1When the British artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) first set foot in America in 1916, she was acclaimed for her provocative poetry, in particular for her “Love Songs to Joannes” (1915-1917) which had been published shortly before her arrival in the United States. A few months later, the New York Evening Sun published an interview of Loy, praising her as the embodiment of the “Modern Woman”: “If she isn’t the Modern Woman, who is, pray?” (Anonymous 1917, 10). The title of the piece hints at Loy’s multiple talents and literary eccentricities: “Mina Loy, Painter, Poet and Playwright, Doesn’t Try to Express Personality by Wearing Odd Looking Draperies – Her Clothes Suggest the Smartest Shops but Her Poems Would Have Puzzled Grandma” (ibid.). The journalist’s humorous comment highlights the novelty of her work and the modernity of her personality: Loy is portrayed as embracing neophilia, while the old-fashioned figure of the “puzzled” grandmother appears on the side of neophobia.
- 1 See Agamben’s essay “Poeisis and Praxis”: “The Greeks used the word ποίησις [poíēsis] to characteri (...)
2Going beyond this fascination with the “new” and “modern” aura surrounding Loy’s persona, her work bears the mark of constant aesthetic renewal and artistic reinvention. Loy is mostly known today for her collection of poems Lunar Baedecker, published by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Press (Loy 1923), and for the subsequent reeditions of her poems. At the time, Loy was residing in Paris and observed the development of the Surrealist scene in the 1920s, including the publication of André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, and the launch of The Surrealist Revolution, a magazine published between 1924 and 1929. However, Loy was not only a poet, but also a versatile artist; she was a writer but also created and sold many objects such as lampshades, which reminds us of the Aristotelian concept of poiein, to make, a making that, in Agamben’s and Arendt’s reading of the concept, is always concerned with the production of presence, and thus with birth, and indeed, with re-birth or re-naissance.1
3Throughout her life, Loy paid tribute to many prominent artists like Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and the sculptor Brancusi – in her poem “Brancusi’s Golden Bird”), as well as the German painter Richard Oelze and the American Surrealist Joseph Cornell (both of whom appear in her Surrealist novel Insel (Loy 2014). Relying on Loy’s lesser-known essays and notes on art as well as her own artworks (including her late assemblages), this article examines Loy’s linguistic, critical, spiritual, and material strategies of renewal. I argue that her critical takes on art are entwined with her own creative practices as a visual artist, combining Surrealist techniques and her innovative experimentations with recycling. Relying on Walter Benjamin’s notions of repetition and renewal, I suggest that Loy’s use of various materials – from words on the page to lampshades, recycled objects and constructions – stages the tension between old and new, neophilia and neophobia, and between organic and mechanical Surrealism.
4In her essay “Modern Poetry,” published in the little magazine Charm in 1925, Mina Loy identified the source of the renewal of the English language in the streets of New York. While praising the work of Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, H. D., Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, she famously claimed:
It was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born and each one, for purposes of communication at least English – English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races […]. (Loy 1996, 158)
5In this context, Loy’s comments on Pound are particularly relevant, especially when considering his famous slogan, “make it new” (Pound 1934). For both writers, the attraction of novelty resides in the process of recycling – words, ideas, images, and even objects. Pound’s motto derives from a Chinese proverb (North 2013, 164) and he translated the poetry of the troubadours, while Loy recycled various materials to create her late assemblages, which will be the focus of my last section. In “Modern Poetry,” she expresses her admiration for Pound’s talent in recognizing and federating poetic energies: “to speak of the modern movement is to speak of him; the masterly impresario of modern poets, for without the discoveries he made with his poet’s instinct for poetry, this modern movement would still be rather a nebula than the constellation it has become” (Loy 1996, 158). Loy celebrates a lively form of language that can be found in the streets of New York:
This composite language is a very living language, it grows as you speak. For the true American appears to be ashamed to say anything in the way it has been said before. Every moment he ingeniously coins new words for old ideas, to keep good humor warm. And on the baser avenues of Manhattan every voice swings to the triple rhythm of its race, its citizenship and its personality. (ibid., 159)
6It is no wonder, then, that Loy has been reclaimed by many American scholars as part of an American literary frame and canon (Perloff 1998, 195; Hart 2010, 184).
- 2 The first drafts of the novel date from the early 1930s when Loy was still living in Paris, but she (...)
