Name
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Birth
1874, Swinemünde, Pomerania, Germany
Country of Origin/Citizenship
Germany/German, American
Kind of Artist/Cultural Worker
Poet, Sculptor, Performance Artist
Avant-Garde Movements Associated With
Futurism, Dada
Date & Places of Overlap with Loy
Munich, early 1900, both studying art. New York, 1916-18. Paris, 1926-27.
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.
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. She 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 (Gammel 146-54). A quick marriage followed to the German Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven (Gammel 159). 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 (Gammel 163-67).
In 1918, following 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 (Gammel xix). She created a number of proto-Dadaist assemblages during this time, including “Cathedral” and “The Cast-Iron Lover.” Many of the Baroness’s creations were assemblages made from found (or stolen) materials (Jones 5-6). Her work provides a direct precursor to Dada collages and to Loy’s later assemblage art. 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 (Gammel 245-60). The Baroness’s eccentric persona made her a distinctive 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 (Burke 287-89).
Although the Baroness was a prolific sculptor and frequently contributed poetry to little magazines such as The Little Review (alongside 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 (Lappin 308). 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” (Heap 46). 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 1923 (Gammel 310). 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 (Gammel 382-84). 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.
Related
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.
Heap, Jane. “Dada.” The Little Review, vol. 8, no. 2, Spring 1922, 46. https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1299781611562504.pdf.
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, 307-319.
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