‘Every great artist has the sense of provocation’

Born in Switzerland 1887 to English and Irish parents, and often referred to as the enfant terrible, Arthur Cravan was the nephew of Oscar Wilde.

In 1912 Cravan published the polemical art review magazine ‘Maintenant’ composed exclusively of his own writings under various pseudonyms, until he libelled the 1914 Salon des indépendants exhibition – the magazine ended after five issues – arguably having achieved exactly what Arthur wanted – to alienate, ridicule and simultaneously grab the attention of the art establishment.

In an attempt to avoid the draft Cravan travelled to NYC in April 1916 with money earned from a ‘fight’ against former world heavy weight prize fighter Jack Johnson (he was beaten in six rounds).

Once in NYC he gave a series of outrageous art lectures as he had in Paris. His first poem was also published, ‘The Soil’. Having received his draft, he fled to Nova Scotia and then by schooner to Mexico City.

After his mysterious death Cravan was subsumed into the successive ‘isms’ gaining currency during the early 20th century.

Cravan carries the legacy of being a proto-Dadaist and his life and work are ‘written into the language of surrealism by Andre Breton’.

Mina Loy married Arthur in 1918, Mina was a British-born artist, writer, poet, playwright, novelist and painter Although no poems survive from their time together in Mexico, Loy wrote an intimate memoir about Cravan in the early 1920s, Colossus (Burke 234). She also elegized him in poems including ‘Mexican Desert’ (1921), ‘The Widow’s Jazz’ (1927), and ‘Letters of the Unliving’ (1949). She mourned his disappearance into her eighties.