EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

THE LAST PHANTOM: WHAT REMAINS TO BE SAID ABOUT ARTHUR CRAVAN

ISADORE DUVAL

May 5, 2025

Arthur Cravan was a poet, a boxer, a hoax, and a vanishing act. He slipped through history like a rumor in a bar fight, leaving behind forged passports, broken typewriters, and unanswered questions. Was he a genius or a prankster? A prophet or a fugitive? In any case, he is exactly what art needs when it forgets how to misbehave.

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Let me tell you a story. In November of 1918, shortly after teaching himself celestial navigation by consulting the stars and a half-torn menu from a Parisian brasserie, Arthur Cravan climbed into a leaky sailboat off the coast of Salina Cruz, Mexico, and vanished. His pockets contained a compass, a love letter from Mina Loy written in mirror script, and, I suspect, a fake passport bearing the name Oscar Wilde. The boat—dubbed The Libertine in sloppily painted red letters—was last seen tilting westward, as if heading not for Argentina, as he claimed, but toward the edge of the world.

Of course, none of this is strictly verifiable. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Cravan’s greatest artwork was his own disappearance—an act of pure aesthetic insolence, a gesture so committed to ambiguity that it continues to echo more than a century later, like a punch line to a joke we only half-understand. 

Arthur Cravan, the original troll

Cravan, for those still enrolled in the well-behaved seminar rooms of art history, is a kind of honorary anti-saint. He was a poet who wrote little poetry, a boxer who lost all of his fights, a forger of both documents and selves. His art criticism was mostly insults. His manifestos—scrawled in a journal he printed with stolen ink—read like a blend of Diogenes and drunk Yelp reviews. He called Guillaume Apollinaire “a fat cannibal” and claimed to have had an affair with Alexandra Feodorovna when he was fourteen. Only some of that is false.

What remains to be said about him? Everything and nothing.

First, let’s dispose of biography. He was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in 1887, in Lausanne, to an English father and a Swiss mother. This we accept only because Swiss birth records are dull, precise things with no imagination. He later claimed, variously, to be Canadian, French, Chilean, and once, after a particularly long night at the Café du Dôme, “a proud subject of the lost kingdom of Bohemia.”

He studied briefly at an English military academy, where he was expelled for spiking tea with absinthe or for spanking a teacher. Later he wandered into the Paris art scene, where he was mostly regarded as a nuisance. His magazine Maintenant—which he edited, printed, and distributed himself—attacked nearly every major figure of the avant-garde. It was like an early version of Twitter, except with better grammar and more physical violence. 

Maintenant (1912–15): A short run, a lasting shock

But to write about Cravan’s life is like trying to write a definitive biography of a rumor. Every fact splits into three versions: the thing that happened, the thing Cravan claimed happened, and the version still circulating at cocktail parties in Buenos Aires.

Now, here is something I believe deeply, though I admit I have no evidence: Arthur Cravan invented conceptual art by accident in a bar fight.

The story goes like this: In 1914, he was in a Montmartre café, insulting a mediocre painter’s new Cubist canvas. The artist challenged him to define art. Cravan stood up, poured a glass of wine over his head, and declared, “This is art—it stains, it costs money, and it ruins your reputation.” He then left the café without paying.

This gesture, this wine-soaked refusal, has haunted us ever since.

Marcel Duchamp adored him. Francis Picabia called him “a walking provocation in search of a brawl.” André Breton claimed Cravan “opened the door to the subconscious by punching it in the face.” Even Mina Loy, no stranger to geniuses with self-destructive tendencies, fell for him not despite the chaos but because of it. Cravan was a kind of inverse Arthur Rimbaud: not someone who wrote a few great lines and quit art, but someone who quit art so thoroughly that his lines became great by omission.

He understood something most of us never dare to: that art, if it cannot escape itself, must devour itself. And who better to do the devouring than a man who boxed for cash and hurled insults for sport?

