Mina Loy

Mina Loy 1917

Mina Loy , actually Mina Gertrude Löwy (born  December 27, 1882 in London , †  September 25, 1966 in Aspen , Colorado ) was an American artist , poet , futurist , actress and lamp designer . She was one of the last first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was worshiped by TS Eliot , Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams .

life and work

Early years

Mina Loy was born as Mina Gertrude Löwy in London in 1882. She was the daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish father and an English mother. After leaving school she began to study art, first from 1899 for two years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and in 1901/02 in London, where the painter Augustus John became her teacher. Together with Stephen Haweis , she moved on to Paris , where both studied at the Académie Colarossi . The couple married on December 31, 1903, after which Mina changed her last name to Loy.

Loy soon became a regular at Gertrude Stein's salon, where she met many of the leading avant-garde and writers. She developed a lifelong friendship with Stein. In 1905, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence , where they increasingly went their separate ways until the marriage finally broke up in 1913. During this time Loy joined the local immigrant community and the Futurists , with whose leader Filippo Marinetti she entered into a relationship. At that time it began with what later became known as Songs to Joannes - a brilliant achievement of modernist-avant-garde love poetry. She began publishing her poems in New York magazines. She became a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine , which also included Man Ray , William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore .

In 1914 she published her Feminist Manifesto . In it she called for a “re-systematization of the women's question” and demanded that women find out what they were: “The way things are now, you have the choice between parasitism, prostitution and negation.”

Loy and Arthur Cravan

Disaffected by the futurists' move towards fascism and also seeking a divorce, Loy went to New York in 1916, where she began acting with the Provincetown Players . She quickly became a member of the Bohème of Greenwich Village . Here she met the “poet boxer” Arthur Cravan , a self-proclaimed Dadaist and conscientious objector. Cravan fled to Mexico; after Loy's divorce was finalized, she followed him, and they were both married in Mexico City .

Both lived there in poverty, as she wrote years later. Eventually both decided (or were forced to) leave the country. Cravan set sail and left Mexico in a small yacht while Loy stood on the beach. He sailed over the horizon and was never seen again. The narrative of this disappearance is heavily anecdotal, as Loy's biographer Carolyn Burke puts it.

Return to Europe

Loy came back to Europe, in part to find Cravan. She wasn't able to accept his death. In 1920 she moved back to New York, still looking. Here she returned to her old life in Greenwich Village, devoted herself to acting again and exchanged views with her fellow poets. In 1923 she went back to Paris and, with the support of Peggy Guggenheim, started a company that designed and produced lampshades, as well as art objects made of glass, paper cuts and painted flower arrangements. In the same year her first book Lunar Baedecker , published by Robert McAlmon , was published . She revived her old friendships with Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein. From 1923 she continued to publish her poems and exhibited her pictures. She left Europe in 1936 during the Nazi era .

Later years

For the next twenty years, Loy was back in New York and lived with her daughter in Manhattan for a while . Then she went to the Bowery , where she developed an interest in the local alcoholics and homeless people (the so-called Bowery Bums ) and wrote poems about them and created sculptures ( objets trouvées ) on the subject. She then went to Colorado to live with her daughters. She became an American citizen in 1946. In 1951 she exhibited her sculptures in New York. Her second book, Lunar Baedeker & Time Tables , was published in 1958. In Colorado, she continued her work as a poet and garbage sculpture artist until her death at the age of 83. She died of pneumonia.

In the 1930s, Loy wrote her only novel, Insel, about the German surrealist painter Richard Oelze , which was published posthumously in 1991 .

literature

• Carolyn Burke: Becoming Modern. The Life of Mina Loy. Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York 1996 ISBN 0-374-10964-8 (English)
• Roger L. Conover (Ed.), Mina Loy: The Lost Lunar Baedeke. Poems of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1997 ISBN 0-374-52507-2 (English)
• Britta Jürgs (Ed.): A little water in the soap. Portraits of Dadaist artists and writers. AvivA Verlag, 1999 ISBN 3-932338-06-5
• Susanne Nadolny: Lived Longing - Border Crossers of Modernity. Edition Ebersbach, 2005 ISBN 3-938740-01-9
• Sara Crangle (Ed.): Stories and essays of Mina Loy. Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign 2011 ISBN 978-1-564-78630-2
• Ina Boesch: The DaDa. How women shaped Dada. Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich 2015 ISBN 978-3-858-81453-1
• Paul Peppis: Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes , and Sexology. Zs. "Modernism - Modernity", 9.4, 2002, pp. 561-579
• Sasha Colby: Staging Modernist Lives. HD , Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard . Three Plays and Criticism. McGill Queen's University Press, Montréal 2017

Web links

Commons : Mina Loy  - Collection of Images

• Mina Loy at Modern American Poetry (English)
• Collection of links (English)
• Jacket , No. 5, October 1998 (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Songs to Joannes
2. ^ Mina Loy: Feminist manifesto , accessed on February 14, 2016.
3. ^ Catrin Lorch: Minas Manifesto. Exhibitions and books celebrate the Dada women. Finally, because only then does the whole movement become visible. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , No. 30, 6./7. February 2016, p. 17.
4. ↑ quoted after the web link Mina Loy at Modern American Poetry