The New York Times Celebrates Dada Centennial, Includes Holland Cotter Tribute to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Holland Cotter honors Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven for the New York Times's 100-years-of-Dada feature, which has NYT critics tracing "the movement’s influence in music, art and dance, while tracking some living heirs." (Hint: It brings them to punk.) Cotter writes of the groundbreaking Baroness:

Dada is often viewed as Western culture’s autoimmune response to the cancer of World War I, and that’s so. An aesthetic impulse, it sent antibodies into what was left of a ruined 19th-century moral system, and gave those antibodies names: antiwar, anti-empire, anticapitalism, anti-authority, anti-logic, antinormality. But before Dada there was already a force of healthy resistance in play, and it too had a name: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Born middle-class Else Plotz in Germany in 1874, she had a hard childhood. Her father was abusive; her mother, suicidal. Creative and aggressively resilient, the baroness-to-be fled to Berlin, where she studied art and theater and wrote increasingly fantastical poetry, supporting herself by modeling and shoplifting. She made three bad marriages. The second brought her to the United States; the third gave her a fancy name and title but left her poor and alone in New York.

New York was a good place for her. With the city as her stage, she became one of the 20th century’s first performance artists and a proto-Dada star. She demolished boundaries, between genders, between art and fashion, art and politics, public and private. She preached sensation, surprise. On the street, she wore a birdcage over her head and a tin-can bra. Indoors, she preferred loosefitting wraps that could be whipped off, leaving her nude. Taking lovers of various erotic persuasions, she was a pioneer of queer. She wrote language-crunching, censorship-challenging verse in a steady stream and, well before Marcel Duchamp, invented the readymade as art.

Duchamp, who arrived in New York two years after she did, was a fan, as was Ezra Pound, who praised her “spirit of non-acquiescence.” Jane Heap, co-editor of “The Little Review,” called the Baroness “the first American Dada.” To the young photographer Berenice Abbott she was “Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled into one.”

Read it all at the New York Times. At top: Theresa Bernstein, The Baroness, c. 1917, Oil on canvas, 35 x 27 inches. Francis M. Naumann Fine Art.