated with loving care and skill to resemble and embody the derelict beings, the bodies and faces, whom she wished to memorialize (fig. 3.28, fig. 3.29, fig. 3.30, fig. 3.31, fig. 3.32, fig. 3.33).

* POSTSCRIPT It is curious that her work was seen by critics at the time as hard to classify, while very shortly after her Bodley Gallery show one of the key exhibitions of our era defined a prevalent but hitherto unidentified aspect of contemporary practice with its roots in Dada and Surrealism: The Art of Assemblage, which did not include her work though it would seem naturally to have fitted.30 Was she just below the radar, by then, or was there something in her work that grated even with William Seitz’s liberal approach to this huge exhibition of over 140 artists? Comparisons with some of those shown there — Kienholz, Marisol, and Dubuffet, for example, as well as Cornell and Duchamp, could be revealing. Étant donnés, though, was still unknown and deeply shocked Duchamp’s supporters when it was made public after his death in 1968.

FIG. 3.27 Joseph Cornell, Penny Arcade with Horse, 1965. Multimedia construction, 11 1∕2 × 8 1∕2 in. 29.2 × 21.6 cm). Miami University Art Museum, Museum Purchase with Patrick A. Spensley Fund and Doepper Art Fund, 1985.76.

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FIG. 3.28 Berenice Abbott, Photograph of Mina Loy’s “Christ on a Clothesline,” 1955–59. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.32 cm). Berenice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada, AG04.2012.6004:0002.

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FIG. 3.29 Berenice Abbott, Photograph of Mina Loy’s “Communal Cot,” ca. 1959. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.32 cm). Berenice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada, AG04.2012.6004:0004.

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FIG. 3.30 Berenice Abbott, Photograph of Mina Loy’s “Househunting,” ca. 1959. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 in. (20.32 x 25.4 cm). Berenice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada, AG04.2012.6004:0007.

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FIG. 3.31 Berenice Abbott, Photograph of Mina Loy’s “Untitled (Black Dancers),” ca. 1959. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 in. (20.32 × 25.4 cm). Berenice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada, AG04.2012.6004:0008.

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FIG. 3.32 Berenice Abbott, Photograph of Mina Loy’s “Bums Praying,” ca. 1959. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.32 cm). Berenice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada, AG04.2012.6004:00010.

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FIG. 3.33 Berenice Abbott, Photograph of Mina Loy’s “Untitled (Bottle and Eye, Ear, Lips),” ca. 1959. Gelatin silver print, overall: 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.32 cm). Berenice Abbott Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada, AG04.2012.6004:00012.

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The Widow’s Jazz The white flesh quakes to the negro soul Chicago! Chicago! An uninterpretable wail stirs in a tangle of pale snakes to the lethargic ecstasy of steps backing into primeval goal White man quit his actin’ wise colored folk hab de moon in dere eyes Haunted by wind instruments in groves of grace the maiden saplings slant to the oboes and shampooed gigolos prowl to the sobbing taboos. An electric crown crashes the furtive cargoes of the floor. the pruned contours dissolve in the brazen shallows of dissonance revolving mimes of the encroaching Eros in adolescence The black brute-angels in their human gloves bellow through a monstrous growth of metal trunks and impish musics crumble the ecstatic loaf before a swooning flock of doves.

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Cravan colossal absentee the substitute dark rolls to the incandescent memory of love’s survivor on this rich suttee seared by the flames of sound the widowed urn holds impotently your murdered laughter Husband how secretly you cuckold me with death while this cajoling jazz blows with its tropic breath among the echoes of the flesh a synthesis of racial caress The seraph and the ass in this unerring esperanto of the earth converse of everlit delight as my desire receded to the distance of the dead searches the opaque silence of unpeopled space.

MINA LOY “I’M NOT THE MUSEUM” ROGER CONOVER

You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both. — Gertrude Stein1 I will never forget the moment I first encountered Mina Loy’s extraterrestrial language experiments. It was like landing on the moon and coming face to face with strange formations made of unfamiliar substances, like nothing I had seen on earth. I didn’t know poetry could be like that. Mina Loy resembled no one I had ever read. It was the early 1970s. I was in a used bookshop in Dinkytown, the beat village on the outskirts of the University of Minnesota, where I was pursuing a graduate degree in English. Dinkytown in those days was the Midwest’s answer to Haight Ashbury and Greenwich Village, a microbohemia pulsing with thinkers and drinkers, bookstores, dive bars, coffee houses, and record shops. It was where Bob Dylan first played2 and John Berryman last read.3 On one particularly cold Minnesota night, I found myself in a familiar position: stooped on the floor, shuffling through boxes of books deemed unworthy of being shelved, waiting for a poetry reading to begin. In one box set against the stairs, something gleamed: Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedecker [sic] (fig. 4.1), published in 1923 by the Paris-based Contact Press, whose co-editor, Robert McAlmon (together with William Carlos Williams) had previously published Loy’s work in the little magazine Contact (fig. 4.3 and fig. 4.4). The book was (in)appropriately housed where it didn’t belong, with a bunch of used astronomy texts. Lunar Baedecker [sic] cost $2.50, fit in my coat pocket, and wound up in my apartment that night. I had my first guide to Mina Loy, whom I would later come to know as a guideless poet and unguided artist. What I could not have known at that time was that this diminutive book would

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FIG. 4.1 Mina Loy, Lunar Baedeker [sic], 1923. Private collection.

FIG. 4.2 Man Ray, Mina Loy, 1920. Gelatin silver print, 6 1∕2 × 5 1∕8 in. (16.51 × 12.95 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 4.3 William Carlos Williams and Robert M. McAlmon, eds., Contact Magazine, 1920. Private collection.

FIG. 4.4 Mina Loy, “O Hell” and “Summer Night in a Florence Slum,” published in Contact Magazine, 1920. Private collection.

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become the generative force behind several other “lunar baedekers” (the last and the lost), and that it would shape a lifetime of research and practice devoted to the arts of editing and literary salvage, not to mention the pursuit of another Mina Loy unknown to me at the time: Mina Loy the artist (fig. 4.2). Fifty years later, recalling that accidental find made while rummaging through an abandoned box of books, these lines still send a shiver through my spine: Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage4

I thought I had found the poetic grail.5 My professors thought otherwise. One confessed he did not realize that Myrna Loy [sic] also wrote poetry.6 It was on that and similar notes (“she’s not Emily Dickinson”) that I decided to leave graduate school. Obsession became mission: find everything Mina Loy had ever written, and create an edition. The Last Lunar Baedeker was published by a small press in North Carolina run by Jonathan Williams (fig. 4.5), a poet who had left Princeton under similar circumstances. In addition to Loy, he published early work (and in many cases first books) by Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Lorine Niedecker, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Joel Oppenheimer, and Kenneth Patchen, as well as graphic art by fellow Black Mountain students Robert Rauschenberg and Ray Johnson. Like Robert McAlmon of the Contact Press, who had published Mina Loy’s first book in Paris a generation earlier (alongside fellow expatriates Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Marsden Hartley, H.D., and William Carlos Williams), Jargon was onto something early. Mina Loy was part of both new waves. Jonathan Williams had met Mina Loy in the 1950s and published a slim volume of her poems called Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables in 1958 (fig. 4.6, fig. 4.7), the manuscript of which had been turned down by James Laughlin of New Directions Press and other leading literary imprints. The fact that this exhibition is being mounted by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is not only a credit to independent-minded and research-driven college art museums; it is beautifully consistent with Mina Loy’s long history of turning up, or being turned up, in unexpected places.7 At the end of her long (non)career, Mina Loy waved off would-be rediscoverers with a shrug: “But, why do you waste your time on these thoughts of mine? I was never a poet.” She had a similar reaction when asked why she didn’t attend the opening of a show of her own work at the Bodley Gallery in 1959: “But, I’ve already seen my work. Why would I go?”8 Refusées, she called her Bowery pieces in that show, positioning her creations precariously between refused works and works made of refuse. Composed mainly of scraps scavenged from and around Manhattan’s oldest street beneath the Third Avenue El, she made art of trash long before dumpster diving was a thing and multimedia was a term.9 She painted with what she

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FIG. 4.5 Roger L. Conover, ed., The Last Lunar Baedeker, 1982. Private collection.

FIG. 4.6 Jonathan Williams, ed., Lunar Baedeker & Timetables, 1958. Private collection.

FIG. 4.7 Jonathan Williams, ed., Lunar Baedeker & Timetables (inscribed to Marcel Duchamp), 1958. Private collection.

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could find or take in empty hand: bottle caps, tin cans, mop heads, broken glass, egg cartons, cardboard, rags, sheets. Gerhard Richter once declared that he was not a painter, but an image maker: if he painted, he would paint with a squeegee, and if he wrote, he would write with scissors. Not so far from Mina Loy. Or from Walter Benjamin, who considered ragpickers and poets the same: “both are concerned with refuse.”10 Each piece she made was a pathway to the next. Mina Loy was a Futurist. Her work has aged in reverse, its meanings becoming deeper and more contemporary with the passage of time. She was out of line at a time when no one was online, but she is one of us now. “The Future is limitless–the past a trail of insidious reactions,”11 she wrote, as if premonitionally perceiving both the prospective and the retro-proleptic reactions her work would receive during and after her lifetime. If her poems demanded a new kind of reader, or her art a new kind of viewer, so be it. Such viewers and readers might come along in time. Or they might not. Either way, she was not about to chase them. She understood, as Gabriel Orozco wrote much later, that if you try to fulfill other people’s expectations you will do so at the expense of your own. So while she believed in overestimating the intelligence of readers, she also had “a fundamental masculine conceit that ascribe[d] lack of appreciation of [her] work to want of perspicacity in the observer.”12 She didn’t genuflect. She understood that if you give people what they want, they will object, and if you don’t give them what they want, they will also object. Given the choice between interpretable and impenetrable, she preferred impenetrable. But in keeping herself to herself and her work so hermetic, she made it difficult for herself and became a problem for others. Mina Loy was a loy unto herself.13 While Myrna Loy played on-screen, Mina Loy played on page and canvas, often using words as mediums. She was a Christian Scientist and numerologist. She was an anagrammatist. She gave readings. Not only of poetry, but of facial destinies (fig. 1.38). She was a prosopologist.14 She read friends’ and strangers’ futures through their names’ numerical values, and spun her own name to produce cognominal effects: cognomina. In her poems she sometimes identified herself as Imna Oly, Nima Lyo, Anim Yol, Mi and Lo, Ova, and Gina. Anagrammatical solutions led to Latin dictums: nomen est omen. After her difficult divorce, financial settlement, and permanent estrangement from her first husband, the British painter Stephen Haweis, she might have spun her self-created name and brand septagonally, turning M-I-N-A-L-O-Y

with perfect economy, into A-L-I-M-O-N-Y

FIG. 4.8 Unidentified artist, Johnson vs. Cravan fight poster, 1916 (modern facsimile). Lithograph, 19 × 45 in (48 × 114.3 cm). Private collection.

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FIG. 4.9 Henri Hayden, Arthur Cravan, 1912. Oil on canvas, 32 × 27 3∕8 in. (81.28 × 69.53 cm). Private collection.

FIG. 4.10 Beatrice Wood, Untitled (Mina Loy and Arthur Cravan), 1990. Colored pencil on paper, 17 × 13 1∕2 in. (43.18 × 34.29 cm). Private collection.

It must have further deepened Mina Loy’s belief in the mysterious and predictive power of names when she discovered that the “real” name of the man she knew as Arthur Cravan (fig. 4.8 and fig. 4.9), who would become her next husband (and love of her life) (fig. 4.10), was Fabian Lloyd. Long before they even knew of one another’s existence, the three spare letters of the surname she invented glistened like a jewel between the extreme consonants of the surname he abandoned: L LOY D.

Uncannily allied and alchemically admixed, Fabian Lloyd and Mina Loy became an alloy, producing a number of ephemeral works together, the most enduring of which was their daughter Fabienne (fig. 4.11, fig. 4.12). Loy (n.): in French, a loi, or law; in Irish, an ancient spade used for turning up ground, for making furrows.15

Mina Loy would sometimes predate her paintings, postdate her writings, and play with her signature, as if anticipating our posthumous curiosity and engaging future scholars and art historians in un jeu de recherche that, long after her last move, she could still win.16 Mina Loy eludes capture. Her pseudonymania may have encouraged a rumor circulating in Paris in the 1920s — that Mina Loy was perhaps not a real person at all, but a made-up artist, a tour de hoax. Her early poems appeared in the pages of the same little magazine that the poet Muna Lee and members of the fictive Spectra School of Poets did. Was Muna Lee Mina Loy? Was Mina Loy a Spectrist?17

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FIG. 4.11 Carl Van Vechten, Fabienne Lloyd, 1937. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 7 3∕8 in. (25.4 × 18.7 cm). Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 4.12 Mina Loy, Untitled (Sketches of Fabienne Lloyd), from Mi and Lo, n.d. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

On the rare occasions that Mina Loy read her poetry in public, listeners had a hard time knowing when a poem ended and a comment began; this attests not to the colloquialism of her poems but to the precision of her speech. She used pointed pauses in her diction the way she used dashes in her writing. Her name was her brand, her voice her signature. When she did speak, she hyper-enunciated in her “mongrel” accent — a striking admixture of the languages she spoke — English, French, Italian, Yiddish, German — none of which she formally studied. She spoke, wrote, and made art out of the one language she did know — the language of constant exile and rootlessness — of not belonging, of outsiderhood. She was a cultural nomad in every sense. Her work traversed the major movements of the twentieth century, while transgressing the boundaries of all of them. Symbolist, Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, Feminist, Conceptualist— she was all and none of them. She moved in and out of avant-garde art circles in London, Paris, Florence, and New York, each time reauthoring and reinventing herself, her poems, her paintings. No wonder she fell in love with Arthur Cravan, the elusive poet-boxer and shape-shifter whose only artifact was himself and the rumors and enigmas he left behind. Unlike Cravan, Mina Loy did produce and “leave behind” a substantial body of work, which this exhibition reveals to the public for the first time, qualified by the fact that much of her work was lost owing to the peregrinations of biography and the ephemerality

