In 1959, Marcel Duchamp organized the last personal exhibition of Mina Loy. The exhibition at New York’s Bodley Gallery featured Loy’s groundbreaking collages of the 1940s and early 1950s, which were made of rags, cardboard, egg cartons and other discarded materials picked up around the Bowery , where the artist had lived. Described as “shocking and macabre” by a contemporary critic of art magazine, Loy’s works predate famous assemblages by artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. “She made art out of trash long before dumpster diving was a thing and multimedia was a term,” says writer and editor Roger Conover. But Loy’s later work was not just materially experimental; these collages of homeless men and other destitute characters in his neighborhood had a distinctly human element.
If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of Loy, you’re not alone. Outside the world of poetry – where she had a certain notoriety – she is not well known. Of course, Loy lived between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, a time when many women were kept on the fringes. She also lived an itinerant life, moving frequently between England, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, and the United States. She was close to some of the most notable cultural agents of the time, including Berenice Abbott, Constantin Brancusi and Gertrude Stein, but many of Loy’s artworks have been lost. As a single mother, she spent long periods without doing fine art in order to provide for her children. And Loy herself was ambivalent about her own artistic career: when asked why she hadn’t attended his 1959 exhibition in New York, she later replied, “But I’ve seen my work. Why would I go?
Perhaps the main reason we don’t know much about Loy today is due to the artist’s refusal to conform to any particular method, material, movement, or style. Conover calls this Loy’s “anti-aesthetic aesthetic,” and it has made it a difficult subject to capture and historicize. But as Meret Oppenheim, another unclassifiable 20th-century female artist who has recently come to prominence, it seems the world is finally ready to take a long look at Loy. A forthcoming book, Mina Loy: Strangeness is inevitable (Princeton University Press), pays tribute to the artist with a series of thoughtful essays by Jennifer R. Gross, Ann Lauterbach, Dawn Ades and Conover. Accompanied by an exhibition of the same name at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the book gives a crucial account of Loy’s varied life and art, and also sheds light on other aspects of his multi-faceted creative output, including his work as a writer , poet, playwright, inventor and fashion. and industrial designer.
Born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London in 1882 to a Jewish immigrant father and a conservative English mother, the artist spent much of her life defying her restrictive Victorian roots. Loy’s quest for art was in itself a rebellion: her mother destroyed the artist’s childhood drawings and poems as a sort of punishment. Loy gave birth to four children to three fathers, none of whom co-parented long term. She made ends meet by making bespoke clothes and hats, opening a lampshade design business, serving as a European representative for her son-in-law Julien Levy’s New York gallery, among other jobs.
“Unlike many others in her cohort, Loy was only financially and socially secure for brief periods, a fact that gave the choices she made in her life an essential precariousness; she was always inventing survival tactics,” Lauterbach notes in the book. Nonetheless, Loy had a rich cultural life in the 1920s, traveling to destinations such as Florence, New York, and Paris. The book collects examples of his sensitive pencil portraits on paper, as well as a number of fascinating archival documents that trace his commercial and artistic successes. Although Loy did not exhibit frequently, a high point came in 1933 when she showed a number of ethereal sky-colored paintings of mysterious celestial bodies at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. A number of these works are beautifully illustrated in the book and are meant to represent his complex spiritual views.
Strangeness is inevitable makes it clear that Loy lived a life of intensity, bohemianism and movement. Reviewing the work of his dynamic and diverse life, one line of his text “Incident” seems autobiographical: “So that was life; to be a kind of magnet for a kind of universal electricity. This book provides an essential foundation for future studies of this fascinating and enigmatic artist.
Mina Loy: Strangeness is inevitable is on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art until September 17. The exhibit was curated by Jennifer R. Gross.
Mina Loy: Strangeness is inevitable edited by Jennifer R. Gross, Ann Lauterbach, Roger L. Conover and Dawn Ades will be published by Princeton University Press on May 23 and is available for pre-order online.
