Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Although she shared the title of “Mother of Dada” with Gertrude Stein, no one in New York could argue that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven didn’t look the part. The woman who would later electrify New York with her eccentric birdcage dress and bustle-taillight was born Else Plötz in 1874 in the small town of Swinemünde, Germany. Elsa Plötz (then Elsa Endell after a brief marriage) came to the United States in 1910. She was accompanying her second husband, Felix Paul Greve, to Kentucky following his staged suicide. They stayed in Kentucky for only a year before Greve once again absconded, leaving Elsa on her own to make a living. After working briefly as an artist’s model in Cincinnati, she found her way to New York, settling at 130^th Street in Harlem. A quick marriage followed to the German Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven, who would later commit suicide after five years as a prisoner of war in France during WWI. During this time, the Baroness made connections through the modeling she did for photographers and artists and through the New York Dada social scene, beginning friendships and collaborations with artists and writers such as Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, and Morton Schamberg.

After a brief stint in Philadelphia and another in a Connecticut jail for espionage, the Baroness settled back in New York, this time on 14^th Street at the edge of Greenwich Village, and began working on her art with a renewed intensity. She sculpted a number of cutting-edge proto-Dadaist works during this time, including “Cathedral” and “The Cast-Iron Lover.” She also wrote a number of experimental sound poetry pieces, once of which was published in the Little Review at the same time as James Joyce’s Ulysses was serialized. She continued her relationships with a number of important Dadaist figures as the movement took off in New York; in 1921, Duchamp and photographer Man Ray released a since-lost film titled Elsa, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, Shaving Her Pubic Hair. Her eccentric dress and behavior made her an enigmatic figure in the New York Dada scene, and she overlapped with Loy in attendance New York artistic salons such as the Arensberg Apartment.

Although the Baroness was a prolific sculptor and frequently contributed poetry to little magazines such as The Little Review, her most important contribution to the art world was the character of the Baroness herself: many credit her as an early pioneer of performance art. An outlandish dresser, she was known for 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, though, ran deeper than just costume. Publisher Jane Heap, who included the Baroness’s works in her Little Review, 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. Both Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams famously rejected her romantic advances, the latter of which proved an embarrassment that the Baroness later chronicled in her critical poem “Thee I Call Thee Hamlet of the Wedding Ring,” published in the Little Review.

Many of the Baroness’s creations were assemblages: she wore garbage picked up off the ground (or stolen), and she made her art from found materials as well. As such, her work provided a direct precursor to Loy’s later assemblage art, and indeed to the Dadaist concept of the collage. Both Loy and the Baroness were much closer to famous men of the movement than they were with each other (often, as in the case of Duchamp, the same famous men). Nevertheless, the two women were key figures in the movement; they also proved to be useful figureheads. At the height of the obscenity trial facing the Little Review after its publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, the Review’s editors planned an issue featuring both Loy and the Baroness “as a defense of Art.” The women were photographed together by Man Ray for this issue.

Like Loy, the Baroness went through great periods of financial dependency and destitution, 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. Barnes continued to manage her letters and estate; a full collection of the Baroness’s poetry, Body Sweats, did not arrive until 2011. As with Loy, scholars have recently led a revival of interest in the Baroness’s work and life, including Mamadada, a collaborative biodrama made collectively by over fifty filmmakers.

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.

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)