{"id":3632,"date":"2017-11-19T04:48:26","date_gmt":"2017-11-19T04:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/?p=3632"},"modified":"2017-11-19T04:50:47","modified_gmt":"2017-11-19T04:50:47","slug":"3632","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/2017\/11\/19\/3632\/","title":{"rendered":"Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although she shared the title of \u201cMother of Dada\u201d with Gertrude Stein, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven truly looked and lived the part. Born Else Pl\u00f6tz in 1874 in Swinem\u00fcnde, Germany, she came to America in 1910. Else lived on a farm in Kentucky and worked as an artist\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In 1918, a brief stint in Philadelphia, three weeks in a Connecticut jail for espionage, and the Baron\u2019s death, the Baroness settled back in New York. She sculpted a number of proto-Dadaist works during this time, including \u201cCathedral\u201d and \u201cThe Cast-Iron Lover.\u201d Many of the Baroness\u2019s creations were assemblages made from found (or stolen) materials. Her work thus provided a direct precursor to Loy\u2019s 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\u00a0Little Review<\/em>\u00a0at the same time as James Joyce\u2019s\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>. The Baroness\u2019s 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 <\/em>obscenity trial, the editors of the Little Review<\/em> planned an issue featuring Loy and the Baroness \u201cas a defense of Art.\u201d The women were photographed together by Man Ray for this issue.<\/p>\n

Although the Baroness was a prolific sculptor and frequently contributed poetry to little magazines such as\u00a0The Little Review <\/em>(alongside Mina Loy), her most important contribution to Dadaism was the character of the\u00a0Baroness herself; many credit her as an early pioneer of performance art.\u00a0Aggressively 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\u2019s affinity for the Dadaist movement, however, ran deeper than costume. Little Review <\/em>publisher Jane Heap described her as \u201cthe first American dada [\u2026] the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada.\u201d Her prickly, exaggerated public persona was\u00a0a constant Dada performance, which made her both indispensable to the burgeoning movement and a deeply alienating presence.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s life have led to the release of the first full collection of her poetry,\u00a0Body Sweats<\/em>, in 2011.<\/p>\n

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