7However, although Loy’s poems may have been influenced by what she calls the American “renaissance of poetry,” her often overlooked prose autobiographies may be analyzed in the light of the Surrealists’ renewal of language. Loy’s autobiographical novel Insel was inspired by her real-life encounter with the German painter Richard Oelze whom she had met in Paris after his arrival in 1933, and portrays a strange and fascinating artist called Insel, deemed “too [S]urrealist for the [S]urrealists” (Loy 2014, 104). This innovative novel, set in Paris in the 1930s, echoes Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, while approaching the Surrealists’ experimentations with occultism.2
8The narrator, Mrs Jones – an artist and art-dealer who stands as a fictional double of Mina Loy – and Insel wander in the streets of Paris, walking aimlessly from the banks of the Seine to Montparnasse. Although Loy’s novel does not reflect the political revolution advocated by the French Surrealists, she insists on the contrast between the spiritual and the material conditions necessary to the Surrealist artist to create. As Insel states: “none of the [S]urrealists will have anything to do with me. They know only too well, if they did, I should try to borrow money,” to which Mrs Jones replies: “I should have thought you’d be worth a little money to a [S]urrealist. He might learn what supereality is about – you are organically surreal” (ibid., 108). Insel is portrayed as “organically surreal,” embodying a more spontaneous and natural form of Surrealism. Loy’s protagonist is depicted as a bohemian painter, who comes to Mrs Jones for financial help, but he is also portrayed as the ultimate Surrealist, while not completely belonging to the Parisian Surrealist community. Alongside this semi-fictional character, Loy mentions real-life Surrealists, including André Breton (under the pseudonym of “Moto”), the painter Salvador Dalí, the German artist Max Ernst, and the photographer Man Ray who, in 1920, took a portrait of Loy – wearing thermometer-shaped earrings he had designed – that features on the cover of the Lost Lunar Baedeker. The many references in Insel to Surrealist artists – and to Oelze in particular – led Susan Rosenbaum to analyze the novel as a “textual gallery,” as she explains in Navigating the Avant-Garde: “an experimental text-based ‘gallery’ at once inspired by and critical of Oelze and his paintings. The novel also served as a space in which Loy tested out her ideas about her own Surrealist paintings and designs from this era” (Churchill, Kinnahan and Rosenbaum 2020a).
- 3 On Loy’s role as Levy’s agent, see Burke’s essay “Loy-alism: Julien Levy’s Kinship with Mina Loy” ( (...)
9While in Paris in the early 1930s, Loy acted as an intermediary between her son-in-law, the art collector Julien Levy, and many European Surrealists, to organize the first major exhibition of Surrealist art in the United States in 1932.3 One of the paintings selected for this exhibition was Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, also known as The Limp Watches, which may have inspired the distortion of time in Insel: “The [S]urrealist man is very long, stretching like a live wire from 1938 as far into the future & through equally numerous stages of evolution as he reaches into the past” (Loy 2014, 163). “[R]each[ing] into the past” while “stretching […] far into the future” could apply to Loy’s own stance regarding the question of the new, constantly marked by the notions of adapting, reclaiming, and recycling existing materials.
- 4 These texts have recently been edited by Karla Kelsey under the title Lost Writings: Two Novels by (...)
10Loy’s Surrealist imagery challenges rationality, and takes part in the renewal of language, reminding the reader of Magritte’s or Dalí’s Surrealist paintings. Some fragments from her “Notes on Childhood,” originally part of her autobiographies “Islands in the Air” and “The Child and the Parent,”4 illustrate Loy’s explorations of consciousness and of the unconscious through automatic writing, as stated by the narrator: “I had the art of animating ideas in a universe at once within and outside the real world. For the things I saw appeared to no one else, horsehair sofas turning into ships” and later: “I used to believe I could create flawless people by holding a dove’s egg under my armpit” (Loy 1982, 314). These images are based on free associations that contradict logical principles, reminding us of André Breton’s definition of Surrealism as it appears in his first Manifesto:
Surréalisme, n.m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale. (Breton 2017, 36)
11Instead of rationality, the reader is confronted with strange verbal combinations going against Cartesian logic. Loy explores the movement of thought, with one image leading up to a completely different one, opening up unexpected horizons of consciousness, in between dream and reality.
12In Insel, the characters develop a special mental connection, so strong that the narrator claims that they are able “to meet on the unexplored frontiers of consciousness” (Loy 2014, 135). The world of dreams and this contact zone between consciousness and the unconscious are filled with Surrealist images. Insel is portrayed as a Surrealist visionary: “As under his conjurative power of projecting images, I felt myself grow to the ruby proportions of a colossal beef steak” (ibid., 34). The image challenges reason, in an unexpected and comical comparison. This sentence merges two objects of desire from Insel’s perspective: Mrs Jones, on the one hand, and food on the other, a clear object of temptation for the starving artist. Loy herself worked with visual and textual fragments of matter and words, brought together like pieces of a puzzle into new and surprising combinations.
- 5 I will not focus on Loy’s ekphrastic poems which have already been extensively studied. On “James J (...)
