Thanks.
I began my foray into early Modernism with the Russian Formalists and futurists. Mina Loy’s name came up then because of her relationship with Italian Futurist Marinetti, and possibly because she had been, while still in her teens, an art student in Munich, where a group of Russians were experimenting. I was surprised to see that there was a substantial biography of her and that it was available on Kindle: Burke, Carolyn, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. ..I downloaded it right away and took my time reading it. I was cloistered; it was during the Pandemic. This is what Google had to say about the Burke book:
“The poet and visual artist Mina Loy has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism in Florence as Gertrude Stein’s friend and Marinetti’s lover; in New York as Marcel Duchamp’s co-conspirator and Djuna Barnes’s confidante; in Mexico with her greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke’s riveting, authoritative biography, Becoming Modern, brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism and one woman’s important contribution to it.”
The above is so concise and true to my reading that I’m almost intimidated into not going on. But it is quite a big book, covering a lot, with quite a bit of analysis, and I read it with intense and careful interest. So I will go on.
Sometimes you run into someone you think you don’t know from Adam and then you find out that you and that person in fact met years ago at a party. That’s the way it was with me and Mina Loy. Didn’t it count that I’d run into her before, in a book I read some years ago? The book was Duchamp – A Biography, by Calvin Tomkins. I enjoyed that book; it was packed full of information, and well written.
I still have a copy. So I looked in the index just now and there are several, in fact five different places where Loy is mentioned. She was part of the gang.
One could of course confuse the name with Myrna Loy, movie star of ancient times; which no doubt has happened. I was flipping the dial a few nights ago and there was Myrna Loy with William Powell and their trusty dog Asta, in one of the Thin Man movies that made them so famous that they were still famous and the movies were still being shown in theaters when I was growing up in the 1950s. (Myrna played a fast talking dame, a genre that was well drawn out in a book I loved, Fast-Talking Dames, by Maria DiBattista, which portrays Hepburn, Dunne, Stanwyck, Myrna Loy and the others with their snappy repartee, something the younger generation only thinks it has invented.)
Mina Loy was born in London in 1882. Her father, a Hungarian Jew, Sigmund Felix Lowy, (She would later change her name), was a tailor who had worked his way up to being a purveyor of men’s clothing. Her mother, Julia Bryan, was a British Evangelical Christian of a somewhat lower class, who had gotten pregnant by the Jewish tailor to her lifetime regret, (she was seven months pregnant when Mina was born), married him and then had two more daughters beside the oldest, Mina. Mina, who became her mother's scapegoat, wouldn’t know for years the aggravating circumstances of her own birth. Her mother, Julia, though she had three children by Sigmund, was an anti-Semite and resented her husband’s refusal to separate himself from his Jewish community and his religion. She found fault in everything her oldest daughter did, calling Mina a sinner, and all manner of forms of brazen hussy.
Mina’s first memories are of living in Hampstead, where the family’s first home, a rental, was in a new and less expensive ‘arriviste’ section. One memory, which she later felt had seeded her creative impulses, was of being carried down the front stairs by her mother’s doctor amidst refracted sunlight beaming through colored glass bottles arranged on a shelf below the rectangular window over the front door. The doctor was taking her home after she had been cared for by his wife while Mina’s mother gave birth to her second of three little girls.
When she was three, Mina's Nanny began reading to her from a common religious children’s book, Peep of Day. She felt the magical nature of reading and wanted a book of her own, and her parents gave her an alphabet book. Before long she was a precocious reader. When she came across a book that she particularly liked, one of the few non-religious books allowed into the nursery, it was a cultural book written for a child’s mind as envisioned in the Victorian era, entitled Chaucer for Children To quote Carolyn Burke;
“This new door opened not onto eternity but onto British history and culture. Its author, a Mrs. H. R. Haweis, had dedicated her book to her four-year-old son. More than Mrs. Haweis’s bowdlerized versions of Chaucer’s tales and flat, Pre-Raphaelite-style illustrations, it was the author’s estimate of, and respect for, her own child's mind that impressed Mina. She envied the young boy in the dedicatory portrait and wondered at his cleverness as he sat reading the stories that his mother had provided for him.”
