Mina Loy - Infinite Women

This bio has been republished from Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. See below for full attribution.

Born: 27 December 1882, United Kingdom
Died: 25 September 1966
Country most active: International
Also known as: Mina Gertrude Lowy, married names Haweis, Lloyd

She consorted with the major 20th-century avant-garde movements—Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism— yet was wedded to none.
She moved among the metropolitan centers of modernism—London, Paris, Florence, New York, and Berlin—yet rarely felt at home.
She wrote poems, plays, and experimental prose;
created drawings, paintings, sculptures, and assemblages; designed lampshades, toys, Christmas lights, cleaning tools, and corselets.
Born in London in 1882, Mina Gertrude Lowy was the child of an English, Protestant mother and a Hungarian, Jewish father. She was raised with two sisters in a Victorian household that aspired to middle-class respectability.
Mina, the first-born, was the problem child. Imaginative and precocious, she was prone to inventing colorful stories and drawings—and disinclined to proper feminine decorum. She was sent to art school: first in London, then Munich, then Paris.
In Paris, Loy met fellow artist Stephen Haweis, who was attracted to her beauty and intelligence. Though her feelings toward him were deeply ambivalent, she married him in 1903 out of necessity. Their daughter, Oda Janet, was born 1904 (five months after the wedding). That same year, Loy exhibited six watercolors at the prestigious Salon d’Automne under the self-styled name, Mina Loy.
Just as her career began to take off, her personal life crashed. Oda died of meningitis in 1905, Loy’s marriage felt apart, and she was plagued by grief, self-doubt, and neurasthenia, which today would be diagnosed as depression. When Loy became pregnant by the doctor who treated her, Stephen agreed to claim paternity if she moved with him to Florence. Divorce was financially impossible, socially unacceptable, and legally very difficult, so Loy complied, and the couple moved to Florence in 1907.
While in Italy, Loy had two more children but grew more estranged from Haweis. Meanwhile, she developed sustaining friendships with Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, and her ward and artistic protégé, Frances Simpson Stevens, who introduced her to the Italian Futurists in 1913.
In 1914, Loy became involved in love affairs with F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini. She also embarked on a literary career, publishing her first poems, manifestos, and plays in various American and European little magazines.
When her affairs with the Italian Futurists ended, Loy served briefly as a nurse for the Italian Red Cross during World War I. In 1917, she left her children with their Italian nursemaid and sailed to New York, determined to reinvent herself as an artist.
In New York, Loy found artistic compatriots in the avant-garde circle that gravitated around Walter and Louise Arensburg. She met Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Beatrice Webb, and the love of her live, Arthur Cravan—a boxer, Dada poet, and nephew of Oscar Wilde.
Loy secured a divorce from Haweis in 1917. The next year, she and Cravan sailed to Mexico so that he could escape the draft, and they got married there. Loy became pregnant, and they set off for Argentina on separate boats. Cravan never made it: his sailboat disappeared off the coast of Mexico, and he was never heard from again.
Heartbroken, Loy returned to London and delivered her fourth child, Jemima Fabienne Cravan Lloyd. She then resumed her transatlantic migrations, moving to Geneva, to Florence, to New York, back to Florence, and then to Paris, where she resided from 1921-1936, running a lamp shop funded by Peggy Guggenheim and then acting as an purchasing agent for her son-in-law Julian Levy’s art gallery in New York, serving as a key figure in Surrealism’s New York reception. In 1933, she befriended the Surrealist painter Richard Oelze and drew upon their relationship for her novel, Insel.
Loy returned to New York in 1936, where she interacted with Joseph Cornell, Kenneth Rexroth, Djuna Barnes, and Charles Henri Ford. She became an American citizen in 1946 and moved to the Bowery in 1949, living in a communal household and creating artistic assemblages from local refuse and found objects.
In 1953, she moved to Aspen, Colorado, to be near her daughters. She died there in 1966.
In her lifetime, Loy published two books, Lunar Baedecker [sic] in 1923 and Lunar Baedeker and Time Tables in 1958, as well as dozens of poems, plays, and essays in little magazines. In addition to exhibiting art at the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Carfax Gallery in London early in her career, she showed Surrealist paintings in Julian Levy’s New York gallery in 1933 and “Constructions” at an exhibit curated by Marcel Duchamp at the Bodley Gallery in New York in 1959.
Today, many of Mina Loy’s creations remain unpublished, undated, lost, or in private collections, making her career as difficult to chart as it is fascinating to follow.