Birth
May 26, 1877, San Francisco, California
Death
September 14, 1927, Nice, Paris
Country of Origin/Citizenship
United States/American
Kind of Artist/Cultural Worker
Dancer
Avant-Garde Movements Associated With
Modernism
Date & Places of Overlap with Loy
1923–27, Natalie Barney’s salon, St. Germain-des-Près
A founder of modern dance and proponent of women’s freedoms, Isadora Duncan was born in 1877, the youngest of four children to Joseph Duncan and Mary Isadora Gray. After her father was tried for illegal banking schemes, her mother divorced him and raised her children in a free-thinking household that encouraged Duncan’s impulsive, revolutionary spirit. Even as a young girl Duncan rebelled against her classical ballet lessons in favor of spontaneous and expressive movement, her signature style throughout her career.
Duncan began performing in 1890 with her brother’s theater in San Francisco. In 1896, she joined the Chicago-based dance company of theater producer Augustin Daly, soon traveling with them to New York and London. She rose to international prominence while dancing privately in salons across Europe. Often performing as a one-woman corps de ballet and always in a “Greek” costume of draped silk or chiffon with bare feet and arms, she developed her own dance technique based on a simple vocabulary of steps, skips, glides, leaps, and pantomime that eschewed masculine movements. Famously androgynous, she defied traditional gender roles, bearing three children out of wedlock by three different men: a daughter with the stage designer Gordon Craig, a son with Paris Singer, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, and a third, who lived only briefly, with a passing acquaintance Romano Romanelli. Choreographer Agnes de Mille wrote that, when young, Duncan danced with grace; when older, with grief, following the death of her children who drowned in a car crash in the Seine in 1913 (Life into Art 10).
From 1907 to 1910 at the Caffè Giubbe Rosse in Florence, Mina Loy occasionally crossed paths with Duncan and Craig, supposedly the most conceited man Loy ever met. Loy crossed paths with Duncan in Berlin in 1921, and Loy and Duncan both frequented writer Natalie Barney’s Paris salon between 1923 and 1927. Hoping to urbanize her daughter Joella’s provincial sensibilities, Loy enrolled her in the Duncan school at Potsdam directed by Isadora’s sister Elizabeth, although Joella did not take to the lessons (Burke 313).
Loy regarded Duncan as “the representative modern woman artist,” who embodied in barefoot dance the “free footed verse” of writer-suffragists like herself (Burke 111). Duncan is the subject of Gertrude Stein’s 1911 poem “Orta or One Dancing” and Loy’s 1952 poem “Biography of Songge Byrd”: “How can I / describe that woman’s art – / her flitting / motion to her song / must make her seem unreal / she was so ariel / so unbound / that if at times she seemed about to fly / her audience found it only fitting” (Loy).
Duncan gave her final performance on July 8, 1927 in Paris at the age of forty-nine and died in September of the same year in Nice, when her long scarf caught in the rear wheel of a car and strangled her. A crowd of ten thousand attended the cremation of her body at Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Related
Works Cited
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1996.
Life into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World. Eds. Dorée Duncan, Carol Pratl, and Cynthia Splatt. W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.
Loy, Mina. “Biography of Songge Byrd.” Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1952. https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3905401. Accessed 7 November 2018.
Other Biographies
Date Of DeathAugust 14, 1966
Although relatively unknown, Alfred Kreymborg was an influential magazine editor, poet, playwright, literary historian, and node in the networks of
Date Of BirthJanuary 1, 1864
Date Of DeathJuly 13, 1946
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Alfred Stieglitz made a career as a photographer and gallery owner in New York. His
Date Of BirthFebruary 19, 1896
Date Of DeathSeptember 28, 1966
Andre Breton was born in 1896 in Tinchebray, France. He attended medical school at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris
Date Of BirthMay 22, 1887
Date Of DeathPresumed lost at sea, November 1918
Often referred to as the, enfant terrible, Arthur Cravan was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd on May 22, 1887 in Laussanne,
Known as the “Mother of Dada,” the Baroness was an emblematic and distinctive figure on the New York art scene.