Mina had a much better relationship with her father, who loved her and understood her enthusiasm for art. An amateur painter, he sometimes took Mina to museums and art galleries; and he tried to protect her from her mother’s hostility, though he too was intimidated by Julia, and also was inclined by Jewish tradition to think the mother should be in charge of the children. In 1892 when Mina was ten, he bought a house in West Hampstead. Many houses in the neighborhood were, and still are given names; so they named the house Clinton. No idea why.
Just after they moved they hired a new nanny who would attempt to put the fear of God into the girls. Her name was Mrs. Nickson, and she was a homely, glum woman who’s religiosity paralleled the mother of the three girls, perhaps minus the status anxiety. For two years the governess-teacher had a calming effect on Julia, who hoped that her ally would be able to purge her eldest daughter of her sinful nature, which she felt had no doubt come from the Jewish side of the family; and when Mrs. Nickson left service, Mina was in dread that she would be left with yet another governess until she turned eighteen, and then allowed to moulder under her mother’s thumb until they could get her married off.
But at the end of that two year period, when Mrs. Nickson decided to leave service, Sigmund, asserting himself, declared his plan to send Mina and Dora to school. They were to go to a progressive school in Hampstead, though which one it was I can’t say. I searched far and wide online, in vain. Mina called the school the ‘Chaucer’ School, after Mrs. Haweies book, which was still a favorite of hers. …As she began attending ‘Chaucer’, she often thought about her mother’s obsessive mode of abusive verbal attacks, which she called ‘The Voice’.
From Mina’s descriptions of Julia, I’ve wondered if she was all that similar to every Evangelical Victorian mother or was she perhaps a bit deranged; in excess of her societal programming. Personally, I think she was a bit nuts. Burke quotes Julia as saying things like, “How can I fit you? You nasty girl. Do you think at your age it is decent to have a figure?” And, even more extreme, “Your vile flesh, you’ll get no good out of it. Curse you. Curse your father.” She did make friends at Chaucer, though, and found out that not all mothers were verbally violent, and that most other mothers, most but not all, took great care in seeing that their daughters were clean and well dressed and their hair neatly brushed and arranged.
During the whole of the 19th century the education system in England grew phenomenally. By the end of the Victorian era, 1819 to 1901, laws had been passed with great frequency that allotted Government money and resources to opening up schools throughout England, Scotland and Wales. Privately funded schools were subject to most of the same laws as the government funded ones, and what could be taught was legislated carefully, down to the number and letter. Mostly it was reading, writing and arithmetic.
Mina and her sister were at ‘Chaucer’, for almost three years, during which they learned the ‘three Rs’, and Mina became known for her drawing facility and Dora for her playing the piano. I wish I knew more about the school but it seems like even if I were to undertake a study of the entire history of the educational system of England, I would probably not learn a thing about ‘Chaucer’. …There is no history of her experiences at that elementary school. She must have felt it was too boring to report on. I regret that, as I also regret not knowing the history of Mina’s own personal reading, particularly early on, but also in her later life. I wish she had written a “Books of my life”, as some writers do. Though she continued to draw while at Chaucer, I don’t know under what conditions that was. Did she draw at school? Or only at home?
I believe her mother was consistently critical of her work, while her father was supportive. I wonder if her father wasn’t more attentive and even perhaps more loving than it would appear from what Mina has said in her biographical work? The family scenario certainly lent itself to melodramatic expression.
At any rate, by the end of those three years she was fifteen and in full blown adolescence. She was no longer so cowed by her mother that she couldn’t argue back. As far as he mother was concerned, Mina could now decorate the house, sew or embroider, and simply wait, like any ‘normal’ middle-class girl, till a suitable husband was found.
Then, when she began to be vocal about wanting to go to Art School, the recent trial of Oscar Wilde supported her mother’s contention that the art world was nothing but a nest of perverts. Her father though, this time, really came through. He asserted himself and decided that, in fact, she should go to art school. …He reasoned that it would add to her value in the marriage game. (And he might have been right about that.) After a personal survey of the available art schools in London, mostly a moral survey, and mostly based on outward appearances, and with his wife’s participation, it was decided she would go to St. John’s Wood; the one closest to home.
