Disillusioned with the macho and destructive elements in Futurism, as well as craving independence and participation in a modernist art community, Loy left her children, and moved to New York in winter 1916. Before arriving in New York Loy had already created a stir – most notably with the 1915 publication of her Love Songs in the first edition of Others. She became a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine, which also included Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, and Marianne Moore.[40] Loy soon became a well-known member of the Greenwich Village bohemian circuit. Frances Stevens, who had stayed with Loy previously in Florence, helped Loy get a small apartment on West Fifty-seventh Street. Within days of being in New York Stevens took Loy to an evening gathering at Walter and Louise Arensberg's 33 West Sixty-seventh Street duplex apartment.
As Loy's biographer Carolyn Burke describes:
'On any given evening the Arensbergs’ guests might include Duchamp’s friends from Paris: the painters Albert Gleizes; his wife, Juliette Roche; Jean and Yvonne Crotti; and Francis Picabia, as well as his wife, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia; the composer Edgard Varèse; and the novelist and diplomat Henri-Pierre Roché. The new figures in American art and letters were also represented: at various times the salon attracted the artists Man Ray, Beatrice Wood, Charles Sheeler, Katherine Dreier, Charles Demuth, Clara Tice, and Frances Stevens, as well as poets Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, William Carlos Williams, writers Allen and Louise Norton and Bob Brown, and art critic Henry McBride. And then there was the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven – artist’s model, poet, and ultra-eccentric.'[41]
Early in 1917, Loy starred alongside William Carlos Williams, as wife and husband, in Alfred Kreymborg's one act play Lima Beans produced by the Provincetown Players.[42]
Loy contributed a (since lost) painting entitled Making Lampshades to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (formed in December 1916) at the Grand Central Palace New York which opened on 10 April 1917.[43] With Walter Arensberg acting as the director and Marcel Duchamp as the head of the hanging committee, the show broke new ground in America as they ran with the slogan 'No jury, no prizes' as well as flouting tradition by displaying art works alphabetically, with no regard to reputation, and allowing anyone to enter for the price of $6.[44]
In 1917 she met the "poet-boxer" Arthur Cravan, a nephew of Oscar Wilde's wife, Constance Lloyd. Cravan fled to Mexico to avoid the draft; when Loy's divorce was final she followed him, and they married in Mexico City in 1918.[22] Here they lived in poverty and years later, Loy would write of their destitution.
When she found out that she was pregnant, she travelled on a hospital ship to Buenos Aires, "where she intended to wait for Cravan, but Cravan never appeared, nor was he ever seen again".[22] Reportedly, "Cravan disappeared while testing a boat he planned to escape in. He was presumed drowned, but reported sightings continued to haunt Loy for the rest of her life."[1] Cravan was lost at sea without trace;[45] although some mistakenly claim that his body was found later in the desert (post-mortem, his life acquired even more epic proportions and dozens of stories proliferated).[46] The tale of Cravan's disappearance is strongly anecdotal, as recounted by Loy's biographer, Carolyn Burke. Their daughter, Fabienne, was born in April 1919 in England.
In a chapter of her largely unpublished memoir entitled Colossus, Loy writes about her relationship with Cravan, who was introduced to her as "the prizefighter who writes poetry."[47] Irene Gammel argues that their relationship was "located at the heart of avant-garde activities [which included boxing and poetry]."[48] Loy draws on the language of boxing throughout her memoir to define the terms of her relationship with Cravan.[49]
