“Wasting its Aesthetic Time”: Mina Loy’s art history and Anglo-Florentine connoisseurship

This article situates Mina Loy within the context of the art historical practices of Anglo-Florence in the early twentieth century, arguing that Loy pinpoints a reductive historicism at play in both avant-garde Italian Futurism and Anglo-American connoisseurship. By contrast, Loy offers an alternative feminist approach to art’s historicity, one that turns the gendering of modernity, to use Rita Felski’s famous formulation, on its head. To make this argument, the article reads some of Loy’s written work produced in and about Florence, paying particular attention to The Pamperers, “Esau Penfold,” and “Giovanni Franchi.” Building upon both established and more recent Loy scholarship, this article examines how Loy develops a distinctly feminist aesthetic temporality that “skips parallel” to the models of historical “progress” that both the Futurists and the connoisseurs promised. In so doing, it positions Loy as a major thinker in the art historical tradition.