13In April 1917, around the same time Duchamp and Cravan created a controversy at the Salon des Indépendants in New York, Loy published a text in the first issue of the short-lived magazine The Blind Man, entitled “In… Formation,” in which she explained the relationship between the artist and the audience: “musing on the distinction between ordinary members of the public and the artist, who both like the same drinks, can fight in the same trenches, pretend to the same women; but never see the same thing ONCE” (Loy 1982, 285). To Loy, the artist’s lens differs from that of the audience: “The only trouble with The Public is education. Education is the putting of spectacles on wholesome eyes. […] Only Artists can look at a greying stickiness on smooth canvas” (ibid.). While Loy was evidently a talented visual artist, she also knew the avant-garde artistic circles of the early twentieth century quite intimately. This led her to write a number of essays on art, and to adopt an original critical stance in her poems and novels, as suggested by Laura Scuriatti: “These texts […] propose themselves as works of literary or artistic criticism: poetry and criticism become one in the act of rewriting the works of others and re-creating them into Loy’s own” (Scuriatti 2019, 249). Loy’s critical and aesthetic trajectory is showcased in her writings on art, which are intricately linked to her own creative practices as a visual artist. In a 1918 issue of The Little Review, Ezra Pound defined Imagism as “poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant” (Pound 1918, 57). To some extent, this definition could apply to Loy’s poems openly addressing the question of the visual arts.5
14Loy’s critical stance is particularly striking in her 1950 essay “Phenomenon in American Art,” drawing parallels between the artworks of two major artists of the twentieth century. The essay focuses on an exhibition of boxes and objects made by Joseph Cornell and exhibited at the Egan Gallery in New York, from December 1949 to January 1950:
The other day, I responded to an announcement from the Egan Gallery where, on parting the door my hand brushed an imprint……
AVIARY.
It is a long aesthetic itinerary from Brancusi’s “Golden Bird” to Cornell’s “Aviary.” The first is the purest abstraction I have ever seen; the latter is the purest enticement of the abstract into the objective, even as cubism marks an itinerary of return to composite form, something which cubists predicted would never again preoccupy the artist.
Gertrude Stein explained the air of cubism to me as “deconstruction preparatory to complete reconstruction of the objective.” I do not know if anyone considers this reconstruction process yet accomplished. How many sighs of ennui would have been spared if only Picasso could have copyrighted the Picassian. (Loy MLP B6 F172)
15This passage offers the reader a unique itinerary through twentieth-century art and invites us to think of Loy’s critical position when analyzing the work of several major figures of the artistic avant-gardes. She offers interpretations of pictorial and literary works, as well as of sculptures and constructions, intertwining visual and verbal strategies.
16In the early 1930s, while going back and forth between Paris and New York, Levy gifted Cornell various boxes, frames, and found objects that he had bought with Loy in Parisian flea markets (Burke 1996, 379). Cornell enthusiastically used these found objects to create his own montages and constructions, which Levy later exhibited:
He closely examined some of the collection of old French puzzle boxes and watch springs in old containers with transparent covers (backed by views of the Arc de Triomphe) I brought out to show him. I had found these years before, sleuthing with Mina for finds in the Marché aux Puces in Paris. Within a week he returned with several objects in three dimensions, a few with moving parts. I immediately decided to include them all in my [S]urrealist show. (Levy 2003, 79)
17Even though Cornell had seen the exhibition of Loy’s paintings at Levy’s art gallery in January 1933, they only met in 1943 – a decade later – in New York, as Rosenbaum points out (2020b). A few years before their actual encounter, Loy paid tribute to Cornell in Insel, towards the end of which Mrs Jones offers her friend a meaningful parting gift created by Cornell, a box, unfortunately lost, probably made around 1935-36:
“Here,” I hailed the will-o’-the-wisp, “after all I will give you the little box.” This box he desired, it was black, was a small object by the American [S]urrealist, Joseph Cornell, the delicious head of a girl in slumber afloat with a night light flame on the surface of water in a tumbler, of bits cut from early Ladies’ Journals (technically in pupilage to Max Ernst) in loveliness, unique, in Surrealism – the tidal lines of engraving cooled its static peace. Under the glass lid, a slim silver slipper and a silver ball and one of witch’s blue came raining down on the grey somnolence when one lifted it up. (Loy 2014, 44)
18The technique of collage is explicitly showcased here, in the “bits cut from early Ladies’ Journals.” It can be found not only in Cornell’s work itself, but also in Loy’s own description of the box. Indeed, she juxtaposes various textual elements through a paratactic and fragmented syntax to create a similar effect to that produced by Cornell’s object. As Rosenbaum argues, “Loy and Cornell shared a method influenced by Surrealism, centered on collage, juxtaposition, and the interplay between word and image, verbal and visual media” (Rosenbaum 2020b).
