Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Hardcover)

Author: Carolyn Burke

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1996)

The poet and visual artist Mina Loy (1882–1966) 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 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.

“For the whole of the twentieth century Mina Loy has been the Missing Person of Modernism; now at last Carolyn Burke has brought her to life, and into the life of her time. Becoming Modern is a perfect example of biographical recovery: it will change our sense of what happened back then, when art was being made new.”

–Samuel Hynes