An erotic embrace: Mina Loy, Marcel Duchamp, and the dynamics of legacy

Addressing the long obfuscation of Mina Loy’s visual art, even as her poetry has gained traction among scholars, this study explores Mina Loy: Constructions, organized by Marcel Duchamp, Julien Levy, and David Mann at the Bodley Gallery in New York in 1959. The analysis reveals Duchamp’s deep investment in the exhibition and the active role Loy played in its development. Undertaken at a moment when both artists were profoundly concerned with the dynamics of legacy, the show reveals the close parallels in their practices. It lays bare their common interest in the fourth dimension, which framed a collaboration that can be understood in those terms as an “erotic embrace.” Mina Loy: Constructions represented a complex conceptual endeavour that further catalyzed the development of the “new kind of picture” – as Loy put it – that she had conceived in New York and nurtured in Aspen, the implications of which are, in many ways, only now becoming visible.