Moreover, the Moon (Historical Context)

Historical Context

In a life that spanned from 1897 to 1966, Loy enjoyed an existence richly influenced by an array of political and artistic movements. Although her mother was a traditional Victorian lady, Loy traded her conservative upbringing for a life outside the mainstream. From her time in Florence in the early 1900s to her final artistically productive days in New York during the 1940s and 1950s, Loy socialized and befriended avant-garde intellectuals who are in the early 2000s seen as icons of their respective movements. Her work was a product of a lifetime of exposure to leading intellectual thought, and it is as such that she wrote her final poetry, including "Moreover, the Moon."

Futurism

Loy moved to Italy in the early 1900s when Italian futurism was in its infancy. She was active in the movement prior to World War I and had love affairs with two of its leading members: founder and poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Florentine writer Giovanni Papini. Loy became disenchanted with futurism because of its strong association with fascism and its antifeminist perspectives.

Futurism was an artistic movement with strong political underpinnings. The movement officially began with Marinetti's publication of the "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" in 1909 and found its motivation in his desire to make Italy a more modern European nation. On the artistic front, the futurists sought to challenge traditional art and culture in order to advance the merits of the mechanical age and modern age. Futurism's impact was wide reaching, and in addition to finding supporters among the literati of the day, the movement's tenets were also embraced and experimented with by painters, sculptors, typographers, product designers, architects, photographers, performing artists, and graphic artists. Loyal to the concepts of change and innovation, futurists embraced dynamism, speed, and mechanical power. Marinetti himself was a proponent of war, violence, and conflict, and he even called for the destruction of institutions such as libraries and museums. As leading futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni states in Artists on Art: From the XIV to the XX Century, the futurists intended "to destroy the cult of the past. . . . To despise utterly every form of imitation. . . . To extol every form of originality, however audacious. . . . To rebel against the tyranny of the words 'harmony' and 'good taste.' . . . [and] To sweep from the field of art all motifs and subjects that have already been exploited."

In poetry, this innovation extended to poetry. Futurist poets employed new techniques intended to engage both the eyes and the ears. In the extreme, futurist poetry lacked punctuation and relied exclusively on the use of nouns. Futurist poets used onomatopoeia and consciously discarded standard forms and conventions in an effort to shock and incite a reaction in their audiences.

Feminism

Loy wrote her "Feminist Manifesto" in November 1914 in response to what she perceived as the futurist's misogynistic attitudes. In Roger Conover's publication of the manifesto in The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, Loy dramatically states that "The feminist movement as at present instituted is inadequate," and she positions men and women as enemies. She does not call for reform or for equality; instead she asks that women look at themselves to see what they are instead of what they are not. Loy's focus on women and their sexuality is a theme found in much of her poetry.

The feminist movement called for equality between the sexes. Feminists believed that patriarchal culture, traditions, and norms oppressed women, leaving them marginalized and therefore absent from or powerless to participate in important social, cultural, political, and economic activity. One of the earliest feminist treatises was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Londoner Mary Wollstonecraft, which was published in 1792. Wollstonecraft believed in education, empowerment, and equality for women. During the latter half of the 1800s and early 1900s, feminist activity centered on women gaining the right to vote. In 1929, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One's Own, in which she wrote about a woman's need to be financially independent and to have a place of her own in which to write.

Dadaism

During the war years, Loy befriended William Carlos Williams and other New York dada writers. She also had close ties to Marcel Duchamp, the leading member of the New York Dada movement, throughout her life. In 1959, he curated her final collage show at New York's Bodley Gallery.

The artistic and literary movement known as dadaism began during World War I with independent efforts spawning in New York and Zurich. The movement spread across Europe and was relatively short-lived, dying out in the early 1920s.

Like the futurists, the dadaists sought to challenge and overturn traditional thought and artistic aesthetics. They were anti-artists who were disillusioned by Western culture and appalled by the Great War. In the ninth edition of Art through the Ages, editors Horst de la Croix, Richard G. Tansey, and Diane Kirkpatrick note that "The Dadaists undertook the project of reform by way of protest, turning the conventions of art upside down. . . . [They] intended to shock viewers by . . . outrageous lack of conventional meaning." Marcel Duchamp's famous "Bicycle Wheel," which was a bicycle wheel mounted on top of a stool, exemplifies the movement's attempts to use something familiar in unexpected ways as a means of encouraging new thought.

Surrealism

During the 1920s and the beginnings of the surrealist movement, Loy enmeshed herself in Paris's literary and intellectual circles. Later, during World War II, she was back in New York and, through her previous son-in-law's art gallery, found herself in the company of leading surrealist poet and critic Andre Breton.

By 1924, the dada movement had fizzled out, and many of its followers now considered themselves surrealists. While still employing some dadaist techniques, the surrealists became interested in the unconscious and the world of dreams. They were inspired by the thinking of leading psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and wanted to use art as a way to unite the unconscious with reality, thus creating the surreal. Well-known surrealists include Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró.