Arthur Cravan Boxes Against Art

Last week the Paris Review posted a profile on the proto-polymath (Dadaist, performance poet/artist, troll?), boxer, huckster, and lover and spouse to Mina Loy... none other than Arthur Cravan. Cravan assailed polite society and the art world at the turn of the twentieth-century, while his outrageous behavior became the model for subsequent artists and art movements, particularly for Dada. Edward White looks into Cravan's life through his posture as a boxer. From the top:

Hemingway, Mailer, and Scorsese: much great American art has been inspired by boxing. George Bellows’s may be the best. Between 1907 and 1909, Bellows created three paintings—Club Night, Stag at Sharkey’s, Both Members of This Club—that captured boxing’s glories and indignities. The sport provided a powerfully visceral metaphor for the American experience of the twentieth century.

But boxing also transfixed artists beyond American shores. Around the time Bellows created his triptych, a tranche of Europeans created sublime, radical work inspired by the sport. One of them was the Swiss enigma Arthur Cravan. Described by one critic as “a world tramp … a traverser of borders and resister of orders,” Cravan traveled the globe in the early 1900s by forging documents and assuming false identities, preening, harassing, and haranguing, as he went. He was hailed by André Breton as a pivotal precursor of Dadaism, and belonged to that category of floating prewar avant-gardists whose legacy resides more in their mode of living than their artistic creations. Indeed, he declared himself anti-art and avowed boxing to be the ultimate creative expression of the modern, American-tinged age. He’s often referred to as a “poet-boxer,” though he wasn’t especially accomplished as either; his real talent appears to have been making a spectacle of himself, in every sense. 

Cravan’s real name was Fabian Avenarius Lloyd; he adopted myriad pseudonyms and aliases during his short life. He was born in Switzerland, in 1887, to Irish and British parents with whom he had a tumultuous relationship, though he was immensely proud that his aunt Constance was Oscar Wilde’s wife. In his early teens, Cravan came to regard the familial link to the world’s most disreputable genius as proof that he was destined for a life of fabulous infamy.

That journey began in 1903 when, aged sixteen, he was kicked out of his boarding school for an egregious act of indiscipline—according to some, he hit a teacher—and, inspired by his hero Arthur Rimbaud, he left Switzerland in search of adventure. Over the next several years, Cravan took up with hookers in Berlin, hoboed his way from New York to California, and worked in the engine room of a steamship bound for the South Pacific, jumping ship when it docked in Australia. But it was in Paris that the legend of the man we know as Arthur Cravan—writer, brawler, and hoaxer—was cemented. Within the space of six years, he scandalized polite society, infuriated the avant-garde, slugged it out with one of the greatest heavyweights of all time, and then disappeared without a trace.

Head to the Paris Review to read this one in full.