Essay from The Literary Review
Dada Queen---Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity
Linda Lappin
Recent feminist readings of modern art history have emphasized the dynamic role of women in promoting, financing, and documenting Dadaism in the US. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of The Little Review, were among the first to publish Dada poetry and artwork, Katherine Dreir financed Marcel Duchamp; Peggy Guggenheim provided generous funds to several artists connected to the movement; photographer Berenice Abbot recorded the artists' faces and environments in her photographs. The confrontational spirit of Dada attracted many women artists as well, including Suzanne Duchamp and Baroness Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven. Despite the important contribution of these and other women to the Dada movement as patrons and artists, their achievements were frequently underestimated by their male colleagues and have hence been overlooked by art historians. Feminist scholarship has brought one of these neglected figures to light again: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, whose work was “rediscovered” by the public in 1996 thanks to the Whitney Exhibition, “Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York,” which featured several of her pieces. Now hailed as America's Dada queen and the great aunt of contemporary performance art, Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven is the subject of an exhaustive cultural biography.
Irene Gammel's biography is the only comprehensive biography to date of this enigmatic woman---artist, poet, and model---who flits and, at times, streaks naked through the memoirs, correspondence, and artwork of many artists and writers of the period: Man Ray, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, Berenice Abbot, and Hart Crane. Before the arrival of Gammel's book, published sources concerning the Baroness were mainly limited to these period memoirs, concentrating on her New York phase, 1913-1923, when Elsa earned her living as an artists' model and was chiefly known for her eye-opening “art-to-wear” costumes.
Tall, slim, stern-featured, with a haughty bearing and a dancer's grace, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven strutted the New York streets and popped in at public events with her head shaved and shellacked in vermillion, postage stamps glued to her cheek, a brassiere made of tomato cans and string, a coal scuttle clapped like a helmet to her head, a dress made of a crepe stolen from an undertaker. Margaret Anderson recorded this description in her autobiography, My Thirty Years' War:
She wore a red Scotch plaid suit with a kilt hanging just below the knees, a bolero jacket with sleeves to the elbows and arms covered with a quantity of ten-cent-store bracelets---silver, gilt, bronze, green and yellow. She wore high white spats with a band of decorative furniture braid around the top. Hanging from her bust were two tea-balls from which the nickel had worn away. On her head was a black velvet tam o' shanter with a feather and several spoons---long ice-cream soda spoons . . . (240-241).
The Baroness created these astonishing costumes from rubbish picked up in the street, or odds and ends pilfered from the dime store, for which she was frequently arrested, spending weeks at a time in the Tombs, the New York jail. The source of materials and the serendipitous way they came into her hands were part of the total experience of her aesthetic. Sometimes she would wait on the sidewalk for a truck to run over and squash a tin can or a bottle cap before retrieving it, for only then was it ready to be employed in one of her creations.
Many of Elsa's contemporaries dismissed her art-to-wear as the whimsical product of a deranged imagination, but today it is seen as an early form of performance art, enlivened by astringent wit and inscribed with feminist and anti-capitalist ideology. Through her scrupulous research on the Baroness's background, Gammel gives us the key to unlocking the many levels of meaning in von Freytag-Loringhoven's costume art, sculpture, and poetry. As Gammel clearly shows, all the Baroness's work contains coherent messages of protest against the forces which she believed were destroying creativity in the American mind: sexual hypocrisy, mass consumerism, and enslavement to technology.
“Cars and bicycles have tail lights. Why not I?” she quipped when asked to explain the battery-operated tail light tacked to the bustle of her dress. Her costume offered cultural critique at a time when women in bloomers were pedaling the streets and the inhabitants of urban areas were becoming anonymous vehicles in the stream of traffic. Writes Gammel, “The Baroness's Dada was an important cultural response to modern urban mass production.” Her sculpture, “god,” a phallic assemblage of plumbing pipes erroneously canonized under the name of Morton Schamberg and now rightly attributed to von Freytag- Loringhoven, manifests her rebellion against technology with its underlying statement: Americans worship plumbing above all. Writing to Guggenheim, she suggested that God should take lessons on production efficiency from Henry Ford. Her series, “Subjoyrides” and “Ready-made Poems,” consisting in collages of advertising slogans called from the New York City subway, voice a similar protest of the era's sell out to consumerism.
