40 Facts About Mina Loy

Mina Loy was one of the last of the first-generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition.

Mina Loy's poetry was admired by T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, and Yvor Winters, among others.

Mina Loy was the daughter of a Hungarian Jewish tailor, Sigmund Felix Lowy, who had moved to London to evade persistent antisemitism in Budapest, and a Christian, English mother, Julia Bryan.

Lowy and Bryan had three daughters in total, with Mina Loy being the oldest.

In retrospect, Mina Loy called it "the worst art school in London" and "a haven of disappointment".

Mina Loy's father pushed for her to go to the art school in the hope that it would make her more marriageable.

Around this time, Mina Loy became fascinated with both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, and after much convincing was able to persuade her father to purchase her Dante's Complete Works and reproductions of his paintings as well as a red Moroccan leather-bound version of Christina's poems.

Mina Loy became passionate about the Pre-Raphaelites, starting first with the work of William Morris before then turning to Edward Burne-Jones.

Mina Loy had to be careful as to how she expressed herself due to her mother's control.

For example, Mina Loy described that when her mother found a drawing she had done of the naked Andromeda bound to a rock her mother, scandalised and disgusted, tore up the work and called her daughter "a vicious slut".

In 1900 Mina Loy attended the Munich Kunstlerinnenverein, or the Society of Female Artists' School, which was connected with the fine art school of Munich University, it was there that she claimed she learned draughtsmanship.

At that time, Mina Loy was Haweis's favourite subject to photograph; this is something which Mina Loy never commented on.

Whilst Mina Loy was in labour through the night, Haweis was absent with his mistress.

Two days after her first birthday, Oda died of meningitis and Mina Loy was left completely bereft with grief over the loss.

Dreading that Joella's condition might be like the meningitis that killed Oda, Mina Loy sought medical and spiritual support.

Once the children were toddlers, Mina Loy spent increasingly less time with them and they were often cared for in the cooler climate of the mountains and Forte de Marmi in the summers.

Mina Loy was drawn to Gertrude and even got the opportunity to dine with her, Dodge, and Andre Gide.

In 1913 and 1914, though she was coping with motherhood, a soured marriage, lovers, and her own artistic aspirations, Mina found time to notice and take part in the emerging Italian Futurist movement, led by Filippo Marinetti, whom Loy had a brief affair with, and to read Stein's manuscript: The Making of Americans.

Mina Loy even showed some of her own art at the first Free Futurist International Exhibition in Rome.

In 1914, while living in an expatriate community in Florence, Italy, Mina Loy wrote her Feminist Manifesto.

Disillusioned with the macho and destructive elements in Futurism, as well as craving independence and participation in a modernist art community, Mina Loy left her children, and moved to New York in winter 1916.

Mina Loy became a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine, which included Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, and Marianne Moore.

Mina Loy soon became a well-known member of the Greenwich Village bohemian circuit.

Early in 1917, Mina Loy starred alongside William Carlos Williams, as wife and husband, in Alfred Kreymborg's one act play Lima Beans produced by the Provincetown Players.

Mina Loy contributed a painting entitled Making Lampshades to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace New York which opened on 10 April 1917.

Cravan fled to Mexico to avoid the draft; when Mina Loy's divorce was final she followed him, and they married in Mexico City in 1918.

Mina Loy was presumed drowned, but reported sightings continued to haunt Loy for the rest of her life.

Mina Loy contributed writing to Marcel Duchamp's two editions of the journal The Blind Man.

Mina Loy travelled back to Florence, then New York, then back to Florence, "provoked by the news that Haweis had moved with Giles to the Caribbean".

Mina Loy brought her daughters to Berlin to enrol her daughter in dance school, but left them once more because she was drawn back to Paris by the art and literature scene.

In 1936, Mina Loy returned to New York and lived for a time with her daughter in Manhattan.

Mina Loy moved to the Bowery, where she found inspiration for poems and found object assemblage art in the destitute people she encountered.

In 1953, Mina Loy moved to Aspen, Colorado, where her daughters were already living; Joella, who had been married to the art dealer of Surrealism in New York, Julien Levy, next married the Bauhaus artist and typographer Herbert Bayer.

Mina Loy exhibited her found object art constructions in New York in 1951 and at the Bodley Gallery in 1959 in a show entitled 'Constructions' but she did not personally attend it.

Mina Loy is described as a "brilliant literary enigma" by Rachel Potter and Suzanne Hobson who outline a chronological map of her geographical and literary shifts.

Mina Loy's poetry was published in several magazines before being published in book form.

Mina Loy had four children; her children by Haweis were Oda Janet Haweis, Joella Synara Haweis Levy Bayer and John Giles Stephen Musgrove Haweis.

One year later, two days after her first birthday, Oda died of meningitis and Mina Loy was left completely bereft with grief over the loss.

Mina Loy continued to write and work on her assemblages until her death at the age of 83, on 25 September 1966 from pneumonia in Aspen, Colorado.

Recently in Argentina Camila Evia has translated and prepared an edition that includes the Feminist Manifesto and many poems by Mina Loy, making her legacy known in depth throughout Latin America.