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of the materials she used to make it. Mina Loy presents formidable challenges when it comes to exhibition and publication, even for the most sympathetic curators and editors. To me, this exhibition is ultimately not about “bringing her back,” but about the interesting and challenging questions that pertain to bringing her up at all. Like her life itself, Mina Loy’s artistic practice was an ode to exile and displacement. Instability was the one defining constant. Although it can be argued that Mina Loy’s entire art-life-writing project is based on protoconceptual principles and strategies, neither the art-making nor the writing valorizes conceptual consistence or coherence. If one of her greatest strengths as an artist is her continuing ability to resist categorical placement, this is also one of the reasons that acceptance of her work has been so troubled. Unlike artists who defined their legacies through sustained focus on a single medium or motif, Mina Loy did not spend decades painting dates or stripes or dots. Her anti-aesthetic aesthetic is harder to read, even to the point that some viewers of her unconforming work have mistaken it for the work of multiple artists or attributed its strangeness to collaboration. Indeed, the signature shifting and misdating artist Mina Loy coexists with the self-refractive and prismatic writer Mina Loy, who produced inventions and registered patents under various brands: Mina Loy, Nina Loy, Mina Lloyd, Madame Cravan, etc. Was she an artist or an art collective? Was the work she produced by Mina Loy or were they Mina Loys? Mina Loy’s “voice” was not only inscribed in her writing. It was also a visual tool. Each piece of the so-called art or non-art she made tells some fragment of a story — other parts of which might be lost, hidden, ventriloquized, or convulsed through other means or objects. One form of expression continually refracts her creations in another. One eye is always behind the poem, one ear behind the painting.18 Practices mingle. Until now, one of Mina Loy’s best-known exhibitions is a purely conceptual one, existing within the space of a novel. There is a scene in her roman à clef Insel where the protagonist Insel (based on the German Surrealist painter Richard Oelze) spots “some photographs of paintings lying on the table” in Mrs. Jones’s apartment, and asks Mrs. Jones (Mina Loy), “Whose pictures are these? … Who could have done these?” adding “You are an extraordinarily gifted woman.” Mrs. Jones responds: “Those are my last exhibition, cancelled the moment the dealer set eyes on them.”19 Susan Rosenbaum has written insightfully that “both the novel and the unexhibited-yet-collected paintings constitute semi-visible, en dehors garde, collections. Did Loy refer to her paintings and lamps in Insel as a way to ‘exhibit’ works that had been sold (lamps) or overlooked (paintings)? An approach to Insel as textual gallery or ‘imaginary museum’ reveals that Loy’s visual creations from the 1920s and 30s need to be read alongside and in conversation with Insel and Loy’s other texts from this era, just as Loy’s Insel as a self-curated museum is in dialogue with the actual museum-gallery network she engaged in Paris and New York.”20 The present exhibition is a further step toward understanding that Malrauxian principle, not only in terms of art being represented outside of vitrines and frames, but also in terms of art’s capacity to transcend time and to

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FIG. 4.13 George Platt Lynes, Mina Loy, 1930–34. Gelatin silver print on paper, 9 9∕16 × 7 11∕16 in. (24.29 × 19.53 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001, 2001-62-741.

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FIG. 4.14 Mina Loy, fabric design, 1943. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

FIG. 4.15 Mina Loy, blotter bracelet invention, ca. 1945. Mina Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library.

be resuscitated, even if some of the work now being exhibited for the first time has previously been “shown” in writing. What others made into art (fig. 4.13), Mina Loy made into life, at a time when the “art/life” divide was still a divide. Just as Mina Loy’s writing often defied the visual grid of the graph paper or sheets of lined notebook paper on which she wrote, her visual “constructions” often perplexed the frames that held them. Scholars who have spent any time with the Mina Loy papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library know that in the margins of many manuscripts are drawings and sketches, while on the versos of other pages are ideas for product placements and inventions (fig. 4.14, fig. 4.15), notes for pending patent applications, and designs for games, tools, toys, dresses. She overlaid her writing with doodles, lists, and scribbles, letting words run off the page then turning the page around to fill another corner, making it difficult to know what is random and what’s deliberate. She often strayed with purpose. On the backs of some of her frames and canvases are casually handwritten reminders: errands, appointments, expenses, addresses. Her writing was never not visual, her imagery never not literate. In response to her switching lines vertically and horizontally, or composing as if there were two

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tops to the same page, Joseph Cornell sometimes responded the same way back to her (fig. 3.15). She wrote in artspace, made art in lifespace. Repair became decoration, art cover-up. Visitors to her 9 rue St.-Romain apartment in Paris would experience “a poetic melange of flea market finds, decorative schemes devised to hide flaws, and [an] idiosyncratic art gallery composed of Mina’s paintings … [as well as] Mina’s collection of antique bottles … and silver paper in floral patterns pasted over cracks in the plaster.”21 Her later Bowery digs on Stanton Street were gloriously disarranged, cluttered with the detritus of everyday living — curtains made from clothing, chairs serving as pedestals, unemptied ashtrays and dirty dishes in basins like arte povera still lifes. “Would not life be lovelier if you were constantly overjoyed by the sublimely pure concavity of your wash bowls? The tubular dynamics of your cigarette?” she once asked rhetorically.22 Her Bowery rooms were as rich with the aesthetics of everyday life and the textures of poverty as her conversation was with throwaway lines and priceless quips. By this stage of her life, she was still sourcing materials from flea markets as she had done in Paris, but the street itself now provided her with many of the materials she would use in her late collages. Her last apartment was a kind of mini-Merzbau, erasing the line between the artistic and inartistic, creative and domestic. She was making art as she was living life — out of almost nothing — out of what she had, out of what she could find in the back alleys and abandoned lots of Lower Manhattan. Mina Loy had no artistic sisters at the time. Or perhaps two, if we can stretch the definition of sister to include Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. I try to imagine her in a community of cerebral women writers and artists in New York like the ones she companioned in Paris and Florence, but such community was not there for her. Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Louise Bourgeois, Susan Sontag — that’s the kind of company in which Loy might well have thrived, if she had been born twenty or thirty years later. I try to imagine Mina Loy among women artists of the present, like Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson (younger sisters from whom we might say she was separated at birth). Or Lee Bontecou, Lee Lozano, and Agnes Martin — all of whom became (better) known as a result of their absence, after their departure from New York. Lozano left for Dallas, Bontecou for western Pennsylvania, Martin for New Mexico. And Mina Loy for Aspen. I mention these names and contexts not only to suggest lines of artistic affinity, but because until now Mina Loy has literally never been discussed by any art historian, or in relation to any other female visual artist other than those who photographed her (Lee Miller and Berenice Abbott). Until now, any time has always been the wrong time to introduce Mina Loy to the public. She was considered too difficult — the outlier’s outlier. Why would they want to show me now?, I can hear her saying. In her autobiographical novel Insel, she delivers a pointed critique of a painting that Richard Oelze planned to show in an upcoming exhibition, making clear her disapproval of the piece. When Insel (Oelze) grows irritated and threatens to destroy the painting, she disarms him in characteristically self-deprecatory posture: “What

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FIG. 4.16 Gilbert Neiman, ed., Between Worlds 1, no. 2, Spring/Summer 1961, featuring cover by Man Ray and five poems by Mina Loy. Private collection.

FIG. 4.17 Roger Conover, ed., The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 1996. Private collection.

does my opinion matter? I’m not the museum.”23 Indeed, she is not the museum. She is the artist. And this is finally the right time to show the artist, without having to close one eye to exclude the poet. We can have them both (fig. 4.17). Mina Loy was almost forgotten in the 1960s and 1970s, but she had just enough champions in certain quarters to keep her name alive: writers associated with Black Mountain College and the Black Mountain Review (Denise Levertov, Edward Dahlberg, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams); poets and critics who had studied with Yvor Winters at Stanford (Thom Gunn, Kenneth Fields); other poets and iconoclasts associated with the Beats (Kenneth Rexroth, Jerome Rothenberg, Henry Miller, Gilbert Neiman); a handful of literary outsiders (Hayden Carruth, Basil Bunting, Bern Porter); and a next-generation of woman poets (Kathleen Fraser, Norma Cole, Barbara Guest, Anne Waldman). But following the publication of Virginia Kouidis’s monograph in 1980, the release of new editions of Mina Loy’s poems in 1982 and 1996, and the publication of Carolyn Burke’s biography in 1996, the foundation was laid for a new and truly vigorous generation of Mina Loy scholarship to emerge. It is virtually impossible to imagine this exhibition having been made without the serious work of the many scholars who have helped to establish the new critical feminist and postfeminist discourse on Mina Loy over the past few decades, whose names I list here in no particular order, except for the first few whose work is truly foundational: Marisa Januzzi, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Carolyn Burke, followed by Linda Kinnahan, Susan Rosenbaum, Suzanne Churchill, Cristanne Miller, Suzanne Zelazo, Marjorie Perloff, Alex Goody, Sarah Hayden,

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Susan Gilmore, Sara Crangle, Elizabeth Arnold, Tyrus Miller, Jed Rasula, Keith Tuma, Sonja Bahun, Susan E. Dunn, Maeera Shreiber, Peter Quartemain, Elisabeth Frost, Laura Scuriatti, Charles Bernstein, Jessica Burstein, Eric White, Andrea Barnet, Mary Ann Caws, Erin Edwards, Sandeep Parmar, Amanda Bradley, Ellen McWhorter, Tara Prescott, Rachel Potter, Craig Dworkin, Sasha Colby, Amy Elkins, Jim Powell, Anita Plath Helle, Ellen Keck Stauder, Janet Lyon, Richard Cook, Sophie Seita, Peter Nicholls, Christina Walter, Sean Pryor, Matthew Landis, Karolina Krasuka, Yasna Bozhkova, Debora Van Durme, Gillian Hanscombe, Virginia Smyers, Amy Feinstein, David Meltzer, Julie Schmid, Helen Jaskoski, Lara Vetter, Natalya Lusty, Lucian Re, Reno Odlin, Megan Girdwood, Matthew Hofer, Kara Kelsey, Eric Selinger, Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, Hilda Bronstein, Claire Gheerardyn. Even with limited access to her artistic oeuvre, a number of these literary scholars helped to pave the way for this exhibition and publication by writing incisively about Mina Loy’s art practice even before this project was conceived, among them Suzanne Zelazo, Amy Elkins, Susan Rosenbaum, Linda Kinnahan, Carolyn Burke, and Sarah Hayden. The many fine translators of Mina Loy’s work from English into other languages must also be acknowledged, in particular those who have translated her into Portuguese, French, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Italian, Greek, Danish, and Japanese. Through these works, a less Anglocentric, more international discourse has begun to develop around the work of Mina Loy, reflective of her own cultural and linguistic hybridity. While art historians are conspicuously absent from these lists, musicians have begun to reset and expand the parameters of Mina Loy’s cultural resonance in significant, unprecedented ways, not surprising given the cadence of her language and her references to music. On June 20, 2005, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins played one song from his newly released album before an estimated television audience of 3.5 million viewers on The Late Show with David Letterman. The song was “Mina Loy: M.O.H.” from Corgan’s studio album The Future Embrace (2005).24 Six years later, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth released “Mina Loy” on his solo album Demolished Thoughts (2011).25 It quickly became a hit single and was named one of the “Best 25 Songs of the Year” by Rolling Stone music critic Rob Sheffield. Suddenly the name Mina Loy was almost trending pop, commanding recognition on a register and to a listenership once unimaginable. Sheffield described Thurston Moore’s “Mina Loy” as “a feminist-fanboy ode to one of New York’s greatest poets, from one of New York’s greatest guitarists, going acoustic for a few minutes of spooked ecstaticpeace beauty.”26 Back to Dinkytown and Bob Dylan, where this story began: “The empty-handed painter from your streets Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.”27

Mina Loy is almost our contemporary now. Perhaps in time, we will catch up with her. In the meantime, her exceptionalism and futurity persist.

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The Artist and the Public The only trouble with The Public is education. The Artist is uneducated, is seeing IT for the first time; he can never see the same thing twice. Education is the putting of spectacles on wholesome eyes. The Public does not naturally care about these spectacles, the cause of its quarrels with art. The Public likes to be jolly; The Artist is jolly and quite irresponsible. Art is The Divine Joke, and any Public, and any Artist, can see a nice, easy simple joke, such as the sun. But only Artists and Serious Critics can look at a greyish stickiness on smooth canvas. Education, recognizing something that has been seen before, demands an art that is only acknowledgeable by way of diluted comparisons. It is significant that the demand is half-hearted. “Let us forget the democratically simple beginnings of an art,” is the cry of the educator — so that we may talk of those things that have only middle and no end, and together wallow in grey stickiness. The Public knows better than this, knowing such values as the underinner curve of women’s footgear, one factor of the art of our epoch. It is unconcerned with curved Faun’s legs and maline-twirled scarves of artistic imagining or with allegories of life with thorn-skewered eyes. It knew before the Futurists that life is a jolly noise and a rush and sequence of ample reactions. The Artist then says to The Public: “Poor pal — what has happened to you? … We were born similar — and now look!” But The Public will not look; that is, look at The Artist. It has unnaturally acquired prejudice. So, The Public and The Artist can meet at every point except the — for The Artist — vital one, that of pure, uneducated seeing. They like the same drinks, can fight in the same trenches, pretend to the same women — but never see the same thing ONCE. You might, at least, keep quiet while I am talking.

Mina Loy, Untitled (detail of fig. 1.133), ca. 1950. Cutpaper and mixed-media collage on canvas, 28 3∕4 × 39 in. (73.03 × 99.06 cm). Private collection.