Retracing Elsa's steps prior to her appearance on the New York scene in 1913, Gammel explores the formative influences of the Baroness's unique aesthetic and shows how many disparate threads—personal, cultural, and artistic, came together in her later poetry and artwork. We are indebted to Gammel for this illuminating endeavor. Previous sketches of the Baroness tend to see her as an isolated figure on the lunatic fringe, rather than as a serious artist whose work evolved through a series of intelligible phases connected to the larger cultural movements of her times. By placing von Freytag-Loringhoven's art and poetry within the overall context of pre and post World War I literary and artistic circles, Gammel helps us make sense of this much misunderstood artist.
Born in the Prussian military town of Swinemunde, Baroness Elsa, nee Elsa Plötz, escaped from a violent father to seek sexual freedom in Berlin where she worked in the music hall. Quickly noted for her superb physique and androgynous appeal, she soon became model, mistress, and pupil of Melchior Lechter, a leading figure of the applied arts movement in Germany. It was not only her physical attractiveness that allowed this transformation, but her own aspirations to become an artist, later reinforced by her marriage to the architect, August Endell.
Her relationship with Endell offered her an affectionate and solid partnership of minds, but left her sexually unfulfilled. Their marriage fell apart when she met the young writer Felix Paul Greve ---for whom she left her husband. Greve faked his own suicide and resurfaced in Kentucky where Elsa joined him in a remote farm-house. After Greve abandoned her, destitute and knowing hardly any English, she found her way to New York, where she married Leopold Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven and acquired her title. At the outbreak of the First World War, her aristocratic husband returned to Germany, after cleaning out her savings and leaving her penniless again. She settled into a tenement on 14th Street where she lived with several dogs and produced her art-to-wear. Sculptor George Biddle visited her in her unheated loft “crowded and reeking with strange relics which she had purloined over a period of years from the New York gutters . . . it had . . . quite as much authenticity as, for instance, Brancusi's studio in Paris, or that of Picabia . . .”
Gammel reconstructs in fascinating detail the family and artistic environments in which Elsa moved in Europe and America and shows how her poetry and artwork reflect the many cultural and artistic influences to which she was subject: the erotic self- display of the music hall, the gender transgressions of the Berlin art scene, and the applied arts movement which sought to elevate daily life to the status of art, while rejecting mechanized production in favor of the handcrafted object. These elements, along with a decidedly modern attitude towards sex, her childhood rage against her father---and a touching, if curious maternal legacy, (her mother, an expert embroiderer, who, after going mad, scandalized the family by sewing together fine fabrics and trash, in order to protest against a domineering husband) all contributed to the poetry, sculpture, and art-to-wear of von Freytag- Loringhoven. In portraying her as a trait d'union between the experiments of the German avant-garde and the explosion of Dada in New York, Gammel convincingly argues that the Baroness was a shaping force in New York Dada.
Discovered by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in 1918, the Baroness became a regular contributor to The Little Review. When her poems appeared in an issue featuring excerpts of Joyce's Ulysses, they created even more of a stir among readers than did Joyce's work, for one of her poems made explicit references to oral sex ( “I got lusting palate” ). Incensed subscribers demanded the Baroness be dropped from future issues. Heap responded that they did indeed intend to drop the Baroness “right into the history of American poetry.” The Little Review published more poems by von Freytag-Loringhoven than any other poet, but her work never won recognition outside a small circle of admirers, including Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and, in his later years, while interned at St. Elizabeth's asylum, Ezra Pound. Although he had formerly ridiculed and parodied her work, in “The Rock-Drill Cantos,” written in 1955, Pound describes the Baroness as “Else Kassandra” who said “several quite true things” but was driven mad by the principle of non-acquiescence. Writing to Margaret Anderson in 1954, he regretted that the Baroness's work had been omitted from The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse.
Many artists and writers found her conversation exhilarating—as Duchamp proclaimed, “The Baroness is not a futurist. She is the future.” Biddle praised the Baroness as “a shrewd and salty critic.” Hart Crane was impressed with her courage in speaking out against the ills of American conformity. Yet few took her work seriously. Although Duchamp and Man Ray praised it, they did nothing to help her gain recognition or support.
