She consorted with the major 20th-century avant-garde movements—Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, and wrote poems, plays, and experimental prose; created drawings, paintings, sculptures, and assemblages; designed lampshades, toys, Christmas lights, cleaning tools, and corselets.
American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector
Denise Levertov remains an influential poet of the mid-twentieth century American group known as the Black Mountain School.
She acted and wrote plays for Provincetown Theater in Massachusetts; she also became a highly paid journalist. In 1921, she was sent to Paris by McCall’s Magazine to study and write about the expatriate movement. She became friends with famous writers and artists including Mina Loy. She frequently visited Natalie Barney’s salon, to read and discuss literature. It was the environment at Barney’s salon that inspired Barnes to write Ladies Almanack (American Women).
Founder of the Catholic Worker, activist and social reformer
Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia might be the most quoted witness of the Dada movement, yet she is one of the least studied. Her name is most often found in the footnotes of books, next to citations for her detailed comments and stories on the charismatic male leaders of the Dada movement.
Janet Flanner, who decried the personal “I,” was a technically skilled writer who found diagramming sentences and Parisian newspapers influential.
American poet, writer, and visual artist
A wealthy American patron of the twentieth-century arts movement, Mabel Evan Dodge Sterne Luhan (Mabel Dodge) hosted modernist salons in Arcetri, Italy (outside of Florence), New York City, and Taos, New Mexico, presiding over her guests as an intellectual provocateur, a financial supporter, organizer, and creative contributor for some of the most radical figures and ideas of the early twentieth century.
Her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize (1951), the National Book Award (1952), and the Bollingen Prize (1953).