Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Biography

Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (née Else Hildegard Plötz; 12 July 1874 – 14 December 1927) was a German avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada. She was considered one of the most controversial and radical artists of the era. Her provocative poetry was published posthumously in 2011 in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The New York Times praised the book as one of the notable art books of 2011.

== Early life == Elsa Plötz was born on 12 July 1874, in Swinemünde (now Świnoujście, Poland), in what was then the German province of Pomerania, to Adolf Plötz, a mason, and Ida Marie Kleist. Her relationship with her father was temperamental—she emphasized how controlling he was in the family, as well as how cruel, yet big-hearted he was. In her art, she related the ways that political structures promote masculine authority in family settings, maintaining the state's patriarchal societal order. Her discontent with her father's masculine control may have fostered her anti-patriarchal activist approach to life. On the other hand, the relationship that she had with her mother was full of admiration—her mother's craft involving the repurposing of found objects could have spawned Freytag-Loringhoven's use of street debris and found objects in her own artworks. She worked as an actress and vaudeville performer while having numerous affairs with artists in Berlin, Munich and Italy. She studied art in Dachau, near Munich. She married Berlin-based architect August Endell in a civil service on August 22, 1901, in Berlin, becoming Elsa Endell. They had an "open relationship", and in 1902 she became romantically involved with a friend of Endell, the minor poet and translator Felix Paul Greve (who later went by the name Frederick Philip Grove). After the trio travelled together to Palermo, Sicily in late January 1903, the Endells' marriage disintegrated. They divorced in 1906. Although their separation was acrimonious, she dedicated several satirical poems to Endell. In 1906, she and Greve returned to Berlin, where they were married on August 22, 1907. By 1909, Greve was in deep financial trouble. With his wife's help, he staged a suicide and departed for North America in late July 1909. In July 1910, Elsa joined him in the United States, where they operated a small farm in Sparta, Kentucky, not far from Cincinnati. Greve suddenly deserted her in 1911 and went west to a bonanza farm near Fargo, North Dakota, and to Manitoba in 1912. There are no records of a divorce from Greve. Elsa started modeling for artists in Cincinnati, and made her way east via West Virginia and Philadelphia, and then she married her third husband, the German Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven (son of Hugo von Freytag-Loringhoven), in November 1913 in New York. At that time Elsa began to make sculptures out of found and discarded objects. She later became known as "the dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven".

== Work ==

In New York City, Freytag-Loringhoven supported herself by working in a cigarette factory and by posing as a model for artists such as Louis Bouché, George Biddle, and Theresa Bernstein. She appeared in photographs by Man Ray, George Grantham Bain and others.

=== Poetry ===

Freytag-Loringhoven was given a platform for her poetry in The Little Review, where, starting in 1918, her work was featured alongside chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses. Jane Heap considered Freytag-Loringhoven "the first American dada." She was an early pioneer of sound poetry, but also made creative use of the dash, while many of her portmanteau compositions, such as "Kissambushed" and "Phalluspistol," present miniature poems. Most of her poems remained unpublished until the publications of Body Sweats. Her personal papers were preserved after her death by her editor, literary agent, artistic collaborator, and lover Djuna Barnes. The University of Maryland Libraries acquired a collection of her work with the papers of Barnes in 1973 and subsequently separated von Freytag-Lorninghoven's papers and treated them as an individual collection. The collection contains correspondence, visual poems, and other artistic/literary works by the artist. The University of Maryland's special collections has an extensive digital archive of her manuscripts.

=== Collage, assemblage and performance ===

In New York, Freytag-Loringhoven also worked on assemblage, sculptures and paintings, creating art out of the rubbish she collected from the streets. She was known to construct elaborate costumes from found objects, creating a "kind of living collage" that erased the boundaries between life and art. Scholar Eliza Jane Reilly argues that Freytag-Loringhoven's elaborate costumes both critiqued and challenged the bourgeois notions of feminine beauty and economic worth. She adorned herself with utilitarian objects like spoons, tin cans, and curtain rings, as well as street debris that she came across. Freytag-Loringhoven's use of her own body as a medium was deliberate, to transform herself into a specific type of spectacle—one that women who complied to the constraints of femininity of the time would be humiliated to embody. By doing so, she controlled and established agency over the visual access to her own nudity, unhinged the presentational expectations of femininity by appearing androgynous, drew upon ideas of women's selfhood and sexual politics, and provided emphasis on her anti-consumerism and anti-aestheticism outlooks. She included her body's smells, perceived imperfections, and leakages in her body art. Irene Gammel argues that the placement of her raw personal body/self in public space could be described as a type of Irrational Modernism. In a performance of these ideals sometime between 1915-1916 in New York City, von Freytag-Loringhoven took a gifted newspaper clipping of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase to rub over her own nude body while reciting a love poem as an ode to the artist of the original painting. This performance was not only a public proclamation of her romantic feelings for Duchamp at that time, but transformative due to this act turning the working artist-model into an artist in her own right. Freytag-Loringhoven's body art was a form of dadaist performance art and activism. Few artworks by Freytag-Loringhoven exist today. Several known found object works include Enduring Ornament (1913), Earring-Object (1917–1919), Cathedral (c. 1918) and Limbswish (c. 1920). Rediscovered by the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1996, her Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1920–1922) is another example of her assemblages. The sculpture God (1917) had for a number of years been solely attributed to the artist Morton Livingston Schamberg. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which collection includes God, now credits Freytag-Loringhoven as a co-author of this piece. Although Amelia Jones suggested that this artwork's concept and title was created by the baroness, it was likely constructed by both Schamberg and Freytag-Loringhoven. This sculpture, God, involved a cast iron plumbing trap and a wooden mitre box, assembled in a phallic-like manner. Her concept behind the shape and choice of materials is indicative of her commentary on the worship and love that Americans have for plumbing that trumps all else; additionally, it is revealing of Freytag-Loringhoven's rejection of technology.