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EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book and the exhibition it accompanies have been profoundly enriched by the hard work of many scholars who endeavored forth before us to gather the cultural constellation of Mina Loy and bring insight to her precocious creativity. As it is the charge of this exhibition to examine Mina Loy’s lifelong artistic practices, I refer all readers to both Carolyn Burke’s prodigious biography Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy and Roger Conover’s gatherings of Loy’s poetry and writing in The Last Lunar Baedeker and The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Conover’s mellifluous introductions and informative synopses of her life in these volumes paired with Burke’s thorough and engaging research stand as the foundational introductions to Loy. The scholarship gathered by Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, particularly Marisa Januzzi’s attentive and remarkable updating of her bibliography and assembled criticism, is another indispensable resource. The website Navigating the Avant-Garde brought together under the direction of scholars Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum gathers a network of perspectives and pertinent adjacencies to Loy’s life and work and is the most extensive repository of images and information on her beyond the Mina Loy Papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Sarah Hayden’s Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood is groundbreaking in its consideration of Loy as an artist. Amy Elkins’s discovery of Berenice Abbott’s photographs of Loy’s late work was transformational in revealing the full breadth of work Loy completed on the Bowery. In addition to these key sources, there has been a surfeit of excellent and probing critical analysis of Loy’s writing undertaken in recent years, and while all cannot be noted here, and many have been cited in my colleagues’ acknowledgments, I bow deeply to all those whose scholarship tempered and guided my own research on Loy as an artist.

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This exhibition is an attempt to map the breadth of Mina Loy’s creativity. It is certain that this endeavor is only a first step in the needed repositioning of Loy at the center of the diaspora of the modernist avant-garde that was in geographical and artistic flux through the interwar period well into the mid-twentieth century. This “Lost Generation,” as identified by Robert McAlmon, lived lives defined by the imperative of perpetual reinvention: forming, dissolving, and reconfiguring their mean against the backdrop of European and American societies whose traditional economic, political, and moral structures were dissolute. While emotionally and economically destabilizing, the strains of this period also created opportunity for the setting aside of convention, of which Loy took full advantage in her life and art. This exhibition would not have been possible without the support of a phalanx of librarians and archivists who creatively enabled my research throughout the pandemic, and I am deeply indebted to them for their diligence, kindness, and encouragement. While many resources were not accessible, the assistance of these dedicated researchers kept our project moving forward despite staff and resource shortages, some even posting volumes wrapped with care in brown paper, an extraordinary beneficence in a time of isolation. The unflagging support of public libraries is deserving of my most profound gratitude. Worthy of particular recognition are Angel Pagani at the New York Public Library, who was truly Mina’s angel; and the incomparably resourceful Joanne Ricciardi and Sharon Dec, librarians at the Tewksbury Township Library in Oldwick, New Jersey. Archivists and collections curators Margaret Huang, Martha Hamilton Morris Archivist at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Moira Fitzgerald, Nancy Kuhl, Lucy Mulroney, Timothy Young at the Beinecke Library at Yale University; Marisa Bourgoin, Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art; Stephanie Crawford, archivist, Mattatuck Museum; Patricia Hickson, Emily Hall Tremaine curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum; Ian Alteveer and Catherine Burns at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Kelsey Bates, director, and Jobi Zink, registrar, at the Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, were all generous with their guidance and assistance, as were many others. The Beinecke Library’s due diligence in the digitization of the entirety of Mina Loy’s Papers was transformative for this project. The online accessibility of these materials during the pandemic exemplifies the high standard of professional commitment that is essential to institutional stewardship of archival resources. Julia Fish and Richard Rezac held open the door for this exhibition to travel to Chicago, and Janine Mileaf, director of the Arts Club of Chicago, walked through it, embracing the exhibition with a very personal passion for Mina. I am also indebted to the many private lenders who were so generous with their knowledge of Mina Loy, including Jonathan Bayer, Michael Duncan, Jessica Gordon, Francis Naumann, and Helen Zell. Marie Difilippantonio of the Julien Levy Estate provided singularly important research for our work. Michelle Komie, editor at Princeton University Press, voiced keen enthusiasm for this project from the start and guided it forward with discernment. Designer Roy Brooks conjured a volume of a sensuous elegance that

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invokes Loy’s personal aesthetic in its beauty and clarity. Terri O’Prey, Kathleen Kageff, Whitney Ravenhorst, and Steven Sears brought essential refinement to the manuscript for publication. Contributors Dawn Ades and Ann Lauterbach focused their remarkable intelligence and keen aesthetic observations to profound results. Their thoughtful writings on Loy’s art have posited considerations for enduring reflection. I am extremely grateful to the team at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art: Leslie Bird, Luc Demers, Michelle Henning, Jo Hluska, Sabrina Lin, Laura Latman, and José Ribas, Shannon Viola, and co-director Frank Goodyear: each worked with care and commitment to see the exhibition to fruition. Anne Collins Goodyear, museum co-director, realized the importance of this project from its inception and led us all forward with good cheer as a keen advocate for Loy’s recognition. For her perpetual inspiration and her long-standing friendship, I am deeply grateful to devout Loy-alist Ingrid Schaffner, who generously joined my hands to the team that has brought this project to fruition. As always, I tip my hat to her curatorial acumen and in the spirit of Polaire raise my paw and bow deeply to her as a most admired fellow yeoman of contemporary curatorial practice. Roger Conover’s generous sharing of his archives and his ongoing support of countless inquiries were invaluable to our work. His deep knowledge of scholars and scholarly resources on Loy opened wide to me the world of Mina Loy. Roger’s passionate support of Loy as an artist has been a lifelong commitment. His work as the steward of her literary estate has encouraged and enabled scholars to engage her creative contributions to art and literature anew. This labor coupled with his assembly and preservation of her art for our enjoyment and further study has been pivotal in the reassessment of Loy as one of the great poets and creators of the twentieth century. I remained honored that he welcomed me into the exceptional Loy cohort and have benefited from his excellent humor and friendship as we sheltered in our distant places, and I became inspired and challenged by Mina’s constellation to realize this exhibition. It is a humbling enterprise to deign to row alongside the force that was Mina Loy. Her spiritual fortitude and unflagging creative vision remain daunting to this day and will provide future generations perpetual resource by which to reassess human aspiration in art, word, and spirit in the twentieth century. Yet it was her art that Loy wished to share, which she fought hard to have seen and appreciated in her lifetime, and for which she most wanted to be remembered. The beauty and harsh truths she wrought with such care in these works remain current in their expression and immediacy in their affect and relevance. Through her art, Mina Loy continues to provoke our social and aesthetic complacencies. I dedicate this book to Ruth J. Gross, who like Loy, found little comfort in this life but who grasped the power to be found in faith. She chose to render beauty and kindness wherever they were needed to mitigate the brokenness of our world and bring recognition to those unseen. Jennifer R. Gross

NOTES Director’s Foreword 1. Mina Loy, “An Aged Woman,” in Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, edited by Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996), 145 (poem) and 214–15 (commentary). 2. In 1945, when he was fifty-eight years old, Marcel Duchamp published a photograph depicting himself at the age of eighty-five (see View 5, no. 1 [March 1945]: 54). In 1955 he told James Johnson Sweeney: “You should wait fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.” Marcel Duchamp, in conversation with James Johnson Sweeney, “A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp,” televised interview for NBC conducted in 1955 and aired in 1956, edited version published in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 133. 3. Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 157. 4. Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry,” 160. Truant of Heaven: The Artist Mina Loy 1. There remain numerous unpublished and unstudied manuscripts in Loy’s archive at the Beinecke Library (BL). 2. Keith Tuma has waded in to excellent results on Loy’s beliefs, but more work is needed to weave together the arc of Loy’s spirituality to restore to history the important counterpoint that her life provides to modernism’s authoritative humanistic orthodoxy. See Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma, eds., Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (hereafter WAP) (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1998), 181–204. 3. According to Loy, “God created the world simply as raw material for the Artist.” Mina Loy Papers, BL, YCAL MSS 6, box 6, folder 166, “Mi and Lo,” 7. 4. Richard Cook has asserted, “Christian Scientists … insist that human nature can be improved by understanding metaphysical principles of ‘reality.’ ” Richard Cook, “The ‘Infinitarian’ and Her ‘Macro-cosmic Presence’: The Question of Loy and Christian Science,” in WAP, 459. 5. Loy had four children, Oda Janet, Joella Synara, John Giles, and Jemima Fabienne (Fabi): Oda and Giles by her first husband, Stephen Haweis; Joella through an affair with Dr. Henri Joel Le Savoureux; and Fabi by her second husband, Arthur Cravan.

6. At the end of her life, Loy expressed that she longed to make one more painting rather than write one more word. ML interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias, in WAP, 215. “Truant of Heaven” is from Loy’s poem “Moreover, The Moon—,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (hereafter LLB96), ed. Roger Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1996), 146. 7. In addition to the numerous poems inspired by her life experiences and observations, Loy drafted not just one autobiographical manuscript, but many approaches to one in multiple versions. Such reworking of self-examination supports the assessment of Loy’s impressively thorough and sympathetic biographer Carolyn Burke’s that Loy wrote “her lightly veiled fiction” to “make sense of her life” and “justify herself.” Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), ix. 8. Samuel French Morse, “The Rediscovery of Mina Loy and the Avant-Garde,” in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 2, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1961): 12–19. 9. Barnes’s endearing lampoon of Natalie Barney’s lesbian salon in Ladies Almanack cast Loy as the incredulous witness Patience Scalpel. Solely because, she wrote, “from Beginning to End, Top to Bottom, inside and out, she could not understand Women and their Ways.” Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press 1992), 11. 10. ML in letter to Julien Levy, in Burke, Becoming Modern, 376. 11. The Last Lunar Baedeker (hereafter LLB82), ed. Roger Conover (Highlands: Jargon Society, 1982), 315. 12. As an adult, Joella visited her aunt Hilda, Mina’s sister in England, and asked her about Mina and her sister Dora’s upbringing. Hilda replied, “they were spoiled rotten. … They were very pretty, and terribly talented.” And while their mother was difficult, “she loved Mina very very much. But Mina always wrote to her, upsetting her, always asking for money … and still wanting things from her.” Burke interview Joella Bayer, Carolyn Burke Papers, BL, YCAL MSS 778, box 2, transcripts, tape 6, June 8, 1989, 3. 13. Lowy was a Sunday painter, and Mina’s education fulfilled some aspect of his own frustrated aspiration.

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14. Raphael Collin, who painted allegories of Music and Dreams, was a favorite teacher of Loy’s and perhaps an influence on her first body of small-scaled, allegorically intriguing paintings made in 1906. 15. Undated letter from Mina Loy to Carl Van Vechten, ca. summer 1915, BL, Carl Van Vechten Papers, YCAL MSS 1050, box 76, folder 1082–83. 16. Entries 377 and 378, Lillah, Gaby, and Amaranthe and The Etruscan Loggia. 17. Loy had learned long ago from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, her earliest artistic inspiration as a poet and artist, that she had no desire to become a woman anything like the listless, beautiful women that occupied his paintings. 18. Using Haweis’s name would have been a recognizable asset in British circles. 19. Burke, Becoming Modern, 95. 20. Djuna Barnes, Dusie, in Americana Esoterica (New York: Macy-Masius, 1927), 75–82. 21. Natalie Clifford Barney, Aventures de l’esprit (Paris: Emile Paul Frères), 1929; translated by John Spalding Gatton as Adventures of the Mind (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 158. 22. Carl Van Vechten, “An Interrupted Conversation,” Rogue 1, no. 3 (1915): 13–14. It is compelling to consider this work in light of Loy and Duchamp’s lifelong friendship. The image is a bachelor stripped bare by his brides. 23. Eros was a slender, winged youth in classical Greek art during the Hellenistic period, felled by the vagaries of love. 24. Paul Jamot, “Le Salon d’Automne,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3rd. ser., 36, found in Virginia M. Kouidis, Rediscovering Our Sources. 25. It has been thought that Joella suffered from a form of polio. 26. Burke, Becoming Modern, 129. 27. Virginia M. Kouidis, Mina Loy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 6. 28. Carl Van Vechten, in Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works (New York: Knopf, 1922), cited in WAP, 545. 29. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), 340. 30. Burke, Becoming Modern, 128. Through the English theater director Gordon Craig, who was living in Florence, her painting Jemima was accepted for

