Original charcoal and gouache drawing of an old woman wearing a white head scarf, 9 ½ x 13 inches, on brown paper, inscribed “Your sincere friend Mina Loy", undated but circa 1949-1952.
In light of the fact that the drawing was done on a piece of scrap paper, as its edges indicate, and may well have been given to the subject, a woman Mina Loy met on the Bowery, the drawing is in very good condition. Framed and glazed. Although best known as one of the most important early modernist poets, Mina Loy was highly regarded as an artist. In drawings, paintings, collages, decorated lampshades, and relief constructions, she earned the admiration of Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, among many others. She attended art schools in London, Munich, and Paris and exhibited at some of the more famous art shows of the early 20th Century, including the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, the 1914 Free Exhibition of International Futurists in Rome, the 1917 Independents' Exhibition in New York City, in addition to being shown later at the gallery of her son-in-law, Julien Levy, in New York. By the early 1950s, Loy was living in a small apartment in New York City, where her most ambitious art works, the assemblages and constructions based on her experiences and encounters with the down and out in the Bowery, were created.This drawing, which is undated, must have..... More