Mina Loy (born Mina Gertrude Löwy)

Mina Loy was an important poet and artist of transatlantic modernism, though she has largely been left out of canonical narratives around the many movements in which she participated, namely Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Through her extensive contacts and activities in a wide avant-garde milieu, she played a seminal role in collecting and disseminating Dada and Surrealist art and exposing American audiences to these practices.

Born to a prosperous British family, Loy was educated as an artist in the capitals of Europe. She traveled extensively in the first decades of the twentieth century, studying in London; meeting emerging modernist writers and artists in Paris, including Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso; and joining the Italian Futurists in Florence, where she had affairs with artists F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini. During World War I she fled to the other side of the Atlantic, where she joined American and expatriate artists and poets in New York associated with magazines such as Camera Work and Rogue. In 1917 she worked with artist Marcel Duchamp to publish the two-issue Dadaist periodical The Blind Man. The following year, Loy married the amateur boxer and Dada poet Arthur Cravan (her second husband, whom she met at the Blind Man’s Ball) in Mexico City. After Cravan went missing at sea, Loy spent two years searching for him, though he was never found. She ultimately relocated to Paris in 1923, where she remained for much of the interwar period. There, she supported herself by running a retail shop at 52 rue de Colisée that sold lampshades of her own design. The store, opened with the financial backing of collector Peggy Guggenheim and her husband, artist and writer Laurence Vail, remained open until 1930.

A year later, in 1931, Loy began to serve as the Paris agent for the Julien Levy Gallery, established in New York by her son-in-law. Duchamp had introduced them at the home of Peggy Guggenheim in Paris four years earlier, in 1927; Levy married Loy’s daughter Joella later that year. Loy’s work with Levy was an arrangement of mutual exchange and respect. Levy provided Loy with a monthly allowance for her assistance in purchasing and transporting Surrealist art to New York and, in return, benefited greatly from Loy’s contacts. Loy also worked with other prominent Paris dealers, such as Léonce Rosenberg and Pierre Colle, to broker acquisitions of Surrealist artworks.

During the 1930s, Loy facilitated the movement of a significant amount of Surrealist art between the United States and Europe, including works by Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, and Pavel Tchelitchew. While awaiting transit to Levy in New York, works would often reside temporarily in Loy’s Paris apartment; these included Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931; Museum of Modern Art, New York) and German Surrealist painter Richard Oelze’s Expectation (1926; Museum of Modern Art, New York). Thanks in large part to Loy, the Levy Gallery played a major role in exposing the New York art world to Surrealism and, in January 1932, became the site of the first Surrealist exhibition in the city.

Loy continued to publish and exhibit her own paintings and works on paper through the 1950s. Her only novel, Insel, was published posthumously in 1991.