Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Dada, Performance Art, Readymade and The Found Object, Modern Photography, Proto-Feminist Artists
Born: 12 July 1874, Swinemunde, Germany
Nationality: German-American
Died: 14 December 1927, Paris, France
The Baroness, as Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was known, was a living legend in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village, New York in the years before and after the First World War. She was a catalyst and provocateur of the burgeoning Dada movement in New York, and the Baroness obliterated the conventional boundaries and norms of womanhood and femininity whilst upending the notions of what was considered to be art.
Along with Marcel Duchamp, the Baroness pioneered the use of the readymade, and she manipulated and stretched the English language creating her own style of avant-garde poetry. The Baroness had a penchant for cross-dressing and using found objects in her wardrobe, in effect, making a public daily Dada performance whenever she went out. A radical proto-feminist, the Baroness criticized the patriarchal norms, however, she was overshadowed by her male colleagues, resulting in her daringness being described as female eccentricity, and she became a footnote in the history of New York Dada. However, in recent years her contribution to the avant-garde has become rightly recognized for their innovativeness.
The Baroness’s work is steeped in avant-garde principles and questions the nature of what is socially considered as art. Her use of the readymades demands the viewer to consider the division between what is low and high culture, everyday objects and fine art, and the role of the artist as an appropriator rather than a creator. Her work disturbed the notions of beauty with much of the Baroness’s work lacerating the commodification of art objects.
Taking the concept of the ‘New Woman,’ the Baroness took the image of the independent modern woman as popularized at the end of the 19th century to new heights with the artist’s own insistence on intellectual, sexual, and artistic autonomy. The Baroness’s eccentric dress and use of her body as a model and performance artist set her apart from her Dada contemporaries
The Baroness was the elder of two siblings born to a middle-class family. Her mother died of uterine cancer in 1893 after suffering from mental health problems for many years. The Baroness blamed her father for her mother’s death leading to a violent encounter with him. Her father’s subsequent remarriage, three months after her mother’s death, and his continued abusive treatment of her led the Baroness to run away to Berlin where she lived with her aunt.
Berlin was a huge influence on the Baroness and her future as an artist and provocateur. She met her future husband and was exposed to bohemian culture through theatre, art, and poetry circles. She encountered vaudeville and with little money to support herself worked as a chorus girl at Berlin’s Zentral Theatre and as a waitress. It was in Berlin she began exploring her bisexuality and gender fluidity, modelling for Henry De Vry’s erotic series “Living Pictures” and starting a relationship with the cross-dressing graphic artist Melchior Lechter. The Baroness spent much of her life living on the edge, following the travels of artists with whom she made artistic as well as romantic connections.
On moving to Munich the Baroness began taking art lessons at an artist’s colony. She also met the Jugendstil architect August Endell, and they were married in 1901. In 1903 the Baroness left Endell for his friend Felix Paul Greve and the couple travelled to Naples, Zürich, and Berlin
The Baroness made up for her lack of academic training with her experience and audacity. Greve was in serious debt and she helped him stage his suicide in 1909. Following his “death” she and Greve moved to the USA running a small farm in Kentucky. The following year, Greve left her and moved to Canada, with a limited knowledge of English the Baroness began travelling through Virginia and Ohio, modelling for artists and photographers along the way, including George Biddle and Charles Sheeler in Philadelphia.
The Baroness travelled to New York where she met and married the German Baron Leo von Freytag-Loringhoven in 1913m thus becoming a baroness. Their marriage was short-lived as Leo returned to Germany on the eve of WW1 and eventually committed suicide after being held as a prisoner of war. After the Baron’s death, the Baroness had to make an income and modelled at the anarchist Ferrer Center and the Arts Students League. She met several influential artists including Man Ray but throughout this time she lived in poverty.
The Baroness’s time in New York irreversibly influenced her artistic career. From the early 1910s, she began making sculptures from found and discarded objects, anticipating a technique that would be a stable trait of the Dada movement. Dada emerged in the wake of WW1 challenging societal norms and rational thinking so valued by the bourgeoisie and seeking to redefine art. The Baroness made use of the rubbish she found on the streets to create collages, assemblages, paintings, and sculptures. The Baroness, along with other Dadaists such as Marcel Duchamp began to defy the notion that art must be crafted by a singular person, as well as the notion it must conform to established concepts of beauty.
The Baroness and Duchamp selected every day, utilitarian objects as pieces of art. Duchamp referred to these sculptures as ‘readymades.’ Some historians suspect the t5 the Baroness was the mastermind behind Duchamp’s conceptual piece ‘Fountain’ citing a letter he wrote to his sister stating the piece had been sent to him by a female friend under the male pseudonym of Richard Mutt. The inscription R. Mutt – a homonym of Armut, German for poverty, would certainly have been a pun the Baroness would have relished.
The Baroness admired Duchamp as an artist and possibly romantically. In return, Duchamp admired her art but did not return the romantic feelings. Openly bisexual in the 1920s the Baroness was unapologetic in her sexuality and promiscuity which caused scandal even among her avant-garde associates, and often overshadowed her art.
Whether the Baroness was the creator of 2The Fount ain” or not, she was a pioneer of New York Dada. Her performances and use of her body in public spaces were the most radical assault on the rational norms. Her dress, which often included a tin-can bra, a birdcage with a bird for a hat, curtain rings as bangles, and a variety of feathers and tassels, collapsed the distinction between art and life. The Baroness lived in Dada, rather than simply making it static artworks in a gallery.
The Baroness was arrested for her appearances in unconventional dress as early as 1910. She continued posing for artists and using her ageing, female body as the site of her art throughout her career. She starred in the film “Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Shaves Her Pubic Hair” (1921) by Man Ray and Duchamp in which she performed the action in the title as a mundane and repetitive task highlighting her body as mortal and abject.
The Baroness was also an innovative poet, appearing in the avant-garde magazine “The Little Review” in 1918 alongside James Joyce. In 1922, the magazine published her poem “AFFECTIONATE” alongside a photograph of “Portrait of Marcel Duchamp”, her quirky assemblage in homage to the artist consisting of feathers and botanical snippets resting on top of a fractured wine glass
Despite her contributions to the avant-garde the Baroness remained in poverty and unacknowledged for her work throughout her life. She returned to Germany in 1923 in the hope of reconnecting with the German avant-garde scene and seeking an improvement in her financial position. Instead, she found a country devastated by war. Her father had died after disinheriting her and she was forced to sell newspapers in Berlin to make a living. Eventually, she found herself destitute
The Baroness moved to Paris in 1926 where she spent the last year of her life penniless and underemployed. She again started posing as a profession at the Montparnasse studios at the Grande Chaumière between 1926 and 1927, The Baroness was never short of ambition despite her lack of good fortune and was even making plans for her own modelling school to open in the late summer of 1927, under the name “Last Dreams.” The dream was ultimately left unfulfilled.
On 14 December 1927, the Baroness and her pets died of asphyxiation in her apartment as a result of the gas being left on. The circumstances of her death remain unresolved as to whether it was simply an accident or intentional suicide,
Resources
Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity-A Cultural Biography by Irene Gammel
Jezzie G 