Customer Reviews

Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy

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Mina 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 evolution of 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. I put down the book knowing more about Loy's world than about her own work or vision, or why Burke thinks it's important; she seems 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 she stops to consider less often than you'd expect, and then 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.

This biography of the madcap artist-poet, Mina Loy, is a masterpiece of the genre. Exhaustively researched by a meticulous scholar, the book's rich detail and witty slant make it read like a well-written novel. Its scenes are so vivid, in fact, that a recent novelization (unauthorized) of it has appeared and is receiving all the wonderful reviews that rightfully belong to Burke's book (see Logue).

Mina Loy led an extraordianry life and was clearly an artist creating before her time. This book is exhaustingly researched, a veritable Loy tome. If you love Mina Loy, it is certainly a must-read. It is very dense in parts though and often explains much more than is needed. The diction is very elevated, which often gives this the feel of an university book written for other academics. It's unfortunate though, because the book does a wonderful job of chronicling her life. This is often weighed down by the feeling that this book is seeking to impress rather than inform.