18 Facts About Arthur Cravan

Arthur Cravan was the second son of Otho Holland Lloyd and Helene Clara St Clair.

Arthur Cravan's brother Otho Lloyd was a painter and photographer married to the Russian emigre artist Olga Sacharoff.

Arthur Cravan changed his name to Cravan in 1912 in honour of his fiancee Renee Bouchet, who was born in the small village of Cravans in the department of Charente-Maritime in western France.

Arthur Cravan was born and educated in Lausanne, Switzerland, then at an English military academy; he was expelled under mysterious circumstances, but some sources suggest that it was for spanking a teacher.

Arthur Cravan declared no single nationality and claimed instead to be "a citizen of 20 countries".

Arthur Cravan set out to promote himself as an eccentric poet and art critic, but his interest in art and literature was that of the provocateur which is typified by his claim in Maintenant that art is "situated more in the guts than in the brain" and that he wanted to "break the face" of the modern art movement.

Arthur Cravan staged public spectacles with himself at the centre, once acting on the front of a line of carts where he paraded his skills as a boxer and singer.

The magazine was designed to cause sensation; in a piece about the 1914 arts salon, Arthur Cravan viciously criticised a self-portrait by Marie Laurencin, stating that it looked like she "needed a good shag".

Arthur Cravan's remarks drove Laurencin's lover and influential modernist critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire into a fury that resulted in a bid for a duel.

In 1915 Arthur Cravan held an exhibition of his paintings at the gallery Bernheim Jeune in Paris under the pseudonym Edouard Archinard.

On 13 January 1916 Arthur Cravan arrived in New York on the same ship as Leon Trotsky, Carolyn Burke notes, "just a few weeks before the Kaiser announced the resumption of attacks on steamships".

In 1917, Arthur Cravan met the poet Mina Loy at a war benefit ball where the dress code was modern art movements.

That night Arthur Cravan had to deliver an address on "The Independent Artists of France and America" but he was pranked by Picabia and Duchamp who got him so drunk that he ended up swaying and slurring his speech on the platform, shouting obscenities and removing his coat, vest, collar and suspenders.

The couple lived on very humble means and Arthur Cravan eventually got seriously ill with amoebic dysentery, fever, stomach issues.

Arthur Cravan never arrived or returned and it is presumed that he capsized and drowned in a storm raging at sea in the following days.

Loy gave birth to Fabienne Arthur Cravan Lloyd, named after her father, on 5 April 1919 in London.

Cravan, a biographical graphic novel on the life of Arthur Cravan, was written by Mike Richardson and illustrated by Rick Geary.

The Arthur Cravan Memorial Society was a 2013 BBC Radio 4 portrait of Cravan by the comedian Arthur Smith.