19Around the same time, in the mid-1930s, Cornell made another box, entitled “Imperious Jewelry of the Universe” (Lunar Baedeker): Portrait of Mina Loy, based on a photograph taken by Man Ray in 1920. Cornell’s work provides it with a new life by adding a third dimension to the picture, framing the photograph, and turning it into an original Surrealist assemblage. There is clearly an artistic strategy of renewal and recycling at work here, paying tribute to Loy while transforming Man Ray’s photograph, by adding shards of colored glass that fragment both the object and Loy’s face. The details regarding the medium used, accompanying this “daguerreotype-object” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art read: “Assemblage of silvered glass, glass shards, cut-out printed illustration, and gelatin silver print, in artist’s frame.”6
20This unique object has drawn the attention of many scholars. In Poetic Salvage (2017), Tara Prescott offers a detailed description of the box, accounting for the originality of this three-dimensional work. She explains that the fragments of glass are not fixed or pasted within the box but move around when the object is handled: “[they] fracture the image of Loy’s face in a myriad of unsettling, intriguing ways, befitting a poet who constantly challenged and redefined her shifting identities” (Prescott 2017, 107). The effect produced by the moving shards of glass is therefore like that of a kaleidoscope, altering Loy’s portrait in a dynamic of renewal each time someone manipulates the box.
21At the back of his singular “Portrait of Mina Loy,” Cornell chose to write a quotation from Loy’s poem “Apology of Genius” that reads: “imperious jewelry of the universe” (Loy 1996, 77). By displaying this line on his own work, Cornell explicitly used intertextuality and intermediality to praise her multiple talents. These recycled lines had already been showcased in the 1933 catalogue advertising the exhibition of Loy’s paintings in Levy’s art gallery. Cornell’s choice of quotation featuring at the back of his box leads us to assume that it was made after the exhibition in the mid-1930s, even though scholars disagree as to its exact date. Regardless of this uncertainty, this Surrealist portrait displays multiple creative layers. Loy is both the subject of Man Ray’s photograph and of Cornell’s assemblage, while standing out as the author of the quotation that serves as a caption to the box. The three artists therefore come together through this object, as Linda Kinnahan explains: “The portrait’s use of a photographic portrait already in existence and produced by a different artist underscores the reproducibility of the photographic image, while insisting upon the artist’s vision through performing a collaboration between Man Ray and Cornell” (Kinnahan 2017, 34). Cornell’s unique assemblage thus offers a kaleidoscopic image of Mina Loy, whose face is fragmented and constantly moving.
22In “Phenomenon in American Art,” Loy commented on the influence of collage on Cornell’s assemblages: “This appropriation of other’s handiwork is not pilfering, but lifting out of the past another’s sight tinged with family likeness – aspects added to the original by the altered observation of modern eyes” (Loy MLP B6 F172). The idea of “lifting out of the past another’s sight,” of turning an existing artwork into something new thanks to “the altered observation of modern eyes,” echoes Pound’s slogan “make it new” (Pound 1934) and the process of transformation, renewal, and recycling at work in both Loy’s and Cornell’s œuvre. To Loy, Cornell seems to embody a specific form of Surrealism, going beyond the experimentations of European Surrealists: guided by his instinctive spiritual renewal, he anchored his work in the past while heralding the future, in some kind of Benjaminian “dialectical embrace” (Edmond 2019, 11). Loy highlights Cornell’s innovative artistic practices in his “Aviary”: “Thus the birds in the Aviary had not to be made by Cornell, they were elected by Cornell, located by Cornell. […] Cornell has brought about a crisis: art’s first intimation of a new potency […] to encompass the future” (Loy MLP B6 F172). Loy suggests that Cornell’s talent resides in his capacity to “locate” these birds in a pre-existing reality, thereby creating “new objects from old ideas,” to borrow her own words. Loy therefore nuances the tension between neophilia and neophobia, and complexifies the relationship between the old and the new, suggesting that artistic innovation paradoxically finds its roots in something that had already been there all along.
23Conveying Loy’s admiration for Cornell, her essay “Phenomenon in American Art” also explores the differences between two dimensions of Surrealism, one associated with black magic, based on rituals and the realm of the occult, and the other associated with white magic, embracing spiritual rebirth and regeneration, oriented towards the future. In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin highlights the ritual characteristics of art, anchored in magic and religion:
Originally, the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, and then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. (Benjamin 1982, 223-224)
24There is a dialectic movement between organic and magical art that is associated with the past, with the aura and its ritual function, and the mechanical dimension of art.
- 7 She was influenced in her beliefs by her friends Mabel Dodge and Frances Simpson Stevens, while the (...)
25In her writings, Loy pays particular attention to the spiritual realm, and her work bears the mark of her fascination with mystical visions. Her conversion to Christian Science in the early 1900s reveals another dimension of her complex beliefs. Even though she had been educated in-between Jewish culture, on her father’s side, and Protestant culture, on her mother’s side, Loy converted to Christian Science following her daughter’s illness in the 1900s (Burke 1996, 117).7 Founded by Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science was based on a belief in the healing powers of prayer and spirituality, as she explained in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, published in 1879. Loy often conjures up her beliefs in her writings, also dealing with metaphysical and spiritual questions in her autobiographical texts in prose and essays, like her “Notes on Metaphysics” (Loy MLP B7 F191).