Chapter 2 in the Burke book is titled ‘The Worst Art School in London’. The title is meant, I’m quite sure, to show Mina’s feeling that the school at “The Wood”, was not satisfactory. Mina dismisses her time there as not important. Wikipedia quotes her as saying that she thought the school was “A haven of disappointment.” In this she was probably displaying some retrospective snobbery, combined with the fact that she was as yet still continuing to live at home. She had to this point never lived outside of the oppressive environment of her mother’s hostile personality.
It was probably not the worst art school in London. In fact, in 1897 art schools from Moscow to San Francisco used surprisingly similar approaches to teaching; learning to draw the figure from plaster casts of sculptured figures; then learning color by mixing color, and anatomy by visiting dead bodies at the morgue. The full exposure of nude models was something a student had to graduate to.
The neighborhood of St. John’s Wood is adjacent to Hampstead; just a few blocks west of Hampstead Heath and Hampstead High Street. The School, on Elm Tree Road, had been founded in 1878 by two art teachers, Eliseo Abelardo Alvarez Calderon, and Bernard Evans Ward. Numerous artists well known to the art world of turn-of-the-century London studied there, though I recognize almost none of their names. Beside Mina Loy there was Enid Bell, Frank Beresford, Herbert James Draper; and the first African to study art in England, Aina Onabolu, who became famous in his own country of Nigeria. Teachers included John Piper, Leonard Walker and Vanessa Bell*. The school was qualified to train students for entrance into the Royal Academy Schools, in fact more “Wood” students made it to the R.A. than those of any other London art school. Between 1880 and 1903 over 300 of its students succeeded in gaining admission to the Academy Schools.
*From: Artist Biographies; a website
On Grove End Road in St. John’s Wood, several wealthy artists, including Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and James Tissot had homes which were architectural showplaces. There was also a group known as the St. John’s Wood Clique; Royal Academy artists who painted illustrative scenes from Shakespeare and from English history.*
*Burke
Mina was liked at the school. She began to adjust to the idea that people thought of her as pretty. She also began to learn a new vernacular, that of the artist and in particular that of the painter. She was led to various books and articles of art criticism and began to develop her own opinions. She became interested in the work of Dante Gabiel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, and convinced her father to buy her a book of reproductions; the complete works of Dante Rossetti; and a leather-bound version of Christina Rossetti’s poems. Soon she added other Pre-Raphaelites, as well as William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones to her collection of art books. From these she made drawings, but those she brought home came up against resistance from her mother who considered most of her drawings sinful, even if what they portrayed was little more than a simple aura of contentment.
There was a certain element of tedium to the instruction, most notable in the technique of stippling and in the frustration of working with loin clothed nudes. But there was a joyful communion of the like-minded at tea time.
A turning point occurred when she was given a book which was going around; her first exposure to a piece of serious art criticism; a translation of a book by a German medical doctor and “self-styled” sociologist named Max Nordau, an important European intellectual of the time and one of the founders of Zionism. The book, Degeneration, published in 1893, lumped Wagner, the Symbolists, mystics, Pre-Praphaelites, Aestheticism, and Decadentism, under the heading of Modern, all of whom he classified as degenerate due to “nervous exhaustion” caused by the diseased state of contemporary life. Huysman and Zola also were targeted as ‘enemies of society.’According to Burke, “Nordau applied the vocabulary developed by Krafft-Ebing and Lombroso in their studies of the criminally insane to the works of representative modern artists, with Oscar Wilde as exhibit A.
Because she loved Rossetti she would accept no negation of her own feelings. She took a contrarian approach to Nordau’s 1893 book, taking his criticism of artists she liked as personal. She had begun to build her own ego-ideal.
She probably understood this more clearly later on, and added that clarity to her autobiographical reminiscences. By then she understood something about intuition and its function as a tool of the hero. If she made the aesthetic content of Rosetti’s paintings and poetry into a parental introject it served her well. It became part of a structure to build on, as did the work of Burn-Jones [sp.] and William Morris. She now had the beginnings of an aesthetic taste to compare favorably with the environment she still shared with her parents.
