Nancy Cunard

Nancy Cunard was an important member of avant-garde circles in London and Paris as well as a poet, publisher, and collector of Dada, Surrealism, and African art.

The great-granddaughter of the founder of Cunard Line, an international shipping corporation, Cunard was an aristocrat and educated privately. She quickly abandoned the life of a socialite, however, and instead formed friendships with such London-based avant-garde writers as T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound. After the First World War, Cunard relocated to Paris and joined the avant-garde community of Montparnasse through her relationship with the author Robert McAlmon. She soon developed relationships with the poets Louis Aragon and Tristan Tzara. Research suggests that she contributed to some of their most innovative projects, inspiring the title character for Aragon’s Blanche, ou l’oubli and suggesting the title for Tzara’s Mouchoir des nuages. Cunard herself achieved critical acclaim with the free verse poem, Parallax, published in 1925.

In addition to her creative pursuits, Cunard also founded and ran The Hours press in Réanville, Normandy, which was the first to publish the work of such emerging talents as Samuel Beckett and Laura Riding, as well as new works by established authors including Pablo Neruda. Between 1928 and 1931, The Hours published twenty-four books—a figure that far exceeded any private press of the era. During this period, Cunard also befriended a number of artists associated with Surrealism, enlisting two, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy, to design book covers for The Hours.

Cunard’s intellectual rigor, artistic sensibility, and distinctive persona—perhaps most notoriously the numerous ivory bangles adorning her arms—sparked the creative imaginations of Parisian interwar artists. Cunard was the subject of paintings by Oskar Kokoschka and Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, photographs by Cecil Beaton and Man Ray, and several fictional characters in books by Ernest Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh.

Beginning in the 1920s, Cunard reportedly used the substantial income from her family business to build a collection of Dada and Surrealist art as well as African sculpture. Despite evidence that she sold some works from her collection at auction, the majority of her holdings disappeared during the Second World War. Little information, therefore, is available on its contents.

By the 1930s, spurred by her relationship with African American jazz musician Henry Crowder, Cunard began studying racial inequality in the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. In 1934 she compiled her Negro Anthology (1934), the first complete study of what historian Paul Gilroy has since termed the Black Atlantic, with texts ranging from poetry by Langston Hughes to ethnographic analyses by Charles Ratton. However, the book ultimately reified the stereotypes and inequitable power dynamics she sought to disrupt. Cunard’s commitment to Anglophone African diasporic communities and politics would continue for the rest of her life: she worked as a correspondent for the Associated Negro Press for two decades (from 1933 to 1953) and coauthored The White Man’s Duty (1942) with George Padmore, considered a founder of the West African liberation movement. Following her work as a journalist combatant in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War, Cunard published Authors Take Sides (1937), exhorting her fellow writers to fight against fascism. During the Second World War, she also worked as a writer and broadcaster for the Allied Expeditionary Force.

At the end of the war, Cunard relocated to the Dordogne region in southwest France. She returned to Spain in 1957, lived in London for two years, and finally settled France in 1962. Cunard died in Paris in March 1965. What remained of her ivory bangles, along with several first edition books and letters, were sold posthumously in a series of sales from 1968 to 1972.