The subject of “Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable” at Bowdoin College Museum of Art (through Sept. 17) has been, until now, almost completely lost to history. Thanks largely to the efforts of Roger Conover – a South Freeport-based writer, editor, curator and founding editor of the art and architecture publishing program at MIT Press – Loy is emerging from obscurity to reclaim her rightful place as a consummate modern and a radical talent.

Conover discovered a slim volume of her poetry decades ago, which propelled him into an obsession that led to acquisition (and thankful preservation) of her varied oeuvre. To understand just how radical a person Loy was, consider that this woman, born into a conventional English Victorian household in 1882, penned her “Feminist Manifesto” in 1914. It called for, among other things, the “unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty” in order to head off the male construct of Victorian feminine virtue.

In her poetry of the 1910s, Conover pointed out in his eloquent Bowdoin lecture, Loy wrote “with the directness of an invoice and the voice of an oracle” about masturbation, menstruation, urination, fornication, childbearing, addiction, menopause and dementia.

As an artist, she was multidisciplinary before that term became common currency. She was a poet, playwright, fashion illustrator, designer, inventor, infrequent actress, portraitist, painter and assemblage artist. Loy was “dumpster diving” in back alleys and on New York’s Bowery when Robert Rauschenberg – famed for incorporating found materials into his work – was barely a toddler. She traveled widely and had many lovers, among them British painter Stephen Haweis (who became her husband); the founder of the Futurist movement in Italy, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti; and poet-boxer Arthur Craven, who became her second husband and remained the love of her life.

During her peripatetic eight decades on this earth, Loy took up residences in London, Berlin, Florence, Paris, New York and Aspen. She knew everyone, including the Futurists, the Dadaists and Surrealists, sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist Tristan Tzara, lesbian writer Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, Marianne Moore, her legendary gallerist Julien Levy and her close lifelong friends Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. Among her art patrons she numbered Peggy Guggenheim, Mabel Dodge and Walter and Louise Arensberg.

Yet Loy lived an impecunious life, one of negation and poverty. She was a devout Christian Scientist (this was what initially bonded her to Cornell, also a Christian Science adherent) and sincerely believed the creation of art required being open to a divine state. Perhaps that is why she instinctively cleared out her life, emptied it of possessions, even abandoning her Bowery apartment and all the paintings it held, for Aspen, where she died at 83.

How does one compact the work and ephemera of such a person into a coherent exhibition? Curator Jennifer Gross organized the show more or less chronologically. There’s a lot to see and read here (I highly recommend the fascinating exhibition catalog from Princeton University Press). The exhibition encompasses publications in which Loy’s writing appeared; her own volumes of poetry; her crafting tools; catalogs of her decorated lampshades; drawings, paintings and beautifully drafted portraits of friends; collages; constructions; exhibition catalogs; photography of Loy by figures such as Man Ray, Lee Miller and George Platt Lynes; a video of Loy and one of her daughters, and on and on.

It is stunning to witness her virtuosity in many media. But it is also possible that her leaping from one style or genre to another contributed to her obscurity. That is, aside, of course, from being a woman, an outlier and an adamant rejector of self-promotion (when asked if she would attend the opening of her solo show at Bodley Gallery in New York, arranged in 1959 by Levy and Duchamp, she wondered why she would do that since she was already so familiar with those works).

To me the strength of the show is in the last gallery, which features ethereal paintings drawn from Loy’s poems in her Lunar Baedecker (the spirit of which is personified in lines from “Moreover, the Moon—”: “Face of the skies/preside/over our wonder”), portrait sketches of friends, Joseph Cornell’s own homage to Loy, and her constructions using refuse scavenged on the Bowery, near her apartment on Stanton Street. “Communal Cot” and “Christ on the Clothesline” are revolutionary works made primarily from rags, cut paper and various other flotsam and jetsam.

“Prospector 1” and “Prospector 2” show Loy elevating crushed tin cans as art material. Loy’s casual sketches of friends reveal her as a master draftswoman, able to say so much with spare lines. Her “Drift of Chaos” paintings are darkly surreal and a riposte to Levy, who had suggested she make more commercially viable work. We can even hear her faint, proper English voice on recordings, giving us a fuller sense of the artist beyond her work.

Though Loy never identified herself as a Futurist, eventually breaking with their male-dominated thinking and aesthetic, these lines from her “Aphorisms on Futurism” seem to beautifully describe her own approach to her art and her life:

DIE in the Past
Live in the Future.
…

LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.

OPEN your arms to the dilapidated, to rehabilitate them.

YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened.

BUT the future is only dark from outside.
Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light.

Or, as Gross writes in her essay “Truant of Heaven”: “Loy once said art was a protest. As an artist she elected to inveigh against convention, patriarchy, obscurity, mediocrity, black magic, poverty, and most of all silence. To be an artist means one had the power and the means to have a voice, a voice that mattered.”

This exhibition makes an incontrovertible argument for exactly why Loy’s voice mattered, both then and now. A vitrine in the final gallery includes CD jewel cases of contemporary recording artists who have rediscovered Loy through her poetry and written music inspired by it. These include Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins and hip hop/rapper Buster Wolf. Loy is “no longer my secret,” said Conover in his lecture. This is one secret that needed to get out, and we should all be grateful to Bowdoin that it did.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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