Becoming Modern

The poet and visual artist Mina Loy 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 the greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke’s riveting, authoritative biography, Becoming Modern, 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.