Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
(1874 -1927)
"Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life ..."
I.
The relationship between dada and punk has long been acknowledged; Greil Marcus, for example, famously traces out a secret history of twentieth-century art in which he discerns a direct lineage from the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 to the Sex Pistols in 1976 [1].
And it's arguable that the German-born artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who, via her radical performance of self during the years 1913 to 1923 came to embody dada, might also be described as a proto-punk.
For not only did she look and act the part, but she even coined the term phalluspistol in her profane and playfully obscene poetry [2], anticipating the name Malcolm McLaren would come up with for the group operating out of 430 King's Road.
I'm not suggesting that McLaren stole Elsa's idea in the same way as Marcel Duchamp allegedly stole credit for his most notorious readymade from her (see below), but it's an interesting coincidence.
II.
Apart from her writings, Baroness Elsa was famous for two things: (i) her numerous love affairs and (ii) her utilisation of found objects - including actual rubbish picked up from the streets - into her work and wardrobe (she once wore a bra, for example, made from old tins cans).
Her aim, she declared, was to sleep with everyone and become a living collage, thereby dissolving the boundary between life and art whilst, at the same time, challenging bourgeois notions of femininity and cultural value. If this made her an embarrassment to her friends and family and a disgrace in the eyes of society, well, she didn't care (again, her attitude and behaviour is now what some would term punk).
Her colourful and unconventional life took her to New York in 1913 and it was here that she made a name for herself as a model, artist, and poet [3]. To help make ends meet, Elsa also worked in a cigarette factory like Bizet's Carmen.
Whilst Man Ray once filmed Elsa shaving her pubic hair, it was Marcel Duchamp for whom she had the hots and, in a public performance c. 1915, she recited a love poem whilst rubbing a newspaper article about the latter over her naked body, making her romantic interest explicit. Several years later she would make an assemblage entitled Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1920-22), which was only rediscovered in 1966.
It was her connection with Duchamp that would lead to a more recent controversy. For there is now speculation that several artworks attributed to other
artists of the period can either be partially attributed to Elsa, or that she should in fact be acknowledged as their sole creator - and this includes one of the most famous and important artworks of the twentieth-century ...
III.
In April 1917, a porcelain urinal signed with the name R. Mutt was submitted by Duchamp for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Duchamp entitled this readymade work Fountain
- and the rest, as they say, is avant-garde art history [4].
But some have suggested that the work was, in fact, the idea of Elsa von
Freytag-Loringhoven who had submitted it to her friend Duchamp and there is, to be fair, circumstantial evidence to support this claim. Most art
historians, however, maintain that Duchamp was solely responsible for
this landmark work in twentieth-century art and he remains credited for
it [5].
Ultimately, we'll probably never know the truth of this for sure.
IV.
In 1923, the Baroness returned to Berlin, where she lived in poverty and suffered mental health problems.
Things improved after she moved to Paris, but, sadly, she died on 14 December 1927 from gas inhalation (whether this was or was not intentional is unclear).
She's buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, so in good company.
There have since been several biographies published and every now and then there's an attempt to bring the name Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to wider public attention [6], though one suspects that she'll always remain a marginal figure of interest only to those in the know.
Notes
[1] Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1989).
[2] See the poem 'Cosmic Chemistry' in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (The MIT Press, 2016). Click here to read on allpoetry.com.
[3] Although most of her poems remained unpublished in her lifetime, some were featured in The Little Review alongside extracts from Joyce's Ulysses.
[4] The original
piece is now lost, but, along with numerous replicas made with Duchamp's permission in the 1950s and '60s, we still have the famous photograph of it taken
at Alfred Stieglitz's sudio and published in The Blind Man (a two-issue journal featuring work by dada artists and edited by Duchamp in 1917).
[5] See, for example, the letter from Dawn Adès (Professor emerita of art history and theory, University of Essex) addressing this controversy in The Guardian (15 June 2022): click here.
[6] See for example Irene Gammel's biography, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity
(The MIT Press, 2003). Gammel makes a strong case for Elsa's artistic brilliance
and punk spirit.
