Insel
“He has an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it on when he paints his pictures.”
Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other—about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris.
German painter Insel is a perpetual sponger and outsider—prone to writing elegant notes with messages like “Am starving to death except for a miracle—three o’clock Tuesday afternoon will be the end”—but somehow writer and art dealer Mrs. Jones likes him.
Together, they sit in cafés, hatch grand plans, and share their artistic aspirations and disappointments. And they become friends. But as they grow ever closer, Mrs. Jones begins to realize just how powerful…
$24.00
May 13, 2014Mina Loy (1882–1966) was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London to a Hungarian father and an English mother. Originally trained as a painter, she was at the center of all the great artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century: she wrote Futurist manifestos in Italy (including the “Feminist Manifesto,” which denounced the misogyny and incipient fascist tendencies of Futurism); her poem “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” appeared alongside T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in The Dial; she starred in plays in Greenwich Village in the 1920s with William Carlos Williams; she was friends with Duchamp and Man Ray; she ran a lampshade business with Peggy Guggenheim; and in the 1940s, she lived on the Bowery, where she collected trash…
