{"id":3147,"date":"2017-09-19T18:44:33","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T18:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/?p=3147"},"modified":"2017-09-19T20:07:09","modified_gmt":"2017-09-19T20:07:09","slug":"baroness-elsa-von-freytag-loringhoven-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/2017\/09\/19\/baroness-elsa-von-freytag-loringhoven-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although she shared the title of \u201cMother of Dada\u201d with Gertrude Stein, no one in New York could argue that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who could be often spotted with a shaved head painted orange or postage stamps stuck to her face, didn\u2019t look the part. Born Else Pl\u00f6tz in 1874 in the small town of Swinem\u00fcnde, Germany, Elsa Pl\u00f6tz came to the United States in 1910 (Gammell. She was accompanying her then-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\u2019s model in Cincinatti, she found her way to New York, settling at 130th<\/sup> 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 (Gammel 164). During this time, the Baroness made connections through her modeling and social activities, beginning friendships and collaborations with artists and writers such as Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, and Morton Schamberg.<\/p>\n

After a brief stint in Philadelphia and another in a Connecticut jail for espionage, the Baroness settled back in New York, this time on 14th<\/sup> Street at the edge of Greenwich Village, and began working on her art with a renewed intensity (Gammel xix). She sculpted a number of cutting-edge proto-Dadaist works, including \u201cCathedral\u201d and \u201cThe Cast-Iron Lover,\u201d the latter of which drew controversy from the art world. She also wrote a number of challenging sound poetry pieces, once of which was published in the Little Review<\/em> at the same time as James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em> was being 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.<\/em> 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 (Voyce 628).<\/p>\n

Although the Baroness was a prolific sculptor and frequently contributed poetry to little magazines such as The Little Review<\/em> (alongside Mina Loy), her most important contribution to Dadaism and the art world in general was the character of the Baroness herself. Endlessly enigmatic and aggressively quirky, she dressed herself as if just walking down the street was a performance: she could be found wearing everything from a live bird to a tin-can bra to a set of taillights (Lappin 309). This affinity for the movement, though, ran deeper than just costume. Publisher Jane Heap, who included the Baroness\u2019s works in her Little Review<\/em>, described her as \u201cthe first American dada [\u2026] the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada\u201d (qtd. in Jones, 5). Her relentlessly challenging public persona was a sort of 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 embarrassing mishap that the Baroness later chronicled in her critical poem \u201cThee I Call Thee Hamlet of the Wedding Ring,\u201d published in the Little Review <\/em>(Gammel 270).<\/p>\n

Many of the Baroness\u2019s creations, both in sculpture and in fashion, were assemblages: she wore garbage picked up off the ground (or stolen), and she made her art from found materials as well (Lappin 309). As such, her work provided a direct precursor to Loy\u2019s later assemblage art, and indeed the Dadaist concept of collage art. Stephen Voyce goes so far as to credit the Baroness as a direct inspiration for the punctuation style of Loy\u2019s \u201cOh Marcel\u201d (642). Although both of these women were much closer to famous men of the movement (often, as in the case of Duchamp, the same famous men) than with each other, they both contributed and received inspiration from the Dadaist movement \u2014 and they both faced a similar historical treatment. 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 (Gammell xvii).<\/p>\n

On December 14, 1927, the Baroness was found dead of asphyxiation by gas in her apartment (Gammel xxi). 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 her poetry, Body Sweats<\/em>, did not arrive until 2011. Like Loy, scholars have recently led a revival of interest her work and life, including Mamadada<\/em>, a collaborative biodrama made collectively by over fifty filmmakers.<\/p>\n

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