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exhibition at the New English Art Club in 53. Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, ed., The London. Modern World of Neith Boyce (Albuquerque: 31. Burke, Becoming Modern, 129. University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 304. 32. Quoted in Burke, Becoming Modern, 54. Carolyn Burke, in her address of Loy’s 129. “Love Songs to Joannes,” compellingly 33. Undated letter from Loy to Stein and describes that they also reveal Loy’s Toklas, Conover Archive, “9 rue st Romaine embrace of a greater cultural purview: Sunday. Dearest and only Gertrude, Won’t “These love songs are haunting not only you & Alice come to tea at five on Tuesday. for their exploration of sexual dissonance I long to see you. Most love to you both but because they are drenched in the Mina.” atmosphere of World War I. They are 34. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice a peculiar kind of war poetry.” Burke, B. Toklas (New York: Random House, Becoming Modern, 208. 1960), 132. 55. Burke, Becoming Modern, 185. 35. Mina Loy, “Gertrude Stein” (written in 56. LLB82, 326. 1929), LLB82, 298. 57. LLB82, xxxvi. 36. LLB96, 94. 58. Loy was also making art, entering 37. LLB82, 297. a calm subject, Woman with Child, in the 38. Mina met Bulgarian artist Jules Pascin Annual Exhibition in Florence. in Paris at Colarossi. He slit his wrists in 59. Mina entered a single painting, Making June 1930. Lampshades, in the 1917 exhibition at 39. From Auto-Facial-Construction, BL, Grand Central Palace. ZaL957 919, 4. 60. They featured strongly in her 40. ML letter to Mabel Dodge, BL, YCAL contribution to The Blind Man: “O Marcel … MSS 196, box 24, folder 664, February I also have been to Louise’s.” 1920, 6. 61. Moore published the poem in the 41. Burke, Becoming Modern, 138. Bryn Mawr publication The Lantern 25 42. Mina Loy to Mabel Dodge, BL, YCAL (Spring 1917). MSS 196, box 24, folder 664, March 28, 62. Djuna Barnes, as a cub reporter for 1913, 4. the Morning Telegraph, wrote in her 43. Burke, Becoming Modern, 151. November 1916 column an account of 44. Carl Van Vechten, Sacred and Profane the avant décor to be found in Greenwich Memories (London: Cassell, 1932), 130. Village interiors: “A touch of purple here, 45. Loy wrote a sequence of her own a gold screen there, a black carpet, a manifestos, 1914–19, including Aphorisms curtain of silver, a tapestry thrown on Futurism (1913), Feminist Manifesto carelessly down, a copy of Rogue on a low (1914), The Artist and the Public (1917), table open at Mina Loy’s poem.” Burke, International Psycho-democracy (1918), and Becoming Modern, 6. Auto-Facial-Construction (1919). 63. ML, “I had found the one man with 46. ML to Mabel Dodge, March 28, 1913, whom my mind could go ‘the whole way.’ ” Mina Loy Papers, BL, YCAL MSS 196, Burke, Becoming Modern, 244. box 24, folder 664, 4. 64. Now lost. 47. WAP, 160. 65. Approximately $14,000 in 2022 dollars. 48. Charles Harrison, English Art and 66. Robert McAlmon wrote of Mina, in Modernism 1900–1939 (London: Penguin Post-adolescence, as “Gusta.” Robert E. Books, 1981), 120. Knoll, ed., McAlmon and the Lost Generation: 49. ML writing to Mabel Dodge in 1914: A Self-Portrait (Lincoln: University of “I got on very well with the fashion plates Nebraska Press, 1962), 131. & sent over 50 with Frances Stevens.” 67. Exceptions are two bodies of paintings Undated letter, BL, YCAL MSS 196, entitled Drift of Chaos and Styx made in box 24, folder 664. the 1930s. In these series figures travel 50. Sarah Hayden, Curious Disciplines: through dreamlike dark and watery Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood landscapes on small boats encountering (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico fantastic creatures in their passage. They Press, 2018), 17. appear as Loy’s reckonings with her loss 51. Joshua C. Taylor, Futurism (New York: of Cravan to the sea. Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 109. 68. Ezra Pound letter to Marianne Moore. 52. Now lost. Kouidis, Mina Loy, 2.

69. Roberto Bagnasco, ed., Il Mare Supplemento Letterario 1932–1933. (Commune di Rapallo, 1999), 321–24. 70. Her involvement at the Société must have led her to take classes with Alexander Archipenko in Berlin the next year as it hosted that spring “Symposium on the Psychology of Modern Art and Archipenko.” 71. See Metropolitan Museum of Art Archive, Dial Papers, Scofield Thayer letter to J. S. Watson Jr., March 5, 1922. 72. Burke, Becoming Modern, 327. 73. Burke, Becoming Modern, 338. 74. Burke, Becoming Modern, 321. 75. Edwin Muir, “Readers and Writers,” New Age, January 31, 1924, 164–65. 76. Yvor Winters, “Mina Loy,” Dial 70 (June 1926): 497. 77. McAlmon in Knoll, McAlmon and the Lost Generation, 37. 78. William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1948), 200, 211, 217, 219, 231, 232. 79. Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938), 195. 80. According to Beach, “the Crowd” included Barnes, McAlmon, T. S. Eliot, Mary Butts, Hartley, Natalie Barney, Pound, and Dolly Wilde, niece of Oscar Wilde. Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), 113–14. 81. Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Universe Books, 1979), 71. 82. N.Y.C. Women’s Wear, May 19, 1925, 7. 83. New York Times, April 19, 1925. 84. Unidentified reviewer in the Little Review 11, no. 1 (Spring 1925). 85. Guggenheim, Out of This Century, 67. Many years later Guggenheim admitted she should not have meddled with Mina’s brilliance: “For the opening of the shop in the Rue de Colisée we allowed my mother to invite her lingère to exhibit some underwear. … This upset Mina so much that she refused to be present at the vernissage. … The lampshade shop was very successful, once I got rid of the underwear.” 86. Joella remembered a special order of a dozen sconce shades with boats for the Montbatten family. Carolyn Burke Papers, transcript of interview with Joella Bayer, BL, YCAL MSS 778, box 2, 84.

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87. Arts and Decoration, July 1927, featured five of Loy’s designs in an article titled “Prize Lamp Shades from Nina [sic] Loy of Paris,” 56. 88. Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 120. 89. ML also read her own poetry at Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. 90. Barney, Aventures de l’esprit, 159. 91. Described in ML review of Cornell’s December 1949 Aviary exhibition in “Phenomenon in American Art,” in LLB82, 300–302 92. “The still life that intrigued him was a pattern of a ‘detail’ to be strewn about the surface of clear lamp shades. Though equidistant holes punched in a crystalline square.” ML, Insel, edited by Elizabeth Arnold (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1991), 167. 93. Burke, Becoming Modern, 463. 94. ML, Insel (Black Sparrow), 66. 95. The painting was titled Faces, mostly likely by Levy, which was subsequently changed to Stars. 96. “Around the Galleries,” Art News, February 4, 1933, 6. 97. Carolyn Burke has also aptly pointed out that Levy may have come up with the term as “a coinage from grisaille, an actual French word.” Email correspondence, April 14, 2022. 98. Sandeep Parmar, Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 94. Loy described herself on more than one occasion as flitting from one thing to the next, distracted by details flooding her senses with a kind of entrancing beauty. 99. “Attractions in the Galleries,” New York Evening Sun, February 5, 1933, 9. 100. “Briefer Comments on Current Art Exhibitions in New York,” New York Herald Tribune, February 5, 1933, sec. VII, 10. 101. Undated letter on 602 Madison, Levy Gallery, stationery to Mina from Julien, Julien Levy Papers, PMAA. 102. Linda A. Kinnahan, Mina Loy, Twentieth Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets (London: Routledge, 2017), 42. 103. This guardian leans toward J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Gollum,” featured in his 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit. The book’s strong spiritual subtext, and structure as

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an epic journey, would no doubt have appealed to Loy as she wrote. 104. ML, in Insel, edited by Elizabeth Arnold (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014), 20. 105. A print after a painting by Henry Robert Morland (1716–97) of this subject was made in 1769 by Philip Dawe and widely distributed. It depicts a young woman shucking oysters, but the primary interest of the work is as a study in the transitory capacity of light in darkness. 106. The photographs of these paintings are in the Mina Loy Papers, Beinecke Library at Yale University. A figure stands over a giant god, or creature of the sea, in the painting. This scene is described in Insel. “Out of a torso of white ash arose iron rags as puffs of curling smoke, blocks of shadow crushed together in the outline of a giant. Dense as the dark, high as a tower, the almost imperceptible radiance of a will-o’-the-wisp shining from it — I crouched alongside encumbered with an enormous shell white as plaster which, having but partly taken shape, trailed to an end in a sail of mist.” Insel (Black Sparrow), 66. 107. ML, letter to Julien Levy, July 30, 1934, 6, Conover Archive. 108. Fabi had become an avid artist in her own right and went on to have a career as a jewelry designer. 109. D. V. Rutland to Harter, August 9, 1934: “still have not heard from Knoedler’s 2 at Agnews October frame.” Conover Archive. 110. D. V. Rutland to ML: “September 12, 1934 Dear Mrs. Lloyd — thank you so much for your letter — now today I met Lady Colefax who tells me she has sold 3 of them & I am to send her more! Lady Colefax tells me she is not taking anything for them herself … but will deduct the price of the frames she put on. I am so pleased — I am sending 2 to an amateur exhibition at Agnews in Bond Street in Oct — 1 is showing at my framers — Please tell her to be doing some more — & send them to me not to be forwarded — I am so glad about their being appreciated D. V. Rutland P.S. Don’t you think she better sign them.” Conover Archive. 111. Levy to ML, undated letter on Mamaroneck farm stationery, ca. 1934, Conover Archive, from PMAA. 112. Joella, who was recently divorced from Levy, had little time for them. Mina

had blamed Joella, and they were not speaking. Carolyn Burke Papers, BL, YCAL MSS 778, box 2, transcript 1989. 113. ML Insel (Black Sparrow), 168–69. 114. ML in “Phenomenon in American Art,” November 25, 1950, LLB82, 302. 115. ML letter to Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell Papers, 1984–86, Dig. 8260, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Museum, Washington, DC. 116. Cornell quote in his The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice), from Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 1939. In Starr, Sandra Leonard Starr (Tokyo: Gatado Gallery, 1987), 21. 117. In their letters, Fabi and Joella would joke between themselves about Mina’s loose hold on the family budget. January 1948 letter from Fabi to Joella, Carolyn Burke Papers, BL, YCAL MSS 778, box 1, 6. Mina recounted with regret that all this good paint had all been left behind in the studio when she was whisked away to Aspen. Blackburn interview, WAP, 238. 118. In 1958 she wrote Jonathan Williams, “I like your book creation of my poems very much. … I would be pleased if you could look in on my pictures at 18 Stanton Str … which Marcel Duchamp was interested in getting me an exhibition — but my family didn’t like my Bowery pictures & since then I have been here.” Undated letter, ML to Jonathan Williams, Conover Archive. 119. Stuart Preston, “The Public and Private Worlds of Artists,” New York Times, April 19, 1959, sec. 2, 17. 120. Amy Elkins’s discovery of Berenice Abbott’s photographs of Loy’s studio are essential to understanding Loy’s late work. See “From the Gutter to the Gallery: Berenice Abbott Photographs Mina Loy’s Assemblages,” PMLA 134, no. 5 (2019): 1094–103. 121. There are conflicting reports as to who was the model for this work: a brilliant Yale student who froze to death; an alcoholic Scandinavian fisherman who lived on the Bowery; or Duchamp, who reportedly assisted Loy in her efforts to find a material to best realize its masklike face. 122. In French this translates roughly as “deceptive Loy,” or “mistaken Loy.” 123. ML letter to JC, November 27, 1950, “Dearest Joseph … Djuna Barnes told me — on the phone — that our dear friend Mary Reynolds has passed away — ! I felt

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glad you wrote her messages. Do give my best to your family — ” Conover Archive. 124. In correspondence held by the Julien Levy Estate dated December 27, 1963, and January 7, 1964, Julien Levy and Joella Bayer arranged for the shipment of these works from Aspen to Connecticut for storage. 125. Fragment, BL, YCAL MSS 6, box 6, folder 183. Mina Loy: Art of the Unbeautiful True 1. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950, edited by Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 507–8. 2. Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (hereafter LLB96), ed. Roger Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1996), 149. All subsequent quotations of Loy’s writing are from this collection unless otherwise noted. 3. The most complete biography of Mina Loy is Carolyn Burke’s meticulously detailed Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 4. This dialogue between “Mi” and “Lo” was probably written in the 1930s. For further emendation, see the extremely useful notes in Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, edited by Sara Crangle (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), 399. 5. Quoted in Burke, Becoming Modern, 186, italics in original. 6. Loy’s observation occurs in her Auto-Facial-Construction, one of her many schemes for generating income. The date of composition is not known; it was published first in a pamphlet for private distribution in 1919. (See Conover’s note, LLB96, 218) 7. Both quotes are from Loy’s brilliant short essay “Modern Poetry,” ca. 1925, LLB96, 157. Conover’s notes on the publication history, and much else are invaluable. 8. There are many works by Loy that attest to her candor and compassion in the face of human suffering and degradation, among them Babies in Hospital, Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape, Photo after Pogrom, An Aged Woman, and Letters of the Unliving. I talk more about this aspect of her work later in this essay. 9. Loy’s evident awareness of the material aspects of language is, in part, what

has excited subsequent generations of experimental poets. For writings on her poetics by many poets and critics of note, see Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma, eds., Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1998). 10. Mina Loy, Insel, edited by Elizabeth Arnold (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014), 20. Not published in Loy’s lifetime, the novel has a stylistic intensity of acuity of perception akin to her friend Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Once again, it shows Loy’s sympathy for difficult persons on the edge of psychological and economic peril. 11. This affiliation is meant to suggest further study. Feminist critics such as Donna J. Haraway, Julia Kristeva, Rosalind Krauss, and Mignon Nixon, among others, have provided a perspective and a vocabulary with which to approach women’s visual work beyond notions of the “feminine” and its relation to traditional ideas of the beautiful. 12. T. J. Clark’s powerful study includes a chapter on Picasso’s “monsters.” T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 149. 13. Quoted in Crangle, Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, 292. 14. Mina Loy, “On Third Avenue,” in LLB96, 109. 15. Crangle, Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, 39. 16. The quote from John Ruskin is taken from Frances S. Connelly’s excellent, informative study The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 160. Her study, she writes, “builds on the premise that the deeper workings of the grotesque image are revealed through its changes, in the interstitial moments when the familiar turns strange or shifts unexpectedly into something else.” 17. I owe the connection to Veronica’s Veil to a conversation with the art historian and curator Stephan Wolohojian. 18. Mina Loy, from “Mi and Lo” in Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, edited by Sara Crangle (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011). 19. Online Etymological Dictionary. From Rogue to Rags: Mina Loy’s Constructions 1. The “constructions” of the title of this section are referred to variously as

constructions, assemblages, and objects. See Roger Conover, “Mina Loy, Bowery Construction (c. early 1950s),” www .mina-loyArt, for the story of his recovery of “Mama’s Bowery trash art,” as her daughter Joella described it. 2. Mina Loy, “Notes on Existence,” in The Last Lunar Baedeker (hereafter LLB82) (Highlands: Jargon Society, 1982), 313. 3. Rogue 111, no. 2, November 1916. 4. “Notes on Childhood,” in LLB82, 314. 5. Dame Rogue (Louise Norton), “Philosophic Fashions: Très decorseté [sic],” Rogue, November 1916, 7. 6. Famous in her time as an opponent of corsets, the writer and campaigner for women’s suffrage Mary Eliza Haweis (d. 1898) was the mother of Loy’s first husband. Although Loy never met her, Haweis was satirized together with Loy’s own parents in “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.” See Charlotte Anne Whelan, “Uncovering the Influence of Mary Eliza Haweis on Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,’ ” English Literature in Transition 63, no. 4 (2020): 624–43. 7. Rogue 2, no. 1 (August 15, 1915): 11. 8. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 138. 9. Camera Work, January 1914, in LLB82, 272–75. 10. Loy’s relationship with Surrealism, from different perspectives — biographical, historical, aesthetic, critical — deserves an essay in its own right. She did not seek to join the movement, either as poet or as artist, although this is not in itself a reason to dissociate her, given how flexible relationships between artists and the Surrealist movement have always been. She knew most of the Paris Surrealists intimately, mixing with them socially as well as commercially. However, her absence from Surrealist manifestations of any kind, even more complete than that of so many long-forgotten women, is striking, and possibly more pointed than amnesiac. The nearest parallels are with her close friends Duchamp and Cornell, who each had a different form of fellowtraveling alliance with the movement. Both, though, were included in Surrealist exhibitions, which Loy never was. She exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery, for which she acted as the Paris agent, and which had established itself as the gallery for Surrealist artists in New York, but

