Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Although she shared the title of “Mother of Dada” with Gertrude Stein, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven truly looked and lived the part. Born Else Plötz in 1874 in Swinemünde, Germany, she came to America in 1910. Else lived on a farm in Kentucky and worked as an artist’s model in Cincinnati before finding her way to New York, where she settled in Harlem. A quick marriage followed to the German Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven. In the five subsequent years when the Baron was held captive as a prisoner of war in France, the Baroness began friendships and collaborations with artists and writers such as Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, and Morton Schamberg.

In 1918, a brief stint in Philadelphia, three weeks in a Connecticut jail for espionage, and the Baron’s death, the Baroness settled back in New York. She sculpted a number of proto-Dadaist works during this time, including “Cathedral” and “The Cast-Iron Lover.” Many of the Baroness’s creations were assemblages made from found (or stolen) materials. Her work thus provided a direct precursor to Loy’s later assemblage art, and indeed to the Dadaist concept of collage. She also wrote experimental sound poetry pieces, one of which was published in the Little Review at the same time as James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Baroness’s eccentric persona made her an enigmatic figure in the New York Dada scene, and she overlapped with Loy in attendance at salons such as the Arensberg apartment. Although the two women were closer to famous men of the movement than to each other, both proved key figures for the Dada movement; at the height of the Ulysses obscenity trial, the editors of the Little Review planned an issue featuring Loy and the Baroness “as a defense of Art.” The women were photographed together by Man Ray for this issue.

Although the Baroness was a prolific sculptor and frequently contributed poetry to little magazines such as The Little Review (alongside Mina Loy), her most important contribution to Dadaism was the character of the Baroness herself; many credit her as an early pioneer of performance art. Aggressively enigmatic, she could be found wearing everything from a tin-can bra to a live bird to a set of postage stamps stuck on her face. The Baroness’s affinity for the Dadaist movement, however, ran deeper than costume. Little Review publisher Jane Heap described her as “the first American dada […] the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada.” Her prickly, exaggerated public persona was a constant Dada performance, which made her both indispensable to the burgeoning movement and a deeply alienating presence.

Like Loy, the Baroness went through great periods of financial dependency, which led to her move from New York to Berlin in 1922. On December 14, 1927, the Baroness was found dead of asphyxiation by gas in her apartment. Although many suspect that her death was suicide, she never left a note. Recently, feminist revisions of the Baroness’s life have led to the release of the first full collection of her poetry, Body Sweats, in 2011.

Bio Template:

• Name: Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Loringhoven
• Date of Birth: 1874
• Place of Birth: Swinemünde, Pomerania, Germany
• Date of Death: 1927 (circumstances unknown/ suspected suicide)
• Place of Death: Paris
• Country of origin, citizenship: Germany
• Gender: Female
• Race: White
• Kind of Artist/Cultural worker: Poet, sculptor, performance artist
• Address in Florence or New York: 228 West 130^thStreet, Harlem; 14^th Street, Greenwich Village; later apartments in Berlin and Paris
• Dates & Places of Overlap with Loy: Munich, early 1900, both studying art. New York, 1916-18; Paris, 1926-27.
• Avant-garde movements the figure was associated with: Futurism, Dada
• Brief summary of the figure’s Biographical/Historical significance: Known as the “Mother of Dada,” the Baroness was an emblematic and distinctive figure on the New York art scene. She worked in poetry and sculpture, but her best-known contributions came from her performance art.
• Brief summary of the figure’s Relationship to Loy:
• What was the nature of their overlap or connection?
• Was it social, literary, artistic? Were they involved in collaborative ventures (publications, exhibitions, performances, readings)? Their connection was less of direct collaboration and more in that both women were taking their work in similar directions. Although the Baroness was the more outspoken (and overdressed) of the two, both she and Loy wrote female sexuality in a forward and direct way which was not being done elsewhere, and since both were published in some of the same little magazines, I think we can clearly assume that they were reading each other. They also frequented the same salons (the Arensberg and Dodge apartments in particular), so their overlap was very much social as well. They were featured in the same issue of the Little Review, and photographed together for the issue (although I can’t find this photo anywhere).
• What other artists/writers did your figure come in contact with? (keep a list – this will not contribute to your word count):

– William Carlos Williams

– Marcel Duchamp

– Ezra Pound (praised her in Rock Drill Cantos [Lappin 314])

– Hemingway

– Djuna Barnes (a good friend and even benefactor of the Baroness, especially during her later years in Berlin and Paris)

– Berenice Abbott

– Felix Paul Greve (Frederick Philip Grove)

– Walter & Louise Arensberg

– Peggy Guggenheim (a financial and personal supporter of the Baroness)

– Mabel Dodge (the Baroness was a regular at her salons, including a peyote adventure [Gammel 168], while Dodge was in New York)

Works Cited:

Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. Print.

Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity — A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. eBook.

Jones, Amelia. Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. eBook.

Lappin, Linda. “Dada Queen in the Bad Boys’ Club.” Southwest Review, vol. 89, no. 2/3, 2004, pp. 307-319). Web.

Mamadada. Directed by Lily Benson and Cassandra Guan, contributions by Leslie Allison, Raoul Anchondo, et al. Independently released, 2013.

Miller, Christianne. “Tongues ‘loosened in the melting pot:” The Poets of Others and the Lower East Side.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 14, no. 3, 2007, pp. 455-476. Web.

Voyce, Stephen. “‘Make the World Your Salon’: Poetry and Community at the Arensberg Apartment.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 15, no. 4, 2008, pp. 627-646. Web.