Arthur Cravan (born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd; 22 May 1887 – disappeared 1918) was a Swiss writer, poet, artist and boxer. He was the second son of Otho Holland Lloyd and Hélène Clara St. Clair. His brother Otho Lloyd was a painter and photographer married to the Russian émigré artist Olga Sacharoff. His father's sister, Constance Mary Lloyd, was married to Irish poet Oscar Wilde. He changed his name to Cravan in 1912 in honour of his fiancée Renée Bouchet, who was born in the small village of Cravans in the department of Charente-Maritime in western France. Cravan was last seen at Salina Cruz, Mexico in 1918 and most likely drowned in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico in November 1918. Early life Cravan was born and educated in Lausanne, Switzerland, then at an English military academy; he was expelled under mysterious circumstances, but some sources suggest that it was for spanking a teacher. After his schooling, during World War I, he travelled throughout Europe and America using a variety of passports and documents, most of them forged. He declared no single nationality and claimed instead to be "a citizen of 20 countries". Career Cravan set out to promote himself as an eccentric poet and art critic, but his interest in art and literature was that of the provocateur which is typified by his claim in Maintenant (March – April 1914) that art is "situated more in the guts than in the brain" and that he wanted to "break the face" of the modern art movement. He staged public spectacles with himself at the centre, once acting on the front of a line of carts where he paraded his skills as a boxer and singer. His proclivity for shock was what endeared him to the New York Dadaist movement, who adopted him as a poster boy after his death despite the fact Cravan never self-identified with the movement. From 1911 to 1915, Cravan published and edited a critical literary magazine, Maintenant! ("Now!"), which appeared in five issues and which he notoriously distributed around Paris with a wheelbarrow. It was gathered together and reprinted by Eric Losfeld in 1971 as J'étais Cigare in the Dadaist collection "Le Désordre". The magazine was designed to cause sensation; in a piece about the 1914 arts salon, Cravan viciously criticised a self-portrait by Marie Laurencin, stating that it looked like she "needed a good