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never had the full imprimatur of inclusion .co.uk/marcel-duchamp-was-not-a-thief, in one of the International Exhibitions of an independent website summarizing Surrealism. current research. Her own practices ran parallel with the 14. “O Marcel: Or I Too Have Been to diverse experiments of artists associated Louise’s,” View, 5th ser., no. 1 (New York): with the movement, especially in the 51. realm of objects, which became a key 15. Julian Levy. Memoir of an Art Gallery focus of Surrealist activity in the 1930s. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), (See Susan Rosenbaum at mina-loy.com.) 120. Surviving only in a photo, Loy’s Lobster 16. Burke, Becoming Modern, 413. Boy could — indeed should — have 17. Periodically, Mina would focus on her appeared among the heteroclite objects inventions and, in the 1940s, made and paintings reproduced in Minotaure, several attempts to get her ideas adopted no. 10 (Winter 1937), which included and patented. Some were intended to Cornell’s Glass Bell, the glass enclosing a be of practical use (unlike Duchamp’s hand holding a fan and a rose with an eye “playtoys,” the Rotoreliefs, which he at the center; Oscar Dominguez’s object presented with zero success at the 1936 constructed of sardine tins and an hour Concours Lepine, the inventors’ fair in glass (Parole d’honneur); Duchamp’s Paris); among these were a curved broom 3 Stoppages Étalon, and Bellmer’s sinister for reaching outside windows, drawn with photo of his Doll in a wood. meticulous precision; a blotter-bracelet to However, Loy’s attitudes to mop up ink effortlessly; a very ingenious fundamental questions of psychic, child’s alphabet; and a Valentine card with spiritual, and emotional experience a real beating heart (long before Dalí’s diverge seriously from Surrealism, and pulsating ruby heart). Always there is a these can be most closely understood in concern for materials, and fascination her book Insel. This is no more a “novel,” with the possibilities of new ones, such i.e., fiction, than Breton’s Nadja. The as “Chatoyant” (see fig. 1.118), “a new character Insel is the German artist structural combination of materials for Richard Oelze, whom she describes as a the manufacture of commercial objects … “truly congenital surrealist” (Loy, Insel, consist[ing] of a layer of brilliant, edited by Elizabeth Arnold [Brooklyn, NY: coloured, varicoloured or natural coloured Melville House, 2014], 44), whose metal, metal foil or foil paper combined paintings Loy was commissioned to with transparent or almost transparent collect and ship to New York, and who plastic or glass, white or coloured.” It had haunts her as a being simultaneously a changeable luster like silk or cat’s eye repulsive and magical, able “to infuse an in the dark. See Mina Loy Papers online, actual detail with the magical contrariness Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript surrealism merely portrays” (33). Library, Beinecke’s Digital Library, Mina This slighting of Surrealism, as merely Loy Papers YCAL MSS6. “portraying” rather than “infusing” 18. G. A. Studdert Kennedy, “Indifference,” something with the marvelous, is typical Peace Rhymes of a Padre (London: Hodder of the book — there is an understanding and Stoughton, 1920). of Surrealism from within, but a When Jesus came to Birmingham, they deliberate distance maintained. simply passed him by Like Cornell, Loy contrasted the They would not hurt a hair of Him, they “white magic” and the “black magic” only let Him die; in Surrealism, and again like Cornell her For men had grown more tender, and commitment to Christian Science and they would not give Him pain, interest in astral bodies were not They only just passed down the street acceptable to Surrealism. and left Him in the rain. 11. Burke, Becoming Modern, 208. 19. “Chiffon Velours,” in The Lost Lunar 12. Dame Rogue, “Philosophic Fashions,” Baedeker (hereafter LLB96), ed. Roger Rogue, no. 5 (May 15, 1915): 16–18. Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 13. See Three New York Dadas and “The 1996), 119. Blind Man” (London: Atlas, 2013). For a 20. Burke, Becoming Modern, 434. full account of the Fountain episode and 21. “Aphorisms on Futurism,” in LLB96, its aftermath, see https://atlaspress 149.

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22. Mina Loy Papers online, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 6, folder 180, no. 210. 23. Loy, Insel, 31. 24. Burke, Becoming Modern, 433. 25. Dated by Burke, Becoming Modern, to ca. 1950–52. 26. Étant donnés: 1. La Chute d’eau 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (1946–66); revealed publicly after his death in 1968. Before this only Teeny (his wife), Bill Copley, and Salvador Dalí knew of it. 27. Burke, Becoming Modern, 421. 28. Duchamp thought of starting a Salon des refusés, after his urinal was rejected by the Independents committee, a reference to the famous Salon of 1863 created after the jury of the official Salon turned down paintings by Manet, Pissarro, Courbet, et al. See letter to Suzanne Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk (Ghent: Ludion, 2000), 47. 29. Burke, Becoming Modern, 421. 30. William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art), 1961; MoMA, October 2 to November 12, 1961; Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, January 9 to February 11, 1961; San Francisco Museum of Art, March 5 to April 15, 1962. Mina Loy: “I’m Not the Museum” 1. Gertrude Stein as cited by John B. Hightower, director of the Museum of Modern Art, in his foreword to Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New York: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970), 8. 2. Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) lived in an apartment above Gray’s Drugstore in Dinkytown during parts of 1959 and 1960. This is where he traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one and played his first sets as Bob Dylan — at a coffeehouse around the corner from Gray’s called the Ten O’Clock Scholar. 3. Dinkytown was on the edge of the University of Minnesota campus, where John Berryman taught until waving farewell and jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in 1972. He sometimes held classes for his grad students and other curious drop-ins at the East Hennepin Bar in the heart of Dinkytown.

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4. I am quoting from section 1 of “Songs to Joannes,” by Mina Loy, in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (hereafter LLB96), ed. Roger Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1996). 5. Stated with humility, having no idea at the time what this project would become (or that Mina Loy had once written a satirical sketch of a pretentious character named Holy Grail who comported himself like a portrait on an engraving. The narrative sketch remains unpublished and exists only in fragments in the Mina Loy papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). 6. Myrna Loy (1905–93), the American film, television, and stage artist, was born Myrna Adele Williams. She changed her surname to Loy on the suggestion of the Russian poet and actor Peter Rurick, who saw Mina Loy act alongside William Carlos Williams in a production of Alfred Kreymborg’s one-act play Lima Beans at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1917. 7. More below on “turning up” or “being turned up” (in other words, being “loyed”). 8. Both Mina Loy quotations were reported by Jonathan Williams in a conversation with the author, October 7, 1979. The 1959 exhibition of works by Mina Loy at the Bodley Gallery in New York (223 East 60th Street) was organized by Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, Joseph Cornell, Peggy Guggenheim, Kay Boyle, Robert Coates, Frances Steloff, Sidney Janis, Bob Brown, Berenice Abbott, and William Copley all attended the opening. Mina Loy did not, just as she did not attend the celebration marking the publication of her book Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables at the Martha Jackson Gallery (New York) in December 1958. 9. The term “multimedia” was coined by singer and artist Bob Goldstein (later ‘Bobb Goldsteinn’) to promote the July 1966 opening of his show Lightworks at L’Oursin in Southampton, Long Island. 10. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 11. From Mina Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism” (LLB96, 150). 12. Letter, Mina Loy to Carl Van Vechten, 1914, Mina Loy Papers, Beinecke Rare

Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 13. This phrase was coined by the poet and literary scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to whom I and all Loy scholars are indebted for writing some of the most consistently intelligent and insightful criticism on Mina Loy over the past (nearly four) decades. The phrase is not only apt and clever; it is true. See DuPlessis’s text “A Letter on Loy” in Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma, eds., Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1998), in which she describes Loy’s work as a rare example of literary expression that can “sustain an analogy with both cubist and metaphysical practices” (499–501). 14. Prosopology is the scientific study of the human face. In 1919, Mina Loy published a prospectus for a new business idea called “Auto-Facial Construction,” in which she described her ability to understand the face in relation to the soul. “Years of specialized interest in physiognomy as an artist, have brought me to an understanding of the human face, which has made it possible for me to find the basic principle of facial integrity. … I will instruct men or women who are intelligent and for the briefest period, patient, to become masters of their facial destiny.” Following its publication (in Florence), she wrote to her friend Mabel Dodge: “Am enclosing a prospectus of a new method I shall teach when not drawing or writing about art.” The complete text of “Auto-Facial Construction” is reproduced in Loy, LLB96, 165–66. A copy of the original prospectus as well as ML’s letter to Mabel Dodge describing it can be found in the Mina Loy Papers at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. 15. “Loys” were ancient Irish spades with long blades designed to turn up stony, untilled ground to make furrows. The word “loy” derives from the Irish Gaelic word láí, or láige (old Irish), or laginaˉ (proto-Celtic). Loys were used as foot ploughs by centuries of farmers to create beds for planting potatoes in the era before tractors. The Loy Association was founded in 1992 with the aim of reintroducing the tradition of using the loy to turn sod. There is no association between the Loy Association and Mina Loy. 16. For a thoughtful and detailed

consideration of Mina Loy’s name play (and much else), see the exceptionally well-developed and rich website “Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde,” https:// mina-loy.com/, developed by Loy scholars Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. It serves not only as the single richest repository of biographical information on Mina Loy outside of Carolyn Burke’s seminal biography and my editions of her poetry, but as a model for twenty-first-century literary and archival projects in the digital humanities. In relation to Loy’s signatures, see in particular “Loy’s Signature Style,” by Suzanne Churchill (https://mina-loy .com/loys-signature-style/); and “A Brief History of Loy’s Name Play,” excerpted from Alex Goody, “Gender, Authority, and the Speaking Subject, or Who Is Mina Loy?,” originally published in How2 1, no. 5 (March 2001). 17. Both Muna Lee and the so-called Spectrist poets appeared in the little magazine Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, edited by Alfred Kreymborg, to which Mina Loy was a frequent and controversial contributor in the 1910s. Muna Lee (1895–1965), a poet and activist known for her writings promoting Pan-American feminism, was a longtime resident of Puerto Rico and translator of poetry from Spanish to English. In 1954, after Muna Lee requested on behalf of the US State Department that William Faulkner attend an international writers’ festival in Brazil, he responded, “Can there be more than one Muna Lee?” For more on this forgotten poet, see A Pan-American Life: Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee, edited and with biography by Jonathan Cohen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). For more on the Spectra School of Poetry see The Spectra Hoax, by William Jay Smith (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961). 18. I am borrowing this phrase from “The Ear behind the Painting,” a 1991 manifesto by the Slovenian writer and ˇ dramaturg Eda Cufer, reprinted in Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991, edited by Dubravka Djuric´ and Miško Šuvakovic´, 579–81 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 19. Mina Loy, Insel, edited by Elizabeth

NOTES TO PAGES 146–197

Arnold, foreword by Roger Conover (Santa paint and to compose lyrics again while Rosa, CA.: Black Sparrow Press, 1991). Dylan was recovering from a 1968 20. Susan Rosenbaum, “Mina Loy’s Insel motorcycle accident). Dylan was later as Textual Gallery,” in Mina Loy: Navigating re-introduced to Loy’s work through the Avant-Garde, edited by Suzanne W. Anne Waldman, who was “poet in Churchill et al. (Athens: University of residence” on Dylan’s famed concert tour Georgia Press, 2020); see https:// “Rolling Thunder Revue” (1975–76). mina-loy.com/, accessed April 10, 2022. Waldman once called Mina Loy’s poems 21. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: “puzzles, mazes, lyrical, intellectual, and The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley: University of temperamental gems,” then went on California Press, 1996). to provide a list of possible causes as to 22. Quote from Loy, The Last Lunar why she was underappreciated: “she is Baedeker. My description of Mina Loy’s eccentric, erratic, clumsy yet clever, a Stanton Street apartment is based on satirist, a brainy woman, not prone to conversations and interviews I conducted easy solutions … subtle, never obvious … in the late 1970s with Alex Bossom, Loy’s willfully obscure … muscular, proud, landlord, and Stephen Ferris, a fellow sexually confident, and so on.” Shreiber tenant in the Stanton Street apartment in and Tuma, Mina Loy. which she lived until moving to Aspen at the behest of her daughters in 1953. After Mina Loy left New York, Ferris looked after the artworks she left behind, eventually becoming the keeper of some of them. Without his and Bossom’s care, a number of the works in this exhibition would not have survived. 23. Loy, Insel. 24. This performance is viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =aYEMv2GuHwI. 25. Thurston Moore was first introduced to Mina Loy’s work by his friend Beck (the singer, songwriter, and recording producer Beck David Hansen, who may in turn have been introduced to Loy by his mother, the performance artist and Warhol superstar Bibbi Hansen (conversation between the author and Thurston Moore in Portland, Maine, January 30, 2012). 26. Rob Sheffield, “Best 25 Songs of the Year,” Rolling Stone, https://www .rollingstone.com/music/music-news /the-top-25-songs-of-2011-246094/. It is hard to imagine what Mina Loy would have made of the fact that in Rob Sheffield’s list of the best songs of 2011, her name appears in a lineup next to such iconic female musicians as Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Adele, Stevie Nicks, Rihanna, and Britney Spears. 27. From “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” This song appears on Dylan’s fifth studio album, Bringing It All Back Home (1965, Columbia Records, a.k.a. Subterranean Homesick Blues in some European countries). Dylan was introduced to Mina Loy’s poems by his one-time mentor Norman Raeben (who taught him how to