26In Insel, Loy refers to the Surrealists’ experimentations with occultism, as the narrator states from the start: “there’s something fundamentally black-magicky about the [S]urrealists” (Loy 2014, 5). She goes on to mention mesmerism and mystical practices. Insel is endowed with strange powers, with a specific kind of magnetism that attracts people and things alike. Contrary to what Loy calls the black magic of the Surrealists (“[the] [S]urrealists who have taken up black magic,” ibid., 24), on the side of primitivism and the occult, Christian Science embodies a form of white magic and is turned towards the future, offering hope and healing to all its believers.
- 8 In Les Collages, Louis Aragon suggests an opposite movement: “Le principe du collage admis, les pei (...)
27In her essay “Phenomenon in American Art,” Loy praises Cornell’s collage “Aviary” as: “bits of white wood restrained to retain the entity of seedling, of branching, of foliage, consolatory shade,” allowing the observer to subtly go “from black to white magic in one movement” (Loy MLP B6 F172).8 Loy clearly associates Cornell with white magic – a form of healing magic – while also referring to Christian Science (to which they had both converted). As Rosenbaum explains: “If Loy functioned as a kind of muse for Cornell, she was also a crucial conversant about an artistic method both shared, shaped by Surrealist poetics but tempered by Christian Science and a skepticism of Surrealism’s ‘black magic’” (Rosenbaum 2020b). Levy recounts a conversation with Cornell in November 1931, during which he confessed his conversion to Christian Science and his fascination with white magic: “‘White is just what I mean,’ asserted Joseph. ‘Not monstrously, but in wonderful variations. All I want to perform,’ he continued stubbornly, ‘is white magic’” (Levy 2003, 78). In Loy’s eyes, Cornell has achieved his goal, and his work symbolizes white magic, going beyond the European Surrealist aesthetics: “For almost as though it had been better described as sub-realism, Cornell, while theoretically adhering to Surrealist formula, alone has raised it above reality, having achieved an incipience of the sublime solidified” (Loy MLP B6 F172). And yet, this idea of “rais[ing] it above reality” echoes Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, where he defines Surrealism as aiming towards a form of “surréalité” (Breton 1924, 24).
28In another passage from “Phenomenon in American Art,” Loy further elaborates on her views of Surrealism as a form of Black magic:
Surrealism was the latest movement to produce a novelty for our intellectual concern. Although, ethically, hindered by its ingenuity of Evil, it was sufficiently valid to take part in that series of ocular surprise propelling the history of art.
Its theoretic contrivance for somersaulting reason into an “Alician” world of topsy-turvy logic, remains only vaguely familiar to my memory, perhaps because I find modern psychiatric shallow. So although, visually, it greatly entertained me my conclusive reactions to much of it was “Black Magic.” (Loy MLP B6 F172)
29On the contrary, Cornell’s work seems to symbolize white magic, as opposed to the black magic of most European Surrealists, whom Loy describes in her novel Insel. As a counterpoint to the white magic encapsulated within Cornell’s work, she depicts that black magic at length, practiced by many artists, from Dalí to Max Ernst and Man Ray, from Breton to Oelze. Insel is also associated with this black magic, constantly surrounded by a mysterious aura of magnetic forces. And yet, this visionary character is also paradoxically marked by the imprint of white magic.
30Although Christian Science isn’t explicitly mentioned in the novel, its influence emerges clearly in the belief in Insel’s healing powers. Black magic and white magic are brought together in the complex character of Insel, who seems to embody them both. The luminous rays he emits allow him to perceive what others cannot see, and to establish a unique kind of contact with those surrounding him, as stated by the narrator: “Now I had found another profession for him – magnetic healer” (Loy 2014, 57). His material poverty goes hand in hand with genuine spiritual and magnetic skills. Mrs Jones and Insel are bound by powerful and mysterious forces through a particular connection: “the smile of ultra-intimacy he had for me whenever we met on the unexplored frontiers of consciousness” (ibid., 135). As David Ayers explains, the mutual dynamics of healing is essential in order for these forces and energies to circulate: “Healing works both ways in Insel: the narrator attempts to save Insel from starvation and restore him to productive health, while his seductive rays offer to heal her” (Ayers 2010, 227). Insel stands as a liminal being, on the threshold of reality and surreality, in between starvation and flamboyance, illness and recovery, building a bridge between Europe and America, past and future, consciousness and the unconscious, black magic and white magic.
31In her 1929 essay “Gertrude Stein,” Loy extols the virtues of everyday objects like Picasso’s or Braque’s guitars. She praises Modernist artists for drawing the viewers’ attention to the humble materiality of modern life:
Modernism has democratized the subject matter and la belle matière of art; through cubism the newspaper has assumed an aesthetic quality, through Cézanne a plate has become more than something to put an apple upon, Brancusi has given an evangelistic import to eggs, and Gertrude Stein has given us the Word, in and for itself. Would not life be lovelier if you were constantly overjoyed by the sublimely pure concavity of your washbowls? The tubular dynamics of your cigarette? (Loy 1982, 298)
32Loy opens up the possibility of finding art and inspiration in the most ordinary objects. She invites the readers to open their eyes and to find the sublime in everyday objects. The artists mentioned here – Cézanne, Brancusi, and Stein – have given a new life to what is often taken for granted, offering the gift of beauty to these ordinary objects:
The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears – and you ignore it because you are looking for your canon of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition. Modernism says: Why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensory everyday life? (ibid., 297)
33Loy insists on the importance of renewing our perspective on the world, of stepping aside for a moment, of “making it new,” not through drastic change, but through a different lens, or what she calls “the altered observation of modern eyes” (Loy MLP B6 F172).