In her second year at St. John’s wood Mina became friends with a girl named Eva, who had a similar dysfunctional relationship with her own mother. With Eva’s help she was able to conclude that there might be a way out of her familial trap; she decided to find herself a husband; or rather, first, a fiancé. Her first pick was a young man who smoked a curved pipe, had a nice profile, and was nicely dressed. She seemed to go after him in a rather assertive manner. After several walks in the park, she managed to confront him with what for him was a paralyzing fear of ‘doing”, well, anything. Although her parents seemed to find the young man, who’s name was Lucas, “an acceptable suitor” especially after learning that he came from a wealthy family, for Mina, the biological clock was simply time bearing down on her concerning her growing desire for real life experience and freedom from the specter of ‘Voice’, that was her mother.
Lucas was her first attempt at choosing a man. He was timid…he seemed more virginal and frightened then she, if in fact she was even at all nervous, about which there is no available clue . They spent official, and chaperoned time together, but he couldn’t transcend his fear, and besides, she soon had her eye on someone else. She broke off the engagement.
It might have been her discovery of the Pre-Raphaelites, or it might have been conversations with her father, but probably it was in the air; that she began to identify with that class of people called geniuses. For certain artists, first the Royal Academy ones and then as time went on, others, the classification of ‘genius’, was the rough equivalent of being appointed into the aristocracy, or at least the upper-middle class; becoming in a certain special way socially acceptable. (I hesitate to add that there is still some of that going around.)
A more mature Mina, writing about it years later, would say that she had risen to a higher level. She was beginning to feel her instincts, something stirring below the conscious level. But it was also, I think, an honest assessment of what turned out to be her own genius, one attracted to beauty, grace, charm and intellectual activity, all of which turned out to be personified in one man. …In retrospect she felt she had been subconsciously drawn to this new man. She “felt”, the poetic in him. He was a perfect fit for that newly forming ego-ideal. …She had first seen him on the tennis court! “…a pale stranger broad-shouldered narrow hipped, lifting his arms in a white shirt.” In her autobiographical writing she referred to him as Holyoak, which to me smacks of gothic romance but I’m not up to speed on that genre.
He seems to have been a bit older and more worldly-wise than the other students at the Wood. He’d already had some success as an actor and was doing well enough in his new career as an “art photographer” to have photographed at least a few celebrities. And Mina, when she was able to watch him at work, had sufficient self-confidence to see herself as potentially a worthy photographic subject.
With Holyoak she shared a general attachment to earlier movements such as aestheticism, symbolism, and romanticism, along with the more contemporary Pre-Raphaelite genre, which had yet to arrive at its untimely death. (No-doubt caused by the quickening forward momentum of modernism.).
They went to a Royal Academy ball, accompanied by her father Sigmund and sister Dora. They danced together. Holyoak was able to watch her relating to her sister and father…
One day after a romantic walk, when they entered the privacy of his studio, he smothered her with kisses, on her both cheeks and forehead, and then played something on the piano which added to the spell that they were both in, though she had no idea who or what music it was. …She experienced being in love and sharing a heightened awareness that is there forever; in amber; a prolonged courtship that manages to gracefully maintain its virginity. After days, or perhaps even weeks of blissful walking among the wild flowers and rose covered gardens, a problem developed. Holyoak’s brother broke the news that his handsome sibling had gotten mixed up in a seamy, complicated affair. He was sharing his lovely little house with a married couple; and the wife, Mrs. Peck, while nursing the poor Holyoak through what might have been a bad cold, managed to fall in love with him, which love had been reciprocated by Holyoak in a way that must have been pleasing to the wife, with the husband’s stoic Victorian acceptance. From what appeared to be a heady brew of good feelings with the addition of a love triangle things went south rather quickly, in a crescendo of misunderstanding and unpredictability.
The next time she saw him she became tongue tied and it wasn’t the new, but a regressed Mina, or what today we might call a parental introject; “The Voice”, her mother Julia, who spoke. Holyoak was telling her he’d broken off with the married woman, and Mina became tongue tied. She wanted to make it clear that she loved him but there was to be no next time. While the wife distracted Holyoak, Julia, Mina’s mother, caused an even more successful interference.