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FURTHER READING Mina Loy and Her Circle: Primary Sources

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Secondary Sources

Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life Barnes, Djuna. Ladies Almanack. Elmwood of Mina Loy. Berkeley: University of Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992. California Press, 1996. Barney, Natalie. Aventures de l’esprit. Paris: Churchill, Suzanne, Linda Kinnahan, Emile-Paul Freres, 1929. and Susan Rosenbaum. “Mina Loy: Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Navigating the Avant Garde.” Mina New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Loy. https://mina-loy.com/. 1956. Crangle, Sara, ed. Stories and Essays of Coates, Robert M. Eater of Darkness. New Mina Loy. Champaign, IL: Dalkey York: Macaulay, 1929. Archive Press, 2011. Dodge, Mabel Luhan. Intimate Memories. DeBoer-Langworthy, Carol, ed. The Modern New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933. World of Neith Boyce. Albuquerque: Duchamp, Marcel. Affectionately, Marcel: University of New Mexico Press, The Selected Correspondence of Marcel 2003. Duchamp. Edited by Francis M. Elkins, Amy. “From the Gutter to the Naumann and Hector Obalk. Ghent: Gallery: Berenice Abbott Photographs Ludion, 2000. Mina Loy’s Assemblages.” PMLA 134, ———. Three New York Dadas and “The no. 5 (2019): 1094–103. Blind Man.” London: Atlas, 2013. Hayden, Sarah. Curious Disciplines: Guggenheim, Peggy. Out of This Century: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood. Confessions of an Art Addict. New York: Albuquerque: University of New Universe Books, 1979. Mexico Press, 2018. Knoll, Robert E., ed. McAlmon and the Lost Kinnahan, Linda A. Mina Loy, Twentieth Generation: A Self-Portrait. Lincoln: Century Photography, and University of Nebraska Press, 1962. Contemporary Women Poets. London: Kreymborg, Alfred. Our Singing Strength: Routledge, 2017. An Outline of American Poetry (1620– “Loy-Alism.” In Julien Levy: Portrait of an 1930). New York: Coward-McCann, Art Gallery, edited by Ingrid Schaffner 1929. and Lisa Jacobs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Levy, Julien. Memoir of an Art Gallery. New Press, 1998. York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977. Morse, Samuel French. “The Rediscovery Loy, Mina. Insel. Edited by Elizabeth of Mina Loy and the Avant-Garde.” Arnold. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary 2014. Literature 2, no. 2 (Spring/Summer ———. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Edited 1961): 12–19. and introduced by Roger L. Conover. Parmar, Sandeep. Reading Mina Loy’s Highlands: Jargon Society, 1982. Autobiographies. London: Bloomsbury, ———. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of 2013. Mina Loy. Edited by Roger L. Conover. Shreiber, Maeera, and Keith Tuma, eds. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996. Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Orono, Loy, Mina, Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre ME: National Poetry Foundation, Roché, and Beatrice Wood. The Blind 1998. Man 1, no. 1 (April 1917). Williams, William Carlos. The McAlmon, Robert. 1938. Being Geniuses Autobiography of William Carlos Together. London: Secker and Williams. New York: Random House, Warburg, 1938. 1948. Stein, Gertrude. Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Random House, 1960. ———. The Making of Americans. Paris: Contact, 1925. Van Vechten, Carl. Sacred and Profane Memories. London: Cassell, 1932.

Editor Jennifer R. Gross Contributors Ann Lauterbach Dawn Ades Roger Conover Director’s Foreword Anne Collins Goodyear

INDEX Note: Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations.

and, 52, 66, 81, 103, 206n112; Mina and Joella in Florence, 18; Mina and Joella, 18; as model, 18; photographs of, Abbott, Berenice, ix, 55, 122; Bodley 60–61; removed from school, 51 Gallery Exhibition Announcement Mina Beach, Sylvia, 54 Loy’s “No Parking,” 162; Fabienne Beach, The (Loy), 21 Lloyd, 55; Marcel Duchamp at Mina Beats, 196 Loy’s Bowery Studio, 166; photography Bell, Vanessa, 30 and, 99, 159, 166, 174–79, 195, 201, Belmaison Gallery, 46 205n120 Benedict, Fritz, 91 Académie Colarossi, 5, 19 Benglis, Lynda, 127 Académie des Femmes, 66 Benjamin, Walter, 187 “Acts of Creation” (Loy), 123 Bentinck, Henry, 31 Ades, Dawn, x, 144–81, 203 Berman, Eugene, 68, 81 “Aged Woman, An” (Loy), ix Berman, Leonid, 68 “Aid of the Madonna” (Loy), 129 Between Worlds (Nieman), 196 Alphabet Toy (Loy), 91 Bewitched, The (Loy), 70, 71 Anderson, Laurie, 195 Blackburn, Paul, 196 Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (Loy), 51, 66 Black Mountain College, 185, 196 “Aphorisms on Futurism” (Loy), 31, 32, Blast magazine, 41, 43 112, 150, 151 Blind Man, no. 1, The (Duchamp, Roché, “Apology of Genius” (Loy), xii, 13, 51, 53, and Wood), 35, 36 70, 92, 123 Blind Man, no. 2, The (Duchamp, Roché, Archipenko, Alexander, 51 and Wood), 153 Architectural League of New York, 6–7 Bodley Gallery, 2, 99, 173 Arendt, Hannah, 195 Bodley Gallery Exhibition Announcement Arensberg, Louise, 35, 40, 45, 127, 152 Mina Loy’s “No Parking” (Abbott), 162 Arensberg, Walter, 35, 40, 45, 127, 152 Boix, Richard, 35 Arensberg Circle of Artists, The (exhibition), Bonnard, Pierre, 30 144 Bontecou, Lee, 195 Art et Industrie, 155 Bourgeois, Louise, 127 Arthur Cravan (Hayden), 188 Bowdoin College Museum of Art, x, 185 Arthur Cravan (Unidentified photographer), Bowery, x, 163, 201; Abbott and, 166; 40 conditions of, 128, 173, 195; creative “Artist and the Public, The” (Loy), 199 years at, 95–96; Refusées, 185; Stanton Art of Assemblage exhibition, 144, 173 Street, 91, 157, 195; tenements of, 159, Arts Magazine, 160 161 Assagioli, Roberto, 26 Boyce, Neith, 32 Auto-Facial-Construction (Loy), 29–30 Boyle, Kay, 46 avant-garde, 3, 31, 39, 53, 99, 127, 152, Brancusi, Constantin, ix; dining with, 53; 190 distillation and, 51; Golden Bird, 121– Aviary (Cornell), 92, 162, 205n91 22, 162; Mina Loy and Two Unidentified Women with Brancusi, 54; portraits of, Balzac (Rodin), 7 120, 153; Stein and, 23, 26, 29, 153 Barnes, Djuna, ix, 203n9, 204n62; Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, Berenice Abbott, Caricatures of Mina Loy, Marsden Hartley, Mina Loy, Jane Heap and Margaret and Gertrude Stein, 45; Cornell and, 103; Anderson in the Studio (Brancusi), 122 on Dusie, 12; friendship of, 66, 91, 103; “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” (Loy), 121 Joyce and, 51; Stein and, 45; Trend Bryan, Julia, 5 Magazine 8, no. 1, 3 Buffet-Picabia, Gabrielle, 152 Barney, Natalie, 66 Bums Praying (Loy), 99, 165, 166, 178 Bather with Beachball, Boisgeloup (Picasso), Bunting, Basil, 185, 196 128 Burke, Carolyn, 173, 196, 204n54, 206n3 Bayer, Herbert, 91 Bust-Length Portrait of Marianne Moore Bayer, Joella Haweis, 203n12, 204n86; (Loy), 40 birth of, 203n5; divorce of, 205n112; Butts, Mary, 46 health of, 18, 203n25; Joella, Fabienne, and Mina Loy at Paris Carnival, 55; Levy Calla Lily Lamp (Haweis), 60

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Camera Work (Stieglitz), 3, 7, 31, 150 Carfax Gallery, 6, 30, 149 Cargoes Gallery, 56 Caricatures of Mina Loy, Marsden Hartley, and Gertrude Stein (Barnes), 45 Carrà, Carlo, 32, 150 Carruth, Hayden, 196 Cezanne, Paul, 26 Charm magazine, 66, 67 Chatoyant Invention (Loy), 82, 86–87, 207n17 Christ Carrying the Cross (Spencer), 159 Christian Science, 3, 95, 130, 161, 206n10 Christ on a Clothesline (Loy), 99, 101, 133, 134, 159, 174 Christ with Gas Mask (Grosz), 159 Clark, T. J., 127 Coates, Robert, 3, 68, 208n8 Cole, Norma, 196 Colefax, Lady, 81 Coles, Henry, 7 Colette, 7 Colossus (Cravan), 46 Communal Cot (Loy), 145, 175; as compendium of pain, 101, 129, 173; construction of, 159–62; Francis M. Naumann Fine Art and, 144; Marinetti and, 150; scale of, 165 Conover, Roger, x, 182–201, 203 Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays (Loy), 146, 148 Contact Magazine, no. 1 (Williams and McAlmon), 184 Contact Press, 51, 182, 185 Cook, Richard, 203n4 Corgan, Billy, 197 Cornell Joseph, ix; artspace and, 195; Aviary, 92, 162, 205n91; Barnes and, 103; bird boxes of, 153, 165, 170; as Christian Scientist, 92, 161; The Crystal Cage, 95, 96; Duchamp and, 206n10; friendship of, 95, 99, 103, 150, 161, 173, 195; The Hotel Eden, 157; Imperious Jewelry of the Universe, 92, 94–95; inspirations of, 95; Levy and, 92, 99, 103, 150, 206n10; Loy letter, 158; Penny Arcade with Horse, 165, 172–73; portraits of, 93; Untitled (Constellation), 170 Corselet (Armour for the Body) (Loy), 82, 84–85 Crapouillot (Loy), 19 Cravan, Arthur, ix, 181; Arensberg circle and, 40–41; as boxer, 187, 190; Dada and, 40, 190; death of, 44–46, 144, 204n67; as Fabian Lloyd, 144, 188, 205n110; Johnson vs. Cravan Fight

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Poster, 187; marriage to, 43–44, 203n5; memorial bouquet to, 56 Cravan, Jemima Fabienne (Fabi), 99, 203n5, 203n30; birth of, 44; career of, 206n108; Cornell and, 92, 95; drawing techniques of, 78; economic issues and, 81–82; letters to, 69; marriage of, 91 Creeley, Robert, 185, 196 Crystal Cage, The (Cornell), 95, 96 cubism, 150, 208n13 Cunard, Nancy, 118–19 Curie, Madame, 26

Duchamp, 37; Société Anonyme, Inc. and, 26; Society of Independent Artists and, 35; “Stanton Street constructions” and, 163, 205n118 Duncan, Robert, 185 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 208n13 Dusie (Barnes), 12–13 Dylan, Bob, 182, 197, 207n2 Dynamism of a Car (Russolo), 119 Dynamism of an Automobile (Russolo), 119 Dynamism of the Subconscious (Loy), 150

Boyce on, 32; Carrà and, 32, 150; dynamism and, 119, 150; emotional furor of, 33; First Free Exhibition of International Futurist Art in Rome, 32; Florentine period and, 149–50; free words and, 32; Italian, 32, 149–50; Lacerba and, 150; Lewis and, 41; machine age and, 124; Marinetti and, 19, 32, 33, 41, 57, 150, 153; Papini and, 32, 33, 57, 150; Pittori brochure and, 34; the public and, 199; Stella and, 35; Stevens and, 32, 152; Stieglitz and, 31, 150; synthetic art and, 32