- 9 Duchamp had been a close friend of Loy’s since their first encounter among the New York Dadaist cir (...)
34In the 1950s, as a tribute to the humble materials of the city and the homeless people of the Bowery, Loy made collages and constructions out of discarded objects and debris found in the streets of New York, which she recycled for artistic purposes. Many of these artworks were exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in 1959. The exhibition was organized by David Mann with the collaboration of Julien Levy, even though Levy had closed his own art gallery a decade earlier (Gross 2023, 99). Marcel Duchamp was also involved in the exhibition and entitled it, in French, “Mina’s Poems à 2 dimensions ½ : Hauts-Reliefs et Bas-Fonds, Inc.”9 In the catalogue of the 2023 exhibition held at Bowdoin College, Strangeness Is Inevitable, Dawn Ades argues that “Duchamp played on the technical terms for sculpture in high or low relief to allude to other dimensions of high and low – implying the rubbing together of spiritual elevation and the lowest depths of human existence” (Ades 2023, 163).
- 10 Amy Elkins analyzes Loy’s assemblages through the photographs of the artworks taken by Berenice Abb (...)
35Following the publication of the collection Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables in December 1958, the exhibition took place from 14 to 25 April 1959.10 Levy asked Loy for new paintings and drawings to exhibit, to which he added artworks he already had in his possession: “For the show will you have any additional drawings, old or new? I will lend those which I have. And by the way neither Marcel nor myself are interested in commission for ourselves” (Levy in Burke CBC B1). Before the exhibition, Levy also wrote to Joella Bayer, Loy’s daughter and his ex-wife, about his plans:
A show for Mina’s Refusées seems definitely in the making, scheduled to open April 13th at the Bodley Gallery under the auspices of David Mann. […] It occurs to me that a group of patrons might be invited to sponsor the opening. I imagine you and Fabi will lend your names. I think too of Billy Williams, Djuna, Virgil, Marcel of course. Who else can you think of among Mina’s distinguished friends? Ezra Pound? Kay Boyle? (So many now are dead). […] It does seem to me that Mina’s era is coming in strongly for esteem today, and Mina should not be forgotten but should share some praises while she is alive – and she would find pleasure in further recognition, I feel sure. (Levy in Burke CBC B1)
36The title Refusées, chosen by Loy, refers to the materials she used in her assemblages: not noble materials, but on the contrary, debris and refuse. Burke highlights the various meanings of the word: “as a name for these disturbing objects, she proposed ‘Refusées’ – a punning blend of refuse, Refusés, and refugees, which summed up her long itinerary from West Hampstead to the Bowery” (Burke 1996, 420).
37In The Futurist Moment, Marjorie Perloff explains the role and aim of collage in the European avant-gardes:
Collage, perhaps the central artistic invention of the avant-guerre, incorporates directly into the work an actual fragment of the referent, thus forcing the reader or viewer to consider the interplay between preexisting message or material and the new artistic composition that results from the graft. (Perloff 1986, xviii)
38The collage of old and new elements offers a new life to “preexisting material,” in a unique form of artistic renaissance and renewal. We can think of painters like Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque who, within their paintings, included newspaper clippings and pieces of cardboard stuck on the canvas. In 1912, Picasso added to his collage Nature morte à la chaise cannée a piece of tablecloth and pieces of string to frame his work. A few years later, Dora Maar made photomontages by printing and superposing photographs in order to conjure up a Surrealist aesthetics. Collage allows the artist to combine several materials and techniques and incorporate them within a composite artwork.
39Loy’s late assemblages rely on those techniques of collage, and add a third dimension, transforming her works into constructions, as Suzanne Zelazo suggests:
Loy’s assemblage art of the 1950s is shown to be a radical attempt to push the medium of collage into a more complex dimensionality in an effort to represent emerging understandings of perception and consciousness, positioning her as a major contributor to a defining art form of Modernism. Bolstered by an appreciation of her own body as sensually charged and relational, Loy ascertained the simultaneity of present absence, connectivity and juxtaposition characterizing collage. (Zelazo 2009, 47-48)
40Within her assemblages, Loy incorporates pieces of newspaper and cloth, offering her constructions a striking material dimension, thus echoing the work of Braque and Picasso. She resembles the figure of the rag-picker, as Deborah Parsons argues in Streetwalking the Metropolis:
Loy is still a walker-observer of the city, but, turning to Baudelaire’s identification of artist and rag-picker, as a vagrant rather than leisured flâneur. The Baudelairian influence extends to the prominence of the [S]ymbolist/[S]urrealist impulse in Loy’s work, her valuing of artificial objects and the city, her depiction of the artist as an outcast figure elegiacally mourning a beloved urban wasteland, and a belief in the role of the artist to create a vision of “everyday life.” (Parsons 2000, 182)
41Everyday materials find a special place in Loy’s constructions, as she adopts her urban surroundings and offers the observer a visual and material form of wandering in the “bas-fonds” of Manhattan.