Date Of BirthMarch 1, 1900
Date Of DeathApril 17, 1985
Basil Bunting was born March 1, 1900 in Scotswood-on-Tyne, Northumberland. He spent his formative years studying at two Quaker schools,
Date Of BirthMarch 3, 1893
Date Of DeathMarch 12, 1998
Born into a Victorian family, Beatrice Wood struggled to free herself from her mother's desire to "turn [her] into a
Date Of BirthJuly 17, 1898
Date Of DeathDecember 9, 1991
Noted twentieth century photographer, Berenice Abbott was born on July 17, 1898 in Springfield, Ohio, to Charles E. Abbott and
Date Of BirthJune 17, 1880
Date Of DeathDecember 21, 1964
Carl Van Vechten is known as a writer, photographer, and patron of some of the most influential figures of the
Date Of BirthFebruary 10, 1908
Date Of DeathSeptember 27, 2002
Charles Henri Ford’s emergence onto the modernist literary scene began in 1929 when Ford started publishing the little magazine, Blues:
Date Of BirthMay 22, 1888
Date Of DeathFebruary 2, 1973
Clara Tice is known as the “Queen of Greenwich Village” due to the role her erotic and revolutionary illustrations played
Date Of BirthFebruary 21, 1876
Date Of DeathMarch 16, 1957
Constantin Brancusi was born on February 19, 1876 in the rural village of Hobița, Romania. During childhood, he developed a
Though born in Essex, England, Denise Levertov remains an influential poet of the mid-twentieth century American group known as the
Date Of BirthJune 12, 1892
Date Of DeathJune 19, 1982
Djuna was born to Wald Barnes and Elizabeth Chappell on June 12 in 1892 in Cornwall-on Hudson in New York.
Date Of BirthNovember 8, 1897
Date Of DeathNovember, 29 1980
Founder of the Catholic Worker, Dorothy May Day was born to John and Grace Day at their house on 71
Date Of BirthSeptember 10, 1890
Date Of DeathNovember 13, 1973
Born on September 10, 1890 to Maria-Luisa and Celestino Schiaparelli, Elsa Schiaparelli grew up in Rome and moved to London
Date Of BirthOctober 26, 1894
Date Of DeathMay 26, 1952
Eugene Jolas was born on October 26, 1894 in Union Hill, New Jersey to parents Eugene Pierre and Christine Jolas.
Date Of BirthOctober 30, 1885
Date Of DeathNovember 1, 1972
Born in Idaho and raised in Pennsylvania, Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (Ezra Pound) is a considered the father of imagism
Date Of BirthFebruary 4, 1881
Date Of DeathAugust 17, 1955
Fernand Léger was a notable French artist and filmmaker during the first half of the twentieth century. A Cubist painter,
Date Of BirthDecember 27, 1876
Date Of DeathDecember 2, 1944
Filipo Tomasso Marinetti (born Emilio Angelo Carlo in Alexandria, Egypt in 1876), the face and founder of Futurism, was the
Date Of BirthMarch 5, 1894
Date Of DeathJuly 18, 1976
In her early 20s, Frances Simpson Stevens was the lone American at the center of the Futurist movement.
Date Of BirthJanuary 22nd, 1879
Alongside Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia is one of the founding names in Cubism and Dada. With regards to Dada in
Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia might be the most quoted witness of the Dada movement, yet she is one of the least studied.
Date Of BirthFebruary 3, 1874
Date Of DeathJuly 27, 1946
Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein is one of the most prominent figures in American literature. She developed a taste
Date Of BirthJanuary 9, 1881
Date Of DeathJuly 8, 1956
Giovanni Papini was born in 1881 in Florence. From an early age he was a voracious reader of the classics,
Date Of BirthApril 11, 1901
Date Of DeathFebruary 22, 1987
Born in 1901 in Kewaskum Wisconsin, Glenway Wescott was the eldest of six children. Wescott left home in 1914 and
Date Of BirthApril 19, 1886
Date Of DeathDecember 1, 1970
Often diminished to a footnote in the life of her husband, the painter Jules Pascin, Hermine David was an artist
Date Of BirthFebruary 2, 1882
Date Of DeathJanuary 13, 1941
Regarded as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin,
Date Of BirthNovember 1, 1883
Date Of DeathJune 18, 1964
“Jane was her name and Jane her station,” wrote Gertrude Stein in a brief but complimentary consideration of American editor,
Date Of BirthMarch 13, 1892
Date Of DeathNovember 7, 1978
Janet Flanner, who decried the personal “I,” was a technically skilled writer who found diagramming sentences and Parisian newspapers influential.
Date Of BirthJuly 5, 1889
Date Of DeathOctober 11, 1963
Jean Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, a horse-riding hub 12 miles outside of Paris as the third child of Georges
Date Of BirthDecember 24, 1903
Date Of DeathDecember 29, 1972
Joseph Cornell was born in 1903 in Nyack, NY, the oldest of four siblings. After his father died of leukemia in
Date Of BirthJune 13, 1877
Date Of DeathNovember 5, 1946
One of the first leaders of Futurism in America, and a contributor to American Modernism, Joseph Stella was born in
Date Of BirthMarch 31, 1885
Date Of DeathJune 1, 1930
Jules Pascin, named Julius Pincas at birth, was born in Bulgaria on March 31, 1885. Pascin had Italian/Serbian and Spanish/Jewish
Date Of BirthJanuary 22, 1906
Date Of DeathFebruary 10, 1981
Julien Levy was born in 1906 in New York to Edgar Levy and Isabelle Isaacs. He attended Harvard University where
Date Of BirthSeptember 10, 1877
Date Of DeathMarch 29, 1952
A prominent artist, lecturer, and art patron, Katherine Dreier was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1877 to German-immigrant parents.