Julia had developed the habit of passing out, often as a response to Mina’s ‘evil’ pursuits. Her last what was then called swoon, during which she fell onto the hard floor, brought on a miscarriage which further developed into peritonitis. A twenty four hour nursing staff were hired and the girls were ordered to stay in the house, a Victorian custom when a mother was ill. I love the following tid-bit, in the Burke biography; “Mina distracted herself with the novels of Oida*, a popular writer who’s sensational tales of peasants and aristocrats offered an escape from middle-class morality. (Now, how am I supposed to bypass Oida?)
- Pretend we all know about Oida? Google, please come to the rescue …wouldn’t it possibly, even probably, have something to do with the development, the stage settings, for Mina’s idealism? But this would have to wait, for me, until some as yet still later date, due in my case to the one-two punch of Psoriasis and Covid Fear. (“Oida, you’ll have to wait.”)
However. As soon as Julia heard about this Oida person she had all those contraband books “put under lock and key.” On top of this, a full time ladies companion, a Mrs. Rayburn, was hired to make sure the two girls never left the house. (And I suppose also make sure they continue their education in how to become a lady.)
Thinking toward the future, Sigmund, while his wife was in a weakened condition, decided that what Mina needed, if she must study art, was an all-Woman’s Art School. Having been brought up in a heavily German Jewish environment in Hungary, (he spoke fluent German), he did some research and decided, without seeking Julia’s approval, that Mina should spend a year at the Munich Kunstlerinnenverien Society of Female Artist’s School, part of Munich University. …Through the British Consulate he found an aristocratic family who took boarders. Mina would be associated with good society. And Mrs. Rayburn would accompany her on the trip to Germany as chaperone. Holyoak was never to be seen again.
The Society of Female Artist’s school, with its ties to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, was similar in its social acceptability to London’s royal Academy. Staying with a baronial family and studying at a royally approved art school would enable Mina to move upward in the social hierarchy, a major concern to her parents.
Before Mrs. Rayburn returned to London, the Baron took the two women on a tour of the city during which he and his wife pumped then for information on Mr. Lowy’s social status. Satisfied that he was a dealer in wholesale cloth, presumably to the upper-classes, Mina settled in; she would be there for a year. Mrs. Rayburn headed home.
Kandinsky’s 1908 painting: Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St. Ursula.
Just as she had at ‘The Wood’, In her classes at Kunstlerinnenverien Mina progressed quickly and became a favorite of the teachers. At home the Baroness encouraged her into down-to-earth conversations that were free from the moral pedagogy of Julia. Mamalie, as she was encouraged to be called, was maternal in a casual way that must have been a relaxing change for Mina. They talked. Mamalie delivered to Mina an unglamorous take on adult love, and threw some cold water on Mina’s attempt to romanticize her version of the Holyoak courtship.
Her classmates pointed out the ‘notorious’ Grafen Franziska zu Reventlow, someone who’s social position Mina had been taught to see as that of “the fallen woman”, In a new light, though, Mina saw her position differently, possibly as improved as; along the lines of “not that bad!” The opinion that the students seemed to share of ‘The Grafen’, was favorable. She was a recognized writer in the popular magazines, a translator, and an arbiter of taste. She was attractive, a glamourous figure in Shwabing, always accompanied by an adoring clique; …thought of as a “Bohemian Princess.” (A reaction to her mother’s pathological projections no doubt helped lead Mina to sympathize with this and other “fallen women”, but the Grafen also had certain idiosyncratic feminist opinions which were similar to those that Mina would use to great effect in her future writing.)
After one of the paying house guests, a young man named Alexander, told Mina that he found the Baron’s place through a newspaper ad, in which it was allowed that he could dine with interesting guests including a lovely English “Miss”; she began to smell a rat. ...Then, before the weather turned cold, the Baron took the whole family, and Mina too, on a grand vacation, one which Mina wondered how they could afford. They would travel by train to a famous lake, the Sternburger See, in the Bavarian Alps.