Eater of Darkness (Coates), 68 Dada, 31, 100; Bodley Gallery and, 160, eccentricity, 5, 91 173; Cravan and, 40, 190; Duchamp Eddy, Mary Baker, 130 Galeries Mina Loy, 57, 59 and, 99, 150, 173; New York Dada, 46; Egan Gallery, 162 Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 16 Preston and, 99; Rogue and, x; social Eilshemius, Louis, 35 Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Basket in comment and, 99, 160 Eliot, T. S., 128 France (Unidentified artist), 26 DA-DA (Boix), 35 Elkins, Amy, 205n120 “Gertrude Stein” (Loy), 26, 27 Dahlberg, Edward, 196 Enemy of Stars (Lewis), 41 Girl with Red Hair (Loy), 46, 50 Daily Telegraph, 62 “Ephemerid” (Loy), 81, 124 Giulia, 18, 35, 44 Dali, Salvador, 68 Ernst, Max, 3, 68, 99, 196 “Golden Bird, The” (Loy), 51, 121 Dame Rogue (Louise Norton), 146, 149, Étant donnés (Duchamp), 99, 163–65, 173 Golden Bird (Brancusi), 121–22, 162 152 Expectation (Oelze), 68–69 Goodyear, Anne Collins, ix–xi, 203 David, Hermine, 53 Gorky, Arshile, 68 Dawn (Loy), 70, 74 Fabienne Lloyd (Abbott), 55 Graham, Cunninghame, 19 de Chirico, Giorgio, 68 Fabienne Lloyd (Van Vechten), 190 Grant, Duncan, 30 Demolished Thoughts (Moore), 197 fantasy, 5, 69, 205n103 Green Sphynx, The (Loy), 109 Departure (with the Sled) (Oelze), 163 Fashion Designs (Loy), 12 Gross, Jennifer, x, 1–112, 201–3 Devant le miroir (Loy), 12, 14, 114 Fashion Sketches (Loy), 48 Grosz, George, 159 Dial magazine, 51, 53 fauvism, 150, 208n13 Group Portrait of American and European Dickinson, Emily, 185 feminism, 206n11; Colette and, 7; Lee Artists in Paris (Unidentified Dodge, Mabel, ix, 23, 25; as Dale, 19; and, 208n17; Moore and, 197; new, photographer), 55 friendship of, 19, 30–31, 127, 208n14; 126, 196; satirical critique and, 146; Guest, Barbara, 196 Villa Curonia and, 19, 30 Surrealism and, 190; Tice and, 152 Guggenheim, Peggy, ix, 3, 56–57, 99, 100, Doolittle, Hilda [H. D.], 185 “Feminist Manifesto” (Loy), xiii–xv, 3, 127, 204n85 Draper, Muriel, 30 149–50 Gunn, Thom, 196 Drawing (Loy), 49 Femme Maison (Bourgeois), 127 Drawing of James Joyce (Loy), 51 Ferris, Stephen, 99 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 195 Dreier, Katherine, 26, 35, 37 Fields, Kenneth, 196 Hardy, Thomas, 19 Dreiser, Theodore, 19 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Unidentified Hare, Denise Browne, 93 Drift of Chaos (Loy), 78, 81, 83, 106–8, photographer), 33 Harter, Ethel, 30, 81 126 Fille en robe rouge (Loy), xii, 20 Hartley, Marsden, 35, 46, 185 Dubuffet, Jean, 173 First Free Exhibition of International Haweis, Giles, 18, 45, 51, 56, 203n5 Duchamp, Marcel, 91, 152, 154, 161, Futurist Art in Rome, 32 Haweis, Mary Eliza, 206n6 186, 205n121; aging and, ix, 203n2; Flaubert, 19 Haweis, Oda, 7, 12–13, 16, 203n5 authenticity and, 3; The Blind Man, no. Floral Lamp Shade (Haweis), 61 Haweis, Stephen, 30; divorce from, 6, 43, 1, 35, 36; The Blind Man, no. 2, 153; Ford, Ford Madox, 26, 27 187; Florence and, 18, 45; heirlooms Bodley Gallery and, 2–3, 99, 173; Forte dei Marmi, 18 of, 35; independence from, 12; letters Bums Praying, 165, 166; Cornell and, Fountain (Duchamp), 153, 207n13 of, 24, 51; marriage to, 6–7, 16, 203n5; 206n10; Dada and, 99, 150, 173; Étant Frankel, Hans, 91 Mina Loy, 6, 8–11; separation from, 19, donnés, 99, 163–65, 173; Fountain, 153, Fraser, Kathleen, 196 32 207n13; Levy and, 66, 81, 99, 150, Freud, Sigmund, 26, 28, 51 Hayden, Henri, 188 163, 206n10; long-standing friendship Friday Club, 30 Heap, Jane, 53 of, 90–91; Marcel Duchamp at Mina Loy’s Fry, Roger, 30 Heart Shop, The (Loy), 19 Bowery Studio, 166; Marcel Duchamp Future Embrace, The (Corgan), 197 Hemingway, Ernest, 51, 185 Wearing “Sexy” Crown, 93; Mary Futurism, 187, 190; “Aphorisms on “Hot Cross Bum” (Loy), 96, 129, 161 Reynolds and, 81; Portrait of Marcel Futurism,” 31, 32, 112, 150, 151; Hotel Eden, The (Cornell), 157

INDEX

Househunting (Loy), 99, 176 Human Cylinders (Loy), 123

lesbianism, 26, 203n9 Le Testament de Villon (Pound), 54 “Letters of the Unliving” (Loy), 129 Imperious Jewelry of the Universe (Cornell), Levertov, Denise, 185, 196 92, 94–95 Levy, Julien, x; Austin exhibition and, 70; “Incident” (Loy), 130 background of, 66; Burke on, 205n97; Independents Exhibition, 153 collection of, 52, 55, 68, 70, 81, 95, Insel (Loy), 69, 115, 117, 162 156, 193; Cornell and, 92, 99, 103, International Psycho-democracy (Loy), 44 150, 206n10; creative expression and, Internationals Decorative Arts Exhibition, 66; Duchamp and, 66, 81, 99, 150, 66 163, 206n10; estate of, 202; Faces, 205n95; gallery of, 5, 43, 68, 92, 99, Jaded Blossoms (Loy), 56 150, 206n10; influence of, 78, 81; Jamot, Paul, 16 Joella and, 52, 66, 81, 103, 205n112; Jane Heap, Mina Loy, and Ezra Pound show paintings and, 78; “Stanton (Unidentified photographer), 54 Street” constructions and, 163; Japanese Toys (Loy), 30 Stettheimer and, 78; Surrealism and, Joella, Fabienne, and Mina Loy at Paris 68, 78, 81, 150, 206n10 Carnival (Unidentified photographer), 55 Levy Exhibition Announcement (Loy), 70 Joella Levy (Man Ray), 52 Lewis, Wyndham: Blast, 43; Colarassi and, Johns, Jasper, 99 5; Enemy of the Stars, 70; Futurism and, Johns, Richard, 47 41; modernism and, 23; The Starry Sky, Johnson, Ray, 185 41–43, 111; talent of, 30; on war, 32 Johnson vs. Cravan Fight Poster, 187 Leyda, Jay, 68 Joyce, James, 29 Light Bursts Out of the Window (Loy), 109 Julien Levy (Leyda), 68 Light (Loy), 76–77 Lima Beans (Kreymborg), 35, 38 Keats, John, 112, 128 Lit de Marcel (Wood), 154 Kennedy, Geoffrey Studdert, 159 Little Carnival, The (Loy), 19, 51 Kienholz, Edward, 173 Little Gallery, 57 Kinnahan, Linda, 78 Little Review magazine, 41, 53, 56–57 Kouidis, Virginia, 196 Lloyd, Fabian. See Cravan, Arthur Kreymborg, Alfred, 2, 31, 33, 35, 38, 150, Lloyd, Fabienne, 44, 55, 98, 190 208n6 logopoeia, 31 Lost Lunar Baedeker, The (Loy and Conover, Lacerba magazine, 150 editor), 196 Ladies at Tea (Loy), 19, 30 Louvre, 16 Ladies Fishing (Loy), 19 Love Songs (Loy), 32–33 Ladies Watching a Ballet (Loy), 19 Lowy, Sigmund, 5, 113 La Dispute (Loy), 12 Loy, Mina: birth of, 113; cerebral nature La Grotte de Cythère (Loy), 30 of, 2; children of, 203n5; citizenships La Guitare (Loy), 12 of, 2; constructions of, 144–81; creative La Maison des Bains (Loy), 19, 22 range of, ix–x, 2, 114–15; long reality La Maison en Papier (Loy), 16, 17, 30 of, ix–xi; names of, 113, 187–88, 208n6, La Mère (Loy), 12 208n16; as polymath, 2; search for L’Amour dorloté par les Belles Dames (Loy), form by, 113–26; unbeautiful true and, 15–16, 19, 149 127–43. See also specific work La Petit carnival (Loy), 30 Lozano, Lee, 195 Last Lunar Baedeker, The (Loy and Conover, Luce, Henry, 129 editor), 185, 186 Lunar Baedecker (Loy), 51–53, 118, Late Show with David Letterman, 197 142–43, 182, 183 Laughlin, James, 185 Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables (Loy), 185, 186 Laurence Vail exhibition brochure, 59 Lynes, George Platt, 4, 192–93 Lauterbach, Ann, x, 23, 112–43, 203 Le Cirque Hagenback à Florence (Loy), 30 McAlmon, Robert, 45–46, 51, 53, 66, 184, “Les Abat-Jour de Mina Loy” (Unidentified 185 author), 62 McCarthy, Mary, 195 Le Savoureux, Henri Joel, 7, 16, 203n5 Machen, Arthur, 19

213

Macy’s, 56 Magritte, René, 68 Maintenant (Cravan), 41 Majesty the Queen’s Collection, 81 Making Lampshades (Loy), 153 Making of Americans, The (Stein), 23 Malraux, André, 193 Mann, David, 163 Man Ray, 55, 196; friendship of, 35, 51, 115; Joella Levy, 52; Mina Loy, 183; Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, 45; Portrait of Mina Loy, 114; photography of, 35, 92, 95, 114; Société Anonyme, Inc., 26 Marcel Duchamp at Mina Loy’s Bowery Studio (Abbott), 166 Marcel Duchamp Wearing “Sexy” Crown, Designed by Mina Loy (Hare), 93 Marchands de New York (Loy), 51 Maria con Bruno (Loy), 30–31 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 19, 32, 33, 41, 57, 150, 153 Marisol, 173 Martin, Agnes, 195 “Mass Production on 14th Street” (Loy), 129–30 Matisse, Henri, 30 Matta, Roberto, 99 M’Cormick, William B., 56 “Mi & Lo” (Loy), 113 Miller, Lee, 156, 195 Mina and Joella in Florence (Unidentified photographer), 18 Mina and Joella (Unidentified photographer), 18 Mina Lowy, Her Mother Julia Lowy, and Sister Dora (Unidentified photographer), 148 Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes (Loy), 45 Mina Loy and Peggy Guggenheim at 52 Rue du Colisée Shop, 57 Mina Loy and Two Unidentified Artist Women with Brancusi and his Dog Polaire, in Front of a Painted Canvas at the Throne Fair (Unidentified photographer), 54 Mina Loy as a Girl (Unidentified photographer), 6 Mina Loy as a Young Woman (Unidentified photographer), 148 Mina Loy Dressed for the Blindman’s Ball (Unidentified photographer), 37 Mina Loy (Haweis), 6, 8–11 Mina Loy Holding Auguste Rodin Sculpture (Haweis), 8 Mina Loy in Paris (Unidentified photographer), 68 Mina Loy (Lynes), 4, 192–93 Mina Loy (Man Ray), 183 Mina Loy (Miller), 156

