Becoming Modern — The Life of Mina Loy

Becoming Modern — The Life of Mina Loy by Carolyn Burke
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 1996; 494 pages

is one of those names a lot of people recognize
without knowing exactly who she was.

When she appears on lists of famous presences,
it adds cachet, and we nod our heads knowingly;
but most of us are hard pressed to say why.

— Nicholas Fox Weber, New York Times

The name Mina Loy opens the door to an era of spirited exchanges between American and Continental vanguards. It conjures up smoky art classes in prewar Montparnasse, costume balls at Mabel Dodge’s Florentine villa, Futurist soirées where enraged audiences hurl vegetables at the stage, Dadaesque poetry readings, gossipy visits with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, dinners in Brancusi’s studio among half-finished blocks of marble — all scenes that reveal the shapes of the modernist imagination. Her life, that of a woman peculiarly responsive to the social and artistic movements of her time, allows us to look more deeply into the self constructing strategies of the international avant-garde.

But as her title Lunar Baedecker suggests, Mina Loy also saw herself as a cartographer of the imagination — at a time when terms like “expatriate” and “exile” held somewhat different meanings than in ours. This biography follows her on voyages of many kinds, tracing her development from a repressive London childhood in the 1880s to art studies in fin-de-siècle Munich and Paris, the Florence of Futurism, and New York in the days of Dada, to revolutionary Mexico (with Arthur Cravan) and postwar Europe (after his disappearance), then back to the United States, where she spent the rest of her life. Her transits describe not linear progress but a series of motions like the epicycles on the celestial maps in which she sought inspiration — travel as an elliptical form of quest.