Date Of BirthMarch 22, 1935
Date Of DeathFebruary 5, 2019
A contemporary American poet, writer, and visual artist, Kathleen Fraser was born in 1935, in Oklahoma, and raised in Colorado
Date Of BirthApril 23, 1907
Date Of DeathJuly 21, 1977
Photographer and model Lee Miller, née Elizabeth, was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in April of 1907 to Theodore and
Date Of BirthFebruary 22, 1900
Date Of DeathJuly 29, 1983
Born on February 22, 1900 to Leonardo Buñuel and María Portolés, Luis Buñuel was raised in Calanda, Spain where he
Date Of BirthFebruary 26, 1879
Date Of DeathAugust 13, 1962
A wealthy American patron of the twentieth-century arts movement, Mabel Evan Dodge Sterne Luhan (Mabel Dodge) hosted modernist salons in
Date Of BirthAugust 27, 1890
Date Of DeathNovember 18, 1976
Man Ray was born Emanuel Radnitsky to Russian Jewish immigrants in 1890. In his youth, his parents moved from the
Date Of BirthJuly 28, 1887
Date Of DeathOctober 2, 1968
A Dada pioneer and the most controversial of modern artists, Marcel Duchamp was born one of six siblings on July
Date Of BirthNovember 15, 1887
Date Of DeathFebruary 5, 1972
The daughter of John Milton Moore and Mary Warner, Marianne Craig Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1887. Although
Date Of BirthJuly 16, 1821
Date Of DeathDecember 3, 1910
In his excoriating book on Christian Science, Mark Twain surprisingly paints its founder Mary Baker Eddy as “the most interesting
Date Of BirthApril 2, 1891
Date Of DeathApril 1, 1976
One of the 20th century’s most influential artists, Max Ernst left his mark on modernism by contributing to the establishment
Date Of BirthMarch 10, 1896
Date Of DeathMarch 16, 1965
English heiress to the Cunard Steamship Company, Nancy Clara Cunard was born in the English midlands. The only child of
Date Of BirthOctober 31, 1876
Date Of DeathFebruary 2, 1972
Natalie Clifford Barney was born on October 31st, 1876, to Albert and Alice Barney. Her father was heir to a
Date Of BirthMarch 21, 1872
Date Of DeathDecember 2, 1951
Boyce (1872-1951) was the second of five children, all of whom perished in an influenza epidemic when she was six
Date Of BirthAugust 26, 1898
Date Of DeathDecember 23, 1979
Peggy Guggenheim was born on August 26, 1898 to Florette Seligman and Benjamin Guggenheim in New York City. In 1920
Date Of BirthJune 29, 1900
Date Of DeathNovember 26, 1980
Surrealist painter Richard Oelze, born June 29th, 1900 in Magdeburg, Germany to a conservative and well-disciplined family, proved to be
Date Of BirthMarch 9, 1895 (some sources say 1896)
Date Of DeathFebruary 2, 1956
Charming and ornery Robert McAlmon was born the last of eight surviving children to an itinerant Presbyterian minister. Raised in
Date Of BirthJuly 23rd, 1878
Born in London, England on July 23rd, 1878, Stephen Hugh Willyams Haweis was the youngest of three children. His parents,
Date Of BirthMarch 14, 1887
Date Of DeathOctober 5, 1962
Sylvia Beach was born in Princeton, NJ in 1887, relocating to Europe when as a volunteer with the Red Cross
Date Of BirthSeptember 26, 1888
Date Of DeathJanuary 04, 1965 Place of Death
One of the most influential intellects of the 20th century, Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot was born on September 26, 1888
Date Of BirthJuly 3, 1901
Date Of DeathDecember 10, 1970
Thelma Ellen Wood was born in Kansas on July 3, 1901 to Maud and William Wood. She was one of
Date Of BirthApril 16, 1896
Date Of DeathDecember 15, 1963
Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock/Rosenstein, also known as S. Samyro), is a Romanian-born playwright, poet, and an editor of magazines such
Date Of BirthApril 4, 1878
Date Of DeathJanuary 29, 1954
Walter Conrad Arensberg intermingled with and befriended some of the most important artists of the 20th century. He and his
Date Of BirthSeptember 17, 1883
Date Of DeathMarch 4, 1963
William Carlos Williams was born in 1883 to an English father and a Puerto Rican mother in Rutherford, New Jersey.