42Loy was not present at the opening of the 1959 exhibition – she was old and fragile, and had by then joined her daughters in Colorado. However, a great number of major figures of the artistic world attended the party, as Levy had predicted, including the American novelists Djuna Barnes and Kay Boyle. Levy also mentions the presence of Loy’s patron Peggy Guggenheim, with whom she had opened a lampshade shop in Paris in the 1920s: “As I was leaving, Peggy G. was buying one, perhaps two, beating the price down of course to a ‘museum discount.’ But that was a good beginning, and how pleasant that she happened to fly the Atlantic and arrive just the moment of your triumph” (Levy in Burke CBC B1). As Jennifer Gross points out in her essay “Truant of Heaven,” the artwork purchased by Guggenheim was Loy’s Househunting (Gross 2023, 99). The exhibition constituted a major artistic event in Loy’s career, but the financial question was also crucial, as Levy explains in a letter: “[David Mann] is hopeful of sales, but such fragile and unusual objects will be difficult to place – and I urge him anyway to restrict the sales to museums or to collections who are genuinely appreciative and will preserve them carefully for posterity” (Levy in Burke CBC B1). Critics were divided, pointing at the sinister quality of Loy’s assemblages. One critic from The New York Times in particular, Stuart Preston, was quite harsh towards her in his piece “Public and Private Worlds of Artists,” dating from April 1959:
Mina Loy’s shocking and macabre big collages, composed most graphically of refuse, and inspired by scenes near the Bowery where Mina Loy “saw the frustrated excess of love by which the derelict has drunk, dreamed and died.” The alliance between Dada and social comment is downright sinister. (Preston 1959, 17)
43And yet, thanks to Duchamp’s support, Loy won the Copley Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement in Art (Burke 1996, 435). After the exhibition, her constructions remained in Levy’s apartment in Connecticut and in a storage space, before being rediscovered by Roger Conover.
44These assemblages show how Loy practised the art of collage and recycling, working with fragments of materials and found objects that she then assembled. Mary Ann Caws highlights these creative principles, deeply anchored in materiality:
Everywhere Mina Loy moved and went, and lived and roomed, those around her had to be extra-careful with all she accumulated. These objects were to be reused instead of thrown away. […] Everyone around her had to be careful with the eggshells and other detritus out of which she made her constructions. (Caws 2022, 190-191)
45Loy thus becomes a talented “bricoleuse,” to borrow the concept of “bricolage” defined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée sauvage: “la composition de l’ensemble […] est le résultat contingent de toutes les occasions qui se sont présentées de renouveler ou d’enrichir le stock, ou de l’entretenir avec les résidus de constructions et de destructions antérieures” (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 27). Loy’s work was indeed influenced by this dynamic of renewal and rebirth, working with “residues” and “refuse” that she recycled to create new objects.
46In her constructions from the 1950s, Loy tried to create her artworks with whatever materials she had at hand, piecing fragments together to construct new artistic objects, which often led to unexpected results. A singular atmosphere is thus conveyed by her assemblages, such as Househunting and Christ on a Clotheline, as Conover points out: “When she scavenged the back alleys for flattened cans and abandoned mopheads it was not to fashion a shelter but to create a poignant vision of shelterless existence” (Conover in Loy 1996, 208). Gross suggests that Loy kept working on various assemblages: “[she] continued to make constructions in Aspen, gathering her garbage supplies along the town’s back alleys” (Gross 2023, 101).
47In her essay “From Rogue to Rags: Mina Loy’s Constructions,” Ades highlights the continuity between Loy’s early crafts and her late assemblages: “At first sight, it looks as if the constructions Mina made in New York in the 1950s are a complete break with all that went before. […] Looked at more closely, the materials are not necessarily junk, rags, or found objects. Moreover, the ingenuity and skill in the actual making are far from casual” (Ades 2023, 157). Her technique is reminiscent of the lamps Loy created in Paris in the 1920s, in the shop she had opened with Peggy Guggenheim. Her lamps drew the praise of arts and crafts magazines and she even won a design competition in 1927. In Insel, Loy mentions paintings and lampshades, thus referring to the crafts she practised in Paris:
The still life that intrigued him was a pattern of a “detail” to be strewn about the surface of a clear lamp shade. Through equidistant holes punched in a crystalline square, I had carefully urged in extension, a still celluloid coil of the color Schiaparelli has since called shocking pink. Made to be worn round pigeon’s ankles for identification, I had picked it up in the Bon Marché. (Loy 2014, 143)
- 11 “In writing something down, painting an image, modeling a figure, or composing a melody […] what ac (...)