The Baroness's marginalization was worsened by the fact that American men were terrified of her. Their fears must have puzzled Elsa, who had met with such success in Germany. Wallace Stevens, who once complimented her on a costume, for years avoided the streets she was known to frequent. Hart Crane decided not to retrieve a typewriter he had lent her for fear of having to call on her at home alone. George Biddle quaked in his shoes when she tried to kiss him. “Enveloping me slowly, as a snake would its prey, she glued her wet lips on mine,” he wrote. She had two great loves among the artists and writers of New York: Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams. Duchamp deflected her advances with Gallic aplomb. William Carlos Williams, although initially attracted to her, later repudiated her cruelly.
The Baroness's eager pursuit and Williams' hasty retreat were chronicled in The Little Review which published her “Thee I Call Thee Hamlet of the Wedding Ring” an eleven-page criticism of Williams' Kore in Hell, but in actual fact a scathing exposé of Williams, branded as a typical “American male” who preferred dull suburban comforts to the artist's itinerant life and who practiced a ruthless double standard---feigning monogamy while thriving on promiscuous affairs to feed his art. Exasperated by her harassment, Williams boned up on his boxing technique, and at their final encounter flattened her in the street. But after her death in Paris he would write, “The Baroness to me was a great field of cultured bounty in spite of her psychosis . . . She was right. I found myself drinking pure water from her spirit.”
This debacle with Williams is emblematic of the Baroness's tragic inability to find true acceptance within the community of artists and writers in New York. She was admired, esteemed, idealized, but ultimately rejected. Her behavior was too uninhibited, her dedication to art as a total way of life, too extreme.
By 1922, Elsa had begun to doubt she could survive for long in America where her life had become an “unskilled, fierce battle” against poverty. “I alone do not belong here. . . . I cannot fight a whole continent,” she wrote to Jane Heap. Heap collected money from friends to send her back to Germany, but Elsa couldn't have chosen a worse time to return to war-ravaged Berlin. When her application for a war widow's pension was denied, she was forced to sell newspapers on the street. Lacking funds, she unsuccessfully tried extortion and blackmail of former lovers. Berlin, scene of her adolescent freedom was now a deathtrap. “I am at the mercy of street riffraff,” she wrote in fall 1923. “I have no heating, bed, furniture, clothing, and winter is coming.”
Concerned for the Baroness's plight, Djuna Barnes, then in Paris, began corresponding with Elsa and offered to collaborate with her on a biography of Elsa's life. Barnes also assumed the role as agent, attempting to interest editors in Elsa's poetry. To Barnes, the Baroness was “a citizen of terror, a contemporary without a country,” and a woman “strange with beauty.” Still stuck in Berlin, denied a visa for France, Elsa struggled with deep depression, fearing she might go mad. In 1925 she was interned in a shelter for homeless women where she exacerbated her caretakers by violating house rules. Clinical records of this institution state that she was not “mentally insane in the full sense of the word.” Judged merely abnormal, she was released a few months later.
Through Barnes' intervention, in 1926, Elsa escaped to Paris where Jane Heap and other old friends were now based. Faced once again with the problems of earning a living, Elsa planned to open a modeling studio for artists, and Peggy Guggenheim helped provide the funds. But this project was doomed from the outset, as Elsa's visa did not permit her to work. One evening in December 1927, the gas in her apartment was left on, asphyxiating the Baroness and her beloved dog, Pinky. It remains uncertain whether her death was accidental or intentional, as no suicide note was found. Barnes took charge, commissioning a death mask and arranging for her burial in a pauper's grave in Père Lachaise, which is why Elsa's name is not listed in the cemetery records there. Friends in New York learned of her death through the obituary appearing in Janet Flanner's “Letter from Paris” in the New Yorker.
Barnes never made headway with Elsa's biography, but may have used some of the material in creating the character of Robin Vote in her novel Nightwood. Other acquaintances continued to purloin details of Elsa's life. Greve, resuscitated as the Canadian writer Frederick Philip Grove, wrote a successful novel based on her abused childhood. In 1979, three years before her death, Djuna Barnes instructed her estate to publish the Baroness' poetry, yet nothing ever came of this behest. Perhaps we should not be surprised that it has taken so long for the Baroness to achieve recognition, given the prejudices of her era. She was German, female, and outrageous. Yet the Baroness and her work deserve our attention, as Irene Gammel so cogently demonstrates in this biography of a controversial artist whose destiny illustrates in strident tones the conflicts, humiliation, and neglect women in the avant-garde endured in making art.
