Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy

Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy by Burke, Carolyn. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780374109646.

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 Steins friend and Marinettis lover; in New York as Marcel Duchamps co-conspirator and Djuna Barness confidante; in Mexico with her greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burkes riveting, authoritative biography brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism - and one womans important contribution to it.