Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Arthur Cravan – Boxer, poet, art critic, anarchist — and probable spy — who vanished off the coast of Mexico in 1918

He vanished like a ghost. Or a con artist. Or a martyr. No one really knows. One day in 1918, Arthur Cravan set sail in a rickety boat off the coast of Salina Cruz, Mexico. The sea, the heat, the weight of a thousand personas — all swallowed him whole. No body. No wreckage. Just an exhale from history.

But before the ocean got him, he was everywhere. And nowhere. A towering figure in every sense — six-foot-six, fists like bricks, a jaw that could shatter champagne glasses. Cravan was a boxer, a poet, a dandy, an art critic, an anarchist. Possibly a spy. Certainly a myth in his own time, and very likely a man inventing himself faster than the world could keep up.

He once fought former world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in a baroque public match in Barcelona — reportedly puking from nerves between rounds and dodging punches like a man trying to escape his own reputation. His poetry readings were drunken performances laced with insults and indecency, less salon and more saloon brawl. He wrote under pseudonyms. He published his own magazine Maintenant just to shred better-known artists to pieces. He was Oscar Wilde’s self-proclaimed nephew. Maybe that part was true.

The chaos was intentional. Arthur Cravan was not trying to be understood. He was trying to stay ahead of the authorities — and perhaps his own unraveling. When war broke out in Europe, Cravan, born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in Switzerland, began a globetrotting dance of avoidance. Military service? Draft? Not for him. He skipped borders like pages, reinventing himself in every port.

And yet — for all his posing and posturing, Cravan wasn’t a fraud. Or at least, not just a fraud. Beneath the arrogance was a strange, vulnerable vision. He embodied the spirit of Dada before Dada had a name. He mocked the art world but was one of its most daring provocateurs. He punched culture in the teeth — literally, if needed — and then kissed it on the lips. A chaos agent with an aching need to be seen.

That he found love near the end seems like a final trick, or a confession. Enter Mina Loy — poet, artist, muse, mystic, expat. A modernist icon in her own right, with eyes like splintered glass and a mind sharper than any of Cravan’s stabs at art criticism. She had been through her share of avant-garde men. But Cravan was something else. Bigger. Wilder. More doomed.

They met in New York in 1917, both fugitives from something, and fell into a love that felt more like a fever dream than a courtship. They married. She got pregnant. He wanted to disappear. Again. But this time, with the promise of returning.

That promise, like so many of his lines, would collapse under the weight of his life.

It was supposed to be a quick trip. He would sail from Mexico to Argentina — to set up a new life, somewhere beyond the grasp of war and scandal and the clutches of anyone who wanted to make sense of him. Loy stayed behind, pregnant and hopeful, on the shore of a country that felt as uncertain as he did.

He never made it. Or maybe he did — and simply chose not to come back.

There are theories, of course. He drowned, the boat taking on water in the Pacific’s unforgiving heat. He was killed. He faked his death. Some swear he reappeared years later, under other names. He had so many to choose from. Cravan, Lloyd, Wilde’s nephew, the man who once boxed in Paris and insulted Apollinaire, who danced with Duchamp and drank with desperadoes. The anarchist art critic. The bohemian fugitive. The Dada ghost. Maybe he simply walked into legend because it was the only country left where he could live.

What’s undeniable is that Cravan’s disappearance only amplified his myth. In the right circles — and they’re the right ones, if you know where to look — he remains a holy ghost of modernist rebellion. A pre-Dada icon. A “bad boy” before that term became marketing. A performance artist before anyone knew what that meant. His name lingers in histories of modern poetry, boxing lore, and countercultural thought like a bruise you keep pressing just to see if it still hurts.

Because here’s the thing: Arthur Cravan wasn’t just some lost poet or eccentric sportsman. He was one of the first to make a spectacle of himself as art. Before Warhol, before punk, before the brand-as-self became our digital religion — Cravan lived it. And he knew the cost. You can only burn that brightly for so long before the fire takes you.

He once said, “Every great man has a madman in his closet.” Cravan lived in his. And threw parties there. And wrote manifestos in crayon on the walls. He showed us what it means to be your own creation — and what it costs to disappear into your own fiction.

There are photos, of course. Grainy black-and-whites. Cravan in boxing stance, head tilted just so, like a man listening for the next punch. Cravan with fists raised in Havana, ready to fight for rent money or just for the story. Cravan beside Mina Loy, looking almost domestic, which might be the strangest image of all.

He was a creature of contradictions: violent and tender, arrogant and aching, a man who wanted both infamy and obscurity. He was the poet who knocked men out cold, the critic who smashed what he secretly loved, the ghost who vanished at the precise moment the world might have started to understand him.

And maybe that’s why we still talk about Arthur Cravan. Not because he was easy to admire. But because he was impossible to forget.