48As a clever “bricoleuse,” the narrator – just like Loy – turns an object into something serving a completely different purpose. Once again, we are reminded of the Aristotelian meaning of poiein, referring to the act of making, of creating both words and objects. In an age of mechanical reproduction, to go back to Benjamin, Loy attempts to preserve the aura of the work of art by repurposing objects and turning them into new artworks, in a spirit of renewal. The process of recycling becomes her own way of “mak[ing] it new,” or of “rescuing” the dead “durable things of human artifice” by “contact with a life willing to resurrect it,” as Arendt writes, following the Greek conception of poeisis, where the act of making as production always implies an incessant re-production.11
49In 2006, forty years after Loy’s death, Francis Naumann organized an exhibition entitled “Daughters of Dada” in his New York art gallery that included several paintings and constructions by Loy, besides works by Beatrice Wood, Clara Tice, Florine Stettheimer, Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, and Katherine S. Dreier. Loy’s five artworks were the following: Teasing a Butterfly (1902), Communal Cot (c. 1950), Christ on a Clothesline (c. 1955-59), Portrait of Man Ray (c. 1925), and Portrait of Jonathan Bayer (1966). Conover celebrated the success of the exhibition, allowing a new generation to discover Loy and shedding light on a little-known aspect of her work:
Word travelled fast by word of mouth and press that something extraordinary was on view: something unlike anything that could be seen at MOMA’s big DADA show downtown, and unlike anything that had been seen in New York since Marcel Duchamp curated an exhibition of Mina Loy’s Bowery “constructions” at the Bodley Gallery in 1959. For two months, New Yorkers came in droves to Francis Naumann’s gallery to experience the sensation that is harder and harder to find in the New York art world these days, especially in work that is decades old: the shock of the new. (Conover 2006, 37-38)
50Decades after The New York Evening Sun hailed Loy as the embodiment of the “Modern Woman,” Conover also insists on the importance of renewal and on what he calls the “shock of the new.” New York Times journalist Holland Cotter also praised Loy as “an exceptionally interesting figure” and “a myth in her own time” in his article “Dada’s Women, Ahead of their Time” (Cotter 2006). The exhibition presented two collages by Loy, that he described as follows: “In one, ‘Communal Cot,’ ten small twisted papier-maché [sic] forms suggest bandaged sleeping figures. In the other, ‘Christ on a Clothesline,’ a cutout painted paper face, more demonic than benign, hangs like a tattered flag in front of tenements made from scraps of wood” (Cotter 2006, online). These assemblages articulate an art of renewal and recycling, both in the materials Loy used and in the figures she depicted.
51This creative process, relying on recycled materials, conjures up the concept of “trouvaille,” coined by André Breton when talking about objects he found at the Flea Market in his Surrealist novel L’Amour fou (Breton 2015, 44). Chance, randomness, and the unexpected become aesthetic principles thanks to collage and bricolage – or what we may call Loy’s art of “bricollage.” Carolyn Burke thus analyzes Loy’s artistic practices:
Anticipating the Surrealists in her appreciation for the underside of high culture (the flea market castoffs dignified by others as objets trouvés), she gave her lowly discoveries new life in the form of lamps, collages, constructions, and a variety of poetic décors – all “applied” arts of unusual and fragile beauty. Her travels and her assemblage of art from shards are related: their metaphors of waywardness and fixity, fragmentation and wholeness, hint at her movements toward a state of grace. (Burke 1996, vii)
52The art of assemblage should be examined together with the process of recycling, creating a complementary dynamic of renewal in Loy’s work. More recently, Loy’s Househunting, restored by Carolyn Burke, was on show at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and the exhibition of Loy’s artworks that took place in 2023 at Bowdoin College then in 2024 at the Arts Club of Chicago presented many of these unique assemblages.
53Throughout her life, Mina Loy devised various strategies of linguistic, spiritual, and material renewal, drawing her inspiration from Surrealist aesthetics and adopting principles of recycling to create unique artworks. From her lamps designed in the 1920s to her late assemblages of the 1950s, Loy gave new life to unexpected objects and unusual materials found in Parisian flea markets and in the streets of New York. Her role as Julien Levy’s agent in Europe and her constant contact with the Surrealists on both sides of the Atlantic, and particularly Joseph Cornell, clearly influenced her artistic practices. These encounters shaped her poetic visions and helped her elaborate a sharp critical stance. Loy’s essays on art and her own experimentations with prose, painting, collage, assemblage, and recycling are intricately intertwined. While Loy praised the American “renaissance of poetry” in her 1925 essay “Modern Poetry,” it is clear that her works of art significantly bear witness to her aesthetics of constant reinvention and renewal.
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