They stayed in a grand hunting Lodge, from which home base the Baron took everyone through daily strenuous hikes through mountains and fields of clover with occasional beer-hall rest stops. (She did find a little time to sketch the scenery.)
One early morning, the whole family was to climb a mountain, but the Baron decided the family should stay behind, and sent Mina on up with three single men. All three men as well as Mina found that situation more than slightly peculiar, and thought, perhaps, that it was some sort of set-up. The three were perfect gentlemen, enjoyed the view, but all including Mina were suspicious of the Baron’s intentions. Meanwhile, the brisk level of activity continued. She began to see, though, that her hosts, in spite of noble bloodlines, were short on funds.
... And this is where I’ve left Mina Loy, as I come out of my unhealthy doldrums; having also by this time reached the ripe old age of 80. And my plan now is to re-start my Mina fascination by re-reading the Burke Book, Becoming Modern; the Life of Mina Loy, by Carolyn Burke, which I still have on my Kindle.
Some Notes;
Its “curvilinear aesthetic” was everywhere in Shwabing; in paintings, pottery, glass, storefront and interior design; it was a close relative of Art Nouveau. The Arts and Crafts movement, somewhat differentiated from Jugenstile, was also booming, and was promoted by the magazine.
Founded in Munich by Hirth, Jugend* was edited by him until his death in 1916. Originally intended to showcase only German Arts and Crafts, instead it wound up showcasing the German version of Art Nouveau. The magazine was famous for its highly original and eye- catching covers which made many of their illustrators famous and in general advanced the position of illustrators throughout the world.
*Wikipedia; “The magazine, along with several others that launched more or less concurrently, including Pan, Simplicissimus, Dekorative Kunst ("Decorative Art") and Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration ("German Art and Decoration") collectively roused interest among wealthy industrialists and the artistocracy, which further spread interest in Jugendstil from 2D art (graphic design) to 3D art (architecture), as well as more applied art.[2] Germany's gesamtkunstwerk ("synthesized artwork") tradition eventually merged and evolved those interests into the Bauhaus movement.”
The genre of Art Nouveau swept the Western World. Its popularity seemed to grow almost overnight, similar to certain later styles; Abstraction Impressionism; Pop Art. Many things laid the groundwork for it, but two events that fascinate me are the invention of the Burmester Curve, (along with technical and design interest in curves, associated with the machine age, in general..) and the publication of several series of biological engravings,* Kunstformen der Natur (known in English as Art Forms in Nature) is a book of lithographic and halftone prints by German biologist Ernst Haeckel.*
*Wikipedia; “Originally published in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904 and collectively in two volumes in 1904,[2] it consists of 100 prints of various organisms, many of which were first described by Haeckel himself. Over the course of his career, over 1000 engravings were produced based on Haeckel's sketches and watercolors; many of the best of these were chosen for Kunstformen der Natur, translated from sketch to print by lithographer Adolf Giltsch.[3] …A second edition of Kunstformen, containing only 30 prints, was produced in 1924.”
Another topic discussed frequently by the students was that of the Secession of 1892. In that year a group of artists broke away from the Munich Artists Association to promote their own art, “..in the face of what they considered official paternalism and its conservative policies.”* They would split again in 1901 when some members formed the group ‘Phalanx’, and again in 1913 when the ‘New Munich Secession’ was formed. Publisher Georg Hirth used the term “Secession” to represent; “…the spirit of the various modern and reactionary movements of the era.”*
*Wikipedia
Since I haven't yet discussed her work, but have read much of the available poetry, I'd like to say that I love what I'll refer to as her Bowery poem, which I found online -
Hot Cross Bum; Poem, Mina Loy;
Can I find a way to ‘Link’, the following? Until then I'll just say it's in.....
Yale University Library, Digital Collection......
.....I would bet no editor currently alive would allow this poem to be published without changing the title, but I’m fine with it. I’m asking you to read this poem to sample what I personally think is a great example of her mature work. It will be of some help, I grant you, if you, like me, have some personal familiarity with the place in NYC called the Bowery, or, in other towns, usually referred to as ‘Skid Row’.
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