Poet-Boxer Arthur Cravan: The Man Who Shocked Greenwich Village

The first annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists opened at Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace on the evening of April 10, 1917. Thousands of guests gathered to celebrate what was to be the largest art show ever held in New York. The momentous occasion took place in an atmosphere of growing political tension as it coincided with America’s entry into the First World War.

In spite of these circumstances, there was a single figure who attracted widespread attention. Known by his adopted name of Arthur Cravan, he had been invited to deliver a lecture on “The Independent Artists in France and America.” His outrageous behavior shocked New York’s artistic elite.

Globetrotter

Fabian Avenarius Lloyd was born in Lausanne beside Lake Geneva on May 22, 1887, the second son of Otho Holland Lloyd and Hélène (Nellie) Clara St Clair. His Irish father had studied law at Oriel College, Oxford, but became a translator of ancient Greek literature. Two months after Fabian’s birth, Otho abandoned his family and ran off with his wife’s best friend.

As a youngster, Fabian was immensely proud that his father’s sister Constance was married to Oscar Wilde. He came to regard the familial link to a ‘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 boarding school for disruptive behavior and left Switzerland in search of adventure.

Travelling the globe on forged documents and false identities, he took up with hookers in Berlin; hoboed his way from New York City to California; worked in the engine room of a steamship bound for the South Pacific, but jumped ship when it docked in Australia.

A human chameleon, he never identified with any place in particular until he settled in Paris. French was his first language, although
he carried a British passport.

On June 10, 1909, Fabian Lloyd published an article in the Parisian weekly L’Écho des Sports entitled “To Be or Not To Be … American” in which he stated that Paris was about to turn American thanks to the presence of cakewalk dancers, athletes and black boxers such as Jeremiah “Joe” Jeannette of West Hoboken, New Jersey.

The latter had been involved on April 17 that year in a memorable bout with Sam McVey, the “Oxnard Cyclone.” The fight took place at the Cirque de Paris and lasted three-and-a-half-hours (forty-nine rounds), the most grueling boxing match of the twentieth century.

It created a sensation. Overnight, Cravan observed, everyone “began to spit and swear” and Parisians started to float around “in clothes two sizes too big for them.”

In 1912 Lloyd changed his name to Arthur Cravan. The forename was a tribute to his hero, the vagabond poet Arthur Rimbaud; Cravan was taken from a Burgundy village where his first wife Renée Bouchet was born. It was in Paris that the legend of the man as a brawler, poet and boxer would be cemented.

Celebrity & Confrontation

In the years preceding World War I, Paris celebrated alternative lifestyles. Amid the craze for novelty, boxing became fashionable. Though originally based on Victorian aristocratic ideals, it was championed by Montmartre’s modernist artists as an embodiment of the new century. Regarded an American pastime, it was beginning to excite the world beyond the United States.

A tall muscular man at six foot four weighing two hundred and thirty pounds, Cravan was built like the Eiffel Tower. Whilst traveling across the USA he had taken up boxing. He avowed pugilism to be the ultimate creative expression of the modern age.

Swagger and trash talk came natural to him and were part of his tool box. He turned pugilism into something between a pantomime and a stage show. Boxing for Cravan was performance art.

On entering the ring, the “mysterious” Cravan acted as his own hype man, introducing himself a poet, boxer, hotel rat (thief), snake-charmer, gold prospector and nephew of Oscar Wilde. Ironically, the Marquees of Queensbury – the man who formulated the rules of boxing – had been responsible for Wilde’s downfall.

Arthur intended to make his audience feel uncomfortable. Advertising one performance, he promised it would climax with his suicide. While sporting only a jockstrap “for the benefit of the ladies,” he then rebuked members of a packed venue for their depraved curiosity.

Between 1911 and 1915, Cravan published five copies of Maintenant (Now), an anti-art magazine of essays, poems and stories, all of which he wrote himself under various pseudonyms. He distributed the magazine himself, using a wheelbarrow.

The magazine was designed to cause havoc. Arthur used his pen to infuriate colleagues. His fierce attacks on fashionable painters caused a stir, turning salon and gallery into a boxing ring in which he floored the patrons of “high art.”

His poetry, anarchistic lectures and provocative public appearances (often degenerating into drunken brawls) earned him the admiration of Parisian avant-garde artists and intellectuals, including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and André Breton.

Cravan published a notable literary hoax in his magazine. Entitled “Oscar Wilde est vivant!,” he claimed that his uncle had visited him in Paris on the night of March 23, 1913.

Although the playwright had died in 1900, the story convinced the editors of the New York Times to dispatch a reporter to conduct an interview with Cravan in which he straight-facedly insisted that the occupant of the Wilde plot in Père Lachaise Cemetery was an imposter.

The Great Swindle

In 1910, John Arthur “Jack” Johnson, nicknamed the Galveston Giant, became the first black world heavyweight boxing champion at the height of the Jim Crow era. After he had beaten his white opponent Jim Jeffries in what was dubbed the “fight of the century,” he was labelled a threat to social order as his victory triggered dozens of race riots across the United States.

In 1913 Johnson fled racially motivated prosecution under the 1910 Mann Act (known as the White-Slave Traffic Act) for his liaison with a teenage white girl. He arrived in Paris to a hero’s welcome and gained celebrity status there, performing sell-out shows that combined pugilism displays with dancing and singing. He was Cravan’s hero and rival.

In the summer of 1914, Cravan began another phase of wandering. Dodging conscription (he despised the collective insanity of war and cared little for any form of nationalism) he jumped the border into Spain, before reappearing in Barcelona sometime in 1916. The fighter refused to bear arms.

In the city he met up with a group of fellow French avant-garde artists in exile. Financially broke and desperate to leave Europe, he seemed stuck.