214

“Mina Loy: M.O.H.” (Corgan), 197 Peggy Guggenheim Seated on Her FourRexroth, Kenneth, 196 “Mina Loy” (Moore), 197 poster Bed (Wilson), 100 Reynolds, Mary, 81 Mina Loy (Williams), 101 Penny Arcade with Horse (Cornell), 165, Richter, Gerhard, 187 Mina Loy Paris business card, 59 172–73 Rimbaud, Arthur, 78 modernism, 43; conversion to, 19, 23, 26, Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works (Van Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), 128 114; cubism, 150, 208n13; as energetic Vechten), 19 Roché, Henri-Pierre, 35, 36 force, 26; enriching definition of, 2; Photograph of Mina Loy Mermaid Mural Rodin, Auguste, 7, 8 fauvism and, 150, 208n13; gender and, (Unidentified photographer), 56 Rogue magazine, x, 31, 38, 39, 146, 149, 40; Guggenheim and, 57; London art Photograph of Mina Loy’s Terra Cotta 152–53 scene and, 30; mainstream, 18; Moore Sculpture “Maternity” (Unidentified Rolling Stone, 197 and, 39; Pascin and, 5; theism and, 3; photographer), 18 Rosenbaum, Susan, 193 Tuma and, 203n2; visual modes of, 146; Photograph of Mina Loy’s “Untitled (Bottle Rose Valley Sanitarium advertisement, 46 vs. tradition, 19 and Eye, Ear, Lips)” (Abbott), 179 Rothenberg, Jerome, 196 “Modern Poetry” (Loy), x, 66, 206n7 Picabia, Francis, 152 Ruskin, John, 130, 206n16 Moons (Loy), 78, 105, 124, 125 Picasso, Pablo, 30, 128 Russolo, Luigi, 119 Moon Tarot Card (Waite and Smith), 76 Picasso and Truth (Clark), 127 Rutland, Duchess of, 30 Moore, George, 7, 19, 119 Pittori Futuristi brochure, 34 Moore, Marianne, 26, 39, 40, 46 Pittsburgh Press, 46 Sacred Prostitute, The (Loy), 32 Moore, Thurston, 197 Playboy magazine, 46, 50 Salon d’Automne, 12–13, 16, 30, 149 “Moreover, the Moon—” (Loy), 105 Poe, Edgar Allan, 23, 46, 118 Sappho, 33 Morland, Henry Robert, 205n105 “Poe” (Loy), 118 Schwabacher, Ethel, 99 Morse, Samuel French, 5 Poplin, Maurice, 106 Second Coming, The (Yeats), 123 Muir, Edwin, 51, 53 Porter, Bern, 196 Sentinels, The (Loy), 106 Portrait of Carl Van Vechten (Loy), 28 Sewing Machine, The (Loy), 30 Namm Gallery, 56 Portrait of Carl Van Vechten (Lutz), 31 Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, 54 “Nancy Cunard” (Loy), 118–19 Portrait of Constantin Brancusi (Loy), 120 Shaw, George Bernard, 19 Naumann, Francis M., 144 Portrait of Flossie (Florence) Williams (Loy), Sheffield, Rob, 197 Nectar (Loy), 100 115, 116 Sherman, Cindy, 127 Neiman, Gilbert, 196 Portrait of Freud (Loy), 28 Ship Lamp (Unidentified photographer), 60 New Directions Press, 185 Portrait of Giovanni Papini, Italian Writer and “Show Me a Saint Who Suffered” (Loy), 96 New York Dada magazine, 46 Philosopher (Unidentified photographer), 33 Sickert, Walter, 7 New York Evening Sun, 78 Portrait of Joseph Cornell (Unidentified “Sketch of a Man on a Platform” (Loy), 147 New York Sun, 39 photographer), 93 Smashing Pumpkins, 197 New York Times, 99, 160 Portrait of Jules Pascin (Loy), 115 Smith, Pamela Colman, 76 Niedecker, Lorine, 185 Portrait of Mable Dodge, Arcetri Smith, Patti, 195 No Parking (Loy), 101, 162, 165, 173 (Unidentified photographer), 23 Snow Crop (Loy), 103, 110–11, 165, Norton, Allen, 31, 35, 39, 152 Portrait of Man Ray (Loy), 115 168–69 Norton, Louise, 31, 35, 146, 152–53 Portrait of Marcel Duchamp Seated in Snow Looks in at the Window (Loy), 109 Katherine Dreier’s New York Apartment Sociétaire du Salon d’Automne Paris calling Objects (Loy), 12 (Unidentified photographer), 37 card (Loy), 13 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 112 Portrait of Mina Loy (Man Ray), 114 Société Anonyme, Inc., 26, 46 Oelze, Richard, x; Departure (with the Sled), Portrait of Stephen Haweis (Loy), 8 Society of Independent Artists, 35 163; Insel and, 162, 195; portrayal of, Pound, Ezra, 31, 46, 54–55, 128 Soil (Coady), 41 115; skills of, 69; Surrealism and, 69, Preston, Stuart, 99 Sonic Youth, 197 115, 193, 207n10 “Prize Lamp Shades from Nina [sic] Loy of Sontag, Susan, 195 “O Hell” (Loy), 184 Paris,” 62, 205n87 Spectra School of Poets, 188, 208n17 Olson, Charles, 185 “Property of Pigeons” (Loy), 96, 129 Spencer, Stanley, 30, 159 “On Third Avenue” (Loy), 129 Prospector 1 (Loy), 103, 170–71 Starry Sky, The (Lewis), 41–43, 111 Oppenheimer, Joel, 185 Prospector 2 (Loy), 132, 165 Stars (Loy), 71, 76, 78 Orozco, Gabriel, 187 Provincetown Players, 35, 46 Stein, Gertrude, x, 27; Barnes and, 45; Others magazine, 2, 4, 31–33, 208n17 Brancusi and, 23, 26, 29, 153; creative Our Singing Strength (Kreymborg), 33 Queen, The (Loy), 82 autonomy of, 26; influence of, 19, 23, 31, 26, 46, 51, 54, 57, 115, 185; Pagany magazine (Johns), 47 Rauschenberg, Robert, 99, 185 language as tactile, 119; lecture on, Pamperers, The (Loy), 32 Refusées (Loy), 185 66; The Making of Americans, 23; on Papini, Giovanni, 32, 33, 57, 150 Resurrection (Spencer), 159 museums, 182; opera of, 78; Société Pascin, Jules, 5, 29, 53, 115 “Review of Jaded Flowers Exhibition at Anonyme, Inc., 26; tradition and, 26; Patchen, Kenneth, 185 Cargoes Gallery” (M’Cormick), 56 verbal portrait of, 115

INDEX

215

Steinbeck, John, 129 Vail, Laurence, 46, 59 Stella, Joseph, 35, 46, 91 Vanity Fair magazine, 51 Steloff, Francis, 91, 101, 208n8 Van Vechten, Carl, x, 6, 127; Dale dinner Stephen Fry (Loy), 117 and, 19; Dodge and, 31; Fabienne Lloyd, Stettheimer, Florine, 78 190; friendship of, 26; letters to, 5, 31, Stevens, Frances Simpson, 32, 149–50, 152 33, 114; as literary agent, 30–31; on Stieglitz, Alfred, 3, 7, 31, 150 observation, 13–14; Peter Whiffle, 19; Stravisnky, 128 portraits of, 28, 31 Stryx, 53 Villa Curonia, 19, 30 Studio magazine, 30, 149 “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots” (Tice), Study for Monument to Basketball (Loy), 90, 91 149 “Summer Night in a Florence Slum” (Loy), Voyageurs (Loy), 19, 30 184 Sunset Creatures (Loy), 108 Waite, A. E., 76 Surrealism, 190; Bodley Gallery and, Waldman, Anne, 196 173; collaboration and, 78; composition Warhol, Andy, 99 and, 81; Cornell and, 92; defining, What D’You Want? (Vail), 46 68; Levy and, 68, 78, 81, 150, Who’s Who in Manhattan (Tice), 152 206n10; Oelze and, 69, 115, 193, “Widow’s Jazz, The” (Loy), 47, 180–81 207n10; photography and, 68, Wilde, Oscar, 41 78, 193; psychedelic revelry and, 69 Williams, Flossie, 29, 54, 115 Symbolism, 190 Williams, Jonathan, 101, 185, 186, 196 Williams, William Carlos, 51, 54, 115, Tanguy, Yves, 99 184, 185 Tchelitchew, Pavel, 68 Wilson, Ray, 100 Teasing a Butterfly (Loy), 70, 75 Window Washer Invention (Loy), 88–89 Thayer, Scofield, 51 Winters, Yvor, 53, 196 theism, 3 Woman’s Head (Loy), 30–31 “Those Various Scalpels” (Moore), 39 Woman Weaver (Loy), 70, 72, 73 Three Studies by an Unusual Artist Mina Loy Women in Carriage (Loy), 13 (Loy), 49 Women’s Wear Daily, 56 Tice, Clara, 149, 152 Wood, Alice, 19 Transatlantic Review, 26, 27 Wood, Beatrice, x, 152; Lit de Marcel, 154; Trend Magazine, no. 1 (Barnes), 3 The Blind Man no. 1 and, 35, 36; The Tulip Lamp (Haweis), 61 Blind Man no. 2 and, 153; Society of Tuma, Keith, 203n2 Independent Artists and, 35; Untitled Twombly, Cy, 99 (Mina Loy and Arthur Cravan), 188 Two Plays: Collision and Cittabàbapini (Loy), 32, 147 Yeats, William Butler, 123 Umbo (Otto Umbehr), 78, 80, 81 Uncanny Street (Umbo), 78, 80–81 “Universal Food Machine” (Loy), 127 Untitled (Black Dancers) (Loy), 177 Photograph of Mina Loy’s “Untitled (Bottle and Eye, Ear, Lips)” (Abbott), 179 Untitled (Constellation) (Cornell), 170 Untitled (Cornell), 170 Untitled (Loy), 58, 73, 99, 103, 104, 131, 136–41, 169, 198–99 Untitled (Mina Loy and Arthur Cravan) (Wood), 188–89 Untitled (Sketches of Fabienne Lloyd) (Loy), ix, 190–91 Untitled (Sleeping Figure) (Loy), 67 Untitled (Surreal Scene) (Loy), vi–vii, 76, 78, 79 Untitled (The Drifting Tower) (Loy), 95, 97

Zorach, Marguerite, 39 Zorach, William, 39 Zukofsky, Louis, 185

CREDITS

216

TEXT

Straus Giroux, 1996), 91–92. First “Apology of Genius,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker: published in Lunar Baedeker (Paris: Poems of Mina Loy, edited by Roger L. Contact, 1923) but probably written Conover (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, somewhat earlier, following the 1996), 77–78. First published in the Dial reproduction of Lewis’s The Starry Sky 73 (July 1922): 73–74. Reprinted in Lunar (pencil, pen, ink, wash, and gouache Baedeker (Paris: Contact, 1923) without drawing, 1912) in the November 1917 changes. issue of the Little Review. “The Artist and the Public,” First published in “The Widow’s Jazz,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited Poems of Mina Loy, edited by Roger L. by Roger L. Conover (Highlands: Jargon Conover (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, Society, 1982), 285. 1996), 95–97. First published in Pagany: “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” The Lost Lunar A Native Quarterly 2, no. 2 (Spring 1931): Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, edited by 18–20. Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar Straus Joseph Cornell to Mina Loy, July 3, 1951, Giroux, 1996), 79–80. First published in Joseph Cornell papers, 1804–1986, bulk the Dial 73 (November 1922): 507–8, 1939–1972. Archives of American Art, opposite Constantin Brancusi’s studio Smithsonian Institution. © 2022 The photograph of The Golden Bird. The same Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial image had previously been reproduced in Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists the “Brancusi” number of the Little Review Rights Society (ARS), NY. 8 (Autumn 1921): pl. 17, accompanying Bob Dylan lyrics from “It’s All Over Now, Ezra Pound’s essay on Constantin Baby Blue” appear on Dylan’s fifth studio Brancusi. album, Bringing It All Back Home (1965, “Feminist Manifesto,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Columbia Records), aka “Subterranean Poems of Mina Loy, edited by Roger L. Homesick Blues” in some European Conover (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, countries. 1996), 153–56. This text follows Mina Loy’s signed and dated holograph version in the Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript New York: Used with permission of The Library, Yale University. Courtesy of the George Platt Lynes Estate: 1.4; © Richard Estate of Mina Loy. Oelze: 3.19 “Human Cylinders,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker: © Phyllis Umbehr / Galerie Kicken Berlin / Poems of Mina Loy, edited by Roger L. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Conover (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2022: 1.112 1996), 40-41. First published in Others: © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, An Anthology of the New Verse (New York: Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), Knopf, 1917), 64-66. This text follows the New York 2022: 1.46, 3.10, 3.20 first published version to which Conover © Authors League Fund and St. Bride’s has made one emendation: 33: Church, as joint literary executors of the antediluvian] antedeluvian. Estate of Djuna Barnes: 1.61 “Lunar Baedeker,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Courtesy Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts / Poems of Mina Loy, edited by Roger L. Happy Valley Foundation: 3.11; Conover (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, photography by Jay York, 4.10 1996), 81–82. Date of composition © Berenice Abbott / Getty Images: 1.80, unknown. Mina Loy’s first book, Lunar 3.18, 3.28, 3.29, 3.30, 3.31, 3.32, 3.33 Baedeker (Paris: Contact, 1923), opens Photo by Brad Stanton: 1.107, 1.109, 2.12 with this poem, marking its first Bridgeman Images: 1.43 appearance in print. Carolyn Burke’s Becoming Modern: The Life of “Moreover, the Moon—,” The Lost Lunar Mina Loy: 1.5, 1.8, 1.50, 3.4, 3.21 Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, edited by Digital image © CCNAC/MNAM, Dist. Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar Straus RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, Giroux, 1996), 146. This text is based New York; repro photo: Philippe Migeat: on the manuscript at Yale Collection of 1.76; photo by Jean-Claude Planchet: 2.7 © Corbis Historical via Getty Images; photo American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book by George Rinhart: 1.83 and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Photo by Dana Martin-Strebel: 2.19 Mina Loy Archive. Courtesy of the Estate Photo by Denise Browne Hare: 1.129 of Mina Loy. “The Starry Sky of WYNDHAM LEWIS,” The Lost © 2022 The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artist Rights Society (ARS), Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, edited New York; photo: Christopher Burke: 2.15 by Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar

ILLUSTRATIONS

Used with permission of The George Platt Lynes Estate: 4.13 © Giancarlo Costa / Bridgeman Images: 1.42 © 2022 Henri Hayden / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris: 4.9 © Jay Leyda: 1.100 Photo by Jay York: 1.14, 1.17, 1.18, 1.24, 1.25, 1.26, 1.104, 1.106, 1.111, 1.114, 1.133, 1.138, 2.1, 2.2, 2.4, 2.5, 2.13, 2.14, 2.17, 2.18, 3.23, 3.24, 3.26, 4.8, 4.9, 4.10 Courtesy of Jonathan Williams’s Estate and the Jargon Society, Inc.: 4.6, 4.7 © 2022 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY: 1.132, 3.14, 3.15, 3.25, 3.27; © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2022: 1.131; image courtesy of Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio: 3.27 Digital Reproduction by Jo Hluska: 1.5, 1.8, 1.50, 1.57, 3.4 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk: 3.13 Photo by Luc Demers: 1.1, 1.3, 1.6, 1.7, 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 1.21, 1.22, 1.23, 1.34, 1.35, 1.37, 1.41, 1.46, 1.48, 1.49, 1.51, 1.54, 1.55, 1.56, 1.59, 1.63, 1.64, 1.67, 1.68, 1.69, 1.71, 1.73, 1.74, 1.75, 1.78, 1.81, 1.82, 1.85, 1.86, 1.87, 1.89, 1.90, 1.91, 1.92, 1.93, 1.94, 1.99, 1.102, 1.103, 1.105, 1.108, 1.128, 1.139, 2.3, 2.6, 2.8, 2.10, 3.2, 3.3, 3.5, 3.6, 3.8, 3.10, 3.12, 3.15, 3.16, 4.2, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.16, 4.17 © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2022: 1.60, 1.72, 2.1, 4.2 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, New York: 1.70 Photo by Michael Tropea, Chicago: 3.1, 3.17 © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York: 1.45; © Richard Oelze: 1.101 Pablo Picasso © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY: 2.16 © Photo Ray Wilson. Courtesy Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) DW000058: 1.137 © Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS) 2022; image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, image source Art Resource, New York: 2.9; digital image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York, photo: Philippe Migeat: 2.11 © Van Vechten Trust: 4.11 © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. All rights reserved 2022: 1.58, 1.59