The Queen of Dada in America

If the name Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is on the tip of your tongue, then we salute you! Just as Timeline salutes the Baroness this week, with a profile detailing her background, marriages, affairs, poetical works, and Dadaist hijinks. We'll have a look into Elsa's life starting in 1913, the year she became "Baroness":

She became a baroness in 1913, marrying the last of her husbands, Baron Leo von Freytag-Loringhoven, who returned to Germany at the outbreak of World War I and promptly shot himself. Elsa remained in New York City, where she came alive — and also perhaps a bit unglued — writing Expressionist and Dada poetry and hanging out with artists of all stripes. She was a nutty fixture in the happening Greenwich Village of the 1920s, notable for her social crowd, her creativity, her seeming delirium, and her unrepentant kleptomania. She regularly scavenged for trash and treasures that she incorporated into her artwork. She modeled for a range of influential artists and appeared in a film made by Man Ray and Duchamp titled “The Baroness Shaves Her Pubic Hair.”

The Baroness’s first poems were published beginning in 1918 in The Little Review, a literary magazine run in part by Ezra Pound and modernist Jane Heap, who was a champion of Freytag-Loringhoven’s work. The journal’s motto was “Making No Compromise With the Public’s Taste,” and it had published James Joyce’s Ulysses in serial form. In her straight-lined, all-caps handwriting, Elsa penned poems with delightfully effervescent titles like “Subjoyride,” “Holy Skirts,” and “A Dozen Cocktails — Please.” Her verse teetered on the boundary between brilliance and nonsense, challenging modernist mores of the time and ushering in a buoyant surrealist style full of playful word association and bold sexual boundary pushing. Heap called her “the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada.”

Baroness Elsa lived at the intersection of artistic movements brimming with urgency, intent, and all manner of weirdness. In Munich and Berlin, she was active in the arts and crafts movement, which she both drew from and inspired with her out-there, DIY fashion statements. When she first arrived in the United States in 1910, Elsa was arrested for walking down Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh smoking a cigarette in a man’s suit. “She Wore Men’s Clothes,” ran a New York Times headline about her. As Nell Frizzell wrote of Elsa in the Guardian, “This was a woman…whose idea of getting gussied-up for a private view was to scatter her outfit liberally with flattened tin cans and stuffed parrots.” She walked 14th Street half-clothed, and recited poetry on city street corners with nothing but tea balls covering her breasts.

Head to Timeline to continue on.