The knockout as an art form

This is where I confess something: I teach Cravan every year, though he appears in none of the canonical syllabi. I show my students a blank slide—no image, no text—and say, “This is Cravan’s final artwork.” They shift in their seats. One will raise a hand and ask, “Is this some kind of prank?” “Exactly,” I say.

Cravan is what we invoke when art becomes too tame, too respectable. He is the ghost who arrives when we need to blow it all up again. Whenever art starts speaking in press releases, Cravan shows up shirtless, calling everyone a fraud.

He didn’t just reject the art world; he mocked its premise. He wrote that art “must stink of sweat and bad gin,” that it should be “an act of cowardice so bold it becomes courage.” He said these things knowing full well he’d be misquoted—which was half the fun.

We need Cravan not because he made great work, but because he refused the category of work altogether. In the age of NFTs and digital ephemera, he would have minted a jpeg of a fart, sold it for a million dollars, and then publicly denounced the buyer as a dupe. And we’d love him for it.

Here, I offer a new theory—untested, unprovable, but elegantly persuasive. Cravan is not a person. He is a function. A kind of mythopoetic pressure valve embedded in the cultural imagination. Whenever we reach a critical mass of self-seriousness—whether in 1916, 1977, or 2025—the “Cravan Function” activates. He is conjured in essays, exhibitions, zines, and lectures by aging art professors like me, who hope that invoking his name might puncture the polite membrane of theory and let a little disorder back in.

We don’t study Cravan to understand him. We study him to un-understand everything else. He was the first to make confusion a medium. A critic once said, “Cravan is the man who proves that the avant-garde was never about art—it was about exit strategies.”

Cravan never finished anything, not because he couldn’t, but because finishing was the enemy. He considered closure a bourgeois concept. One of his poems ends mid-sentence. One of his boxing matches ended when he simply walked out of the ring. There is an unverified anecdote—recounted by no fewer than three drunken Surrealists—that he once submitted an empty envelope as an entry to a poetry contest. He came in second.

April 23, 1916: Jack Johnson vs. Arthur Cravan

This refusal of completion is not laziness. It is principle. He believed that to finish something was to admit defeat. The moment an artwork concludes, it becomes vulnerable to interpretation, to ownership, to being framed and hung and neutered. Cravan’s life, such as we know it, was one long rehearsal for a disappearance.

I have in my desk drawer a letter I like to pretend was written by Cravan. I found it tucked between two pages of a secondhand book I bought in Paris—a battered edition of Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont. The handwriting is erratic, the ink smudged, the paper brittle. It begins “To the future impostors of art . . .” and continues with a series of increasingly wild instructions:

• “Never wear matching socks.”

• “Publish your manifestos on the backs of unpaid bills.”

• “Paint only with liquids that ferment.”

• “If you must marry, marry someone who detests you.”

• “Never die in the place where you were born.”

The signature is illegible. Of course, it could be anyone’s. But I choose to believe it’s Cravan’s.

Or perhaps I wrote it. The truth is flexible. 

Farewell in stormy seas—the last glimpse of the man who vanished into myth

So, again—what remains to be said about Cravan?

That he died, probably. But maybe not. That his works are lost, or perhaps were never written. That his lectures were riots and his manifestos were fistfights. That his best poem may have been a forged obituary. That he is the one figure in modern art who successfully turned himself into a rumor—and stayed that way.

And that maybe, just maybe, the future of art belongs not to those who show up, but to those who leave spectacularly.

What remains to be said about Cravan is what can never be said. His story ends every time it is told, which means it must always be told again.

Isadore Duval (born 1936 in Valencia, Spain) is an art historian and retired university professor who occasionally guest lectures at a college in New Jersey. She studied under Paul Salmon and André Dermée in the late 1950s. Her lectures drift between lost manifestos and vanished artists, always returning to the question: What survives when the artwork disappears?

 [LW1

Cover image: Olga Sacharoff, Youth of the Cat (Portrait of Arthur Cravan), 1916. Oil on canvas, 111 x 94 cm