Luck would have it that Johnson was in the midst of a triumphant stay in Spain, during which he was received by Royalty and starred in movies. Whose idea it was to book a high-profile match against the former world champion remains unclear, but it seems reasonable to assume that only Cravan himself could have come up with the ludicrous idea of such a “sensational encounter.”

The fight took place on Sunday afternoon, April 23. Photographs published at the time suggest the impressive scale of the event which was held at the Plaza de Toros Monumental, Barcelona’s huge bullfighting arena. Posters announcing the match touted Cravan as a “European champion.”

It was reported that Arthur shook with fear before the contest began as even a ring-rusty Johnson was leagues ahead of his opponent who lasted five three-minute rounds before being felled in the sixth. The bout was little more than a skillful demonstration of shadow boxing by two men who both were experienced stage actors.

Johnson and Cravan were collaborators rather than competitors. The event was a hype-fueled payday for an aging legend and a flamboyant con man. The crowd went mad when they sensed that the fight was rigged and a riot ensued. Cravan slipped out a side exit. The Monday morning press proclaimed the fight a “Big Swindle.”

Greenwich Village

With his share of the 50,000-peseta purse Cravan bought a ticket on the steamship Montserrat and in early January 1917 he embarked at Cadiz, destination New York City. Dozens of other European artists, intellectuals, dissidents and deserters were making the same journey across a stormy Atlantic.

On board were Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, his partner and two sons following their expulsion from Spain. Trotsky and Cravan actually became acquainted, but the latter remained staunchly unaffiliated, rejected all notions of progress and mocked utopianism.

Cravan arrived in New York on January 13, just a few weeks before the Kaiser announced the resumption of German U-boat attacks on steamships. As he traversed Manhattan’s streets, the metropolis overwhelmed and inspired him. Penniless most of the time, he drank in cheap bars in the Bronx, associated with Greenwich Village bohemians and slept rough in Central Park.

And yet, with charming bravado he managed to hobnob with the city’s literary and artistic elite. He frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s photographic salons, was present at gallery openings and joined literary gatherings. He also met up with former Parisian friends who had made their way to New York City.

In April 1917, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia (founders of “New York Dada”) invited him to the Premier Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue & 46th Street to deliver one of his notorious anti-art lectures.

New York’s first encounter with modern art had come four years earlier with the seminal Armory Show, at which Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase caused an almighty rumpus.

This time, Duchamp presented the ready-made sculpture Fountain for exhibition, consisting of a signed urinal that divided opinion. Cravan was expected to add his voice to the sound and fury of the occasion with an address on “The Independent Artists of France and America.”

Arthur did not disappoint. On the day, drunk on absinthe, he stood in front of his audience, shouted obscenities, exposed himself and was promptly arrested. He was bailed out by modernist art patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg who took him back to their home at West 67th Street.

For Cravan it was all in a days’ work, but the lasting significance of the event was his meeting with Mina Loy, poet and painter. It was the start of an intense love affair.

Slacker Raids

Four days before the opening of the Independents Exhibition, America had entered the war. In spite of a drive to recruit volunteers, the armed services remained understaffed. On May 18, 1917, the Selective Service Act introduced conscription. The draft was widely resisted. US Marshals were tasked with protecting the home front against enemy aliens, spies and draft dodgers.

Supported by volunteers of the American Protective League (APL), they carried out a series of “slacker raids” (slacker was a label given to young men suspected of avoiding the draft).

Cravan did not feel secure in an increasingly pro-war mood of suspicion and mistrust, even in his bohemian Manhattan. He decided to move on and made his way to Canada. From there he sailed to Mexico, arriving in Mexico City in December 1917.

He persuaded Loy to join him. Not too long after her arrival in mid-January the pair got married at the Mayor’s office with two passers-by as witnesses.

Arthur had established a small boxing school and resumed training. On August 9, 1918, he fought the Mexican heavyweight Honorato Castro at the Teatro Principio in Mexico City, but lost on points.

His final recorded fight against Black Diamond Smith which took place at the Plaza de Toros on Sunday September 15 ended in a humiliating defeat. Cravan and Loy left the city shortly after as he still felt under threat from the secret police. She was pregnant.

As money was tight, they planned to make their separate ways to Buenos Aires, hoping the city might offer them safety and a steady income. While Loy traveled ahead on a hospital ship, Cravan set sail on a dilapidated boat from the port town of Salina Cruz in November 1918. He was never seen again.

Loy bore their daughter, Fabienne, in April 1919. A year later she published Colossus, an intimate and loving memoir of her relationship with Cravan.

Often referred to as a poet-boxer, Cravan was not particularly good at either activity. The volume of writings was slender; his victories in the ring were scarce. He belonged to that family of floating pre-war artists whose legacy resides more in a mode of living than in artistic achievement.

Forever on the move, living an elusive life of aliases and disguises, Arthur was a showman with an uncanny ability to make a spectacle of himself, be it in Paris, Barcelona or Manhattan. Even his death felt like a vanishing trick as his body was never recovered.

For his ability to create an atmosphere of affront and outrage, André Breton hailed him as a precursor of “Dada.” Less generous critics called him a charlatan. A vacuum of information on Cravan’s life and death leaves him as an enigmatic character worthy of a place in the fight corner of Modernism.

Illustrations, from above: Arthur Cravan, ca. 1916.; Program of the fight between Jeannette and McVey in Paris; The Oscar Wilde issue of Maintenant no. 3, October/November 1915; Arthur Cravan and Jack Johnson poster, 1916; Catalogue of the Society of Independent Artists exhibition at Grand Central Palace, April 1917; and Cravan in November 1917.