Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy

by Carolyn Burke

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 restless and much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism, where her friends and lovers included Gertrude Stein, Marinetti, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Djuna Barnes, the poet-boxer Arthur Cravan, and 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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Poetry, Art, Literature, Feminism, British Literature

503 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

Carolyn Burke was born in Sydney, spent many years in Paris, and now lives in Santa Cruz, California. She graduated from Swarthmore College and earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University. She is a member of PEN and the Authors Guild. A practitioner of Zen Buddhism, she took the precepts with Tenshin Reb Anderson in 2010.

Her latest book, No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, was published in 2011 by Knopf (U.S.) and Bloomsbury (U.K.) Since then it has appeared in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Czech and Russian. The definitive life of the chanteuse, No Regrets has been called "an eloquent embrace of the famed French singer-songwriter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review); "sympathetic . . . captivating . . . highly effective" (New York Review of Books); "masterful storytelling" (Library Journal); and listed among the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sunday Times (U.K.). Burke has performed with singers of Piaf's repertoire in Paris (Caveau des Légendes), London (The Vortex), Los Angeles (Catalina Jazz Club), and San Francisco (City Lights/Litquake). She recently took part in the BBC 4 special on Piaf's iconic song "Non, je ne regrette rien" and in the U.S. Postal Service's launch of their Piaf stamp.

Burke's Lee Miller: A Life, published by Knopf and Bloomsbury in 2005 and Autrement in 2007, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award. The Chicago Tribune gave it a cover review; People called it "a great read"; The Telegraph (U.K.) judged, "Lee Miller was an astounding woman, brought memorably to life by this astounding book." Burke appears in the BBC's docudrama Lee Miller: A Crazy Way of Seeing.

Her interest in Miller began when she met the photographer while working on her first book, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (FSG, 1996). Becoming Modern won praise in the TLS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Nation. The definitive life of the expatriate artist/poet, it sparked a Loy revival, including a cabaret musical about her.

Burke's essays and translations have appeared in many magazines, including Heat, Vogue, Poetry Flash, La Nouvelle Revue Française, and the New Yorker. Her art writing includes essays in Artpress, Art in America, and in exhibition catalogues (Roland Penrose and Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer; Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery).

She has taught non-fiction and life-writing at book festivals and universities in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and France. Recent appearances include talks at CUNY's Women Writing about Women seminar, NYU's Maison Française, Princeton University, Universities of New South Wales and Sydney; radio talks and readings (NPR, BBC, Australian Broadcasting Company); and for No Regrets, musical soirées in some of these same venues.

She is currently writing a group portrait about the intertwined lives and work of four twentieth century artists.

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loy's well on her way to rejoining the Modernist Hall of Fame, and Carolyn Burke deserves credit for stoking the fires with this full-scale biography, the first (but I hope not the last) word on Loy's life and achievement. Loy enjoyed a view from the center during the revolution in modern art c. 1905-1940, and her list of friends, lovers and acquaintances reads like a 20th-century Who's Who: F.T. Marinetti, Arthur Cravan, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Peggy Guggenheim, Constantine Brancusi, Walter Arensberg, William Carlos Williams, Mabel Dodge, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound--virtually anybody who was anybody in the international art circuit between the wars seemed to know and remember Loy.

Having famous friends is a tricky business, and in Burke's account the roll call of Loy's intimates threatens to eclipse her own distinctive work in poetry and the visual arts. Burke inadvertently assigns Loy a sort of secondary role in her own life, throwing over a deeper analysis of her poetry and prose to focus on the colorful age she lived in; she's more attracted to the parade of bohemians and makers of famous "isms" that moved through Loy's life than she is to the poetry, which gets discussed in abbreviated soundbites. Still, this is a good place to start if you're at all interested in Loy and the work that's been done on her in the decade since this book first appeared.

[Heather Gibbons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, beautiful, tragic, talented, enigmatic, a little batty in the end: meet Mina Loy the Modernista. A bad mother, but an enviable mover and shaker who meets and beguiles everyone from Futurists to Red Wheelbarrowists. More than a muse, though, she actually works, making not just innovative poems and manifestoes but lamps, dresses, collages. In terms of defining artistic production and trouncing the high/low binary, Mina is more Po-Mo than Mo. Way ahead of her time and adventurous enough to make for a real page-turner.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Burke focuses on Loy's life as special and interesting but it's mostly through Loy's beauty.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is fascinating to see the modern period through the eyes of a minor artist: it corrects the hagiographies beautifully. The vanguard with their absurd ideas about achieving higher consciousness in their privileged self-regarding world could not be better lampooned in a direct satire! Nonetheless Mina Loy's honest investigations of her own sexuality make powerful reading when they appear in the text of this biography and give me an appetite to investigate her writing more.

[Kevin O'Sullivan]

chronicle of an under-appreciated figure in the literary and artistic avant-garde who traversed the last century hitting all the important stops along the way --futurist florence, dadaist new york, interwar paris-- leaving behind important textual traces of a life lived beyond the limits of the norm; occult, erotic, indecipherable...

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very enjoyable and informative, although much more concentrated on social doings than on the work. However this book should lead to more serious engagement with a wonderful writer, and hopefully to the unearthing of her many lost visual works.

[G]

I've been reading this on and off for a while. I love Mina Loy.

[Velvetink]

Mentioned in The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women by Harriet Rubin.

[Jeremiah Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A huge achievement.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thankfully slight on critical analysis of her poems and staying more clearly focused on her life as lived, with fine coverage too of her artwork—probably more significant, at least in the life as lived, than the poetry.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Writing style no for me

[Marisa Januzzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just a brilliant and poignant biography-- it's a Baedeker of the avant garde.