If we had seen her roaming Greenwich Village in the 1910s, would we have thought "baroness" or "bag lady?" When it comes to the Dadaist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), it's impossible to say. The only certainty is that we would have noticed her: tall with long, flat muscles; erect carriage; purposeful stride; hawkish nose balanced by receding chin; close to handsome and far from pretty; and the way she dressed! Have you known any woman in your life who wore two empty tomato soup cans instead of a bra? Teaspoons for earrings? A birthday cake for a hat? Yellow pancake makeup with black lipstick? A shaved head painted vermilion? Or -- how about nothing? The Baroness, you see, wore nudity as another costume. It was effective, too, when she was openly stalking her sexual prey.
I have long wondered how it is that flamboyant Baroness Elsa, the antithesis of Ideal Womanhood in an era where two piece undergarments were considered the zenith of female liberation, got swept into the dustbin of art history. Aside from the fact that her life was a years-long Performance Art piece, she was a sculptress and a poetess. She was Dada before Dada was Dada. Back in the day, everyone even peripherally involved with the New York Dada scene knew her name. Why don't we? Clearly (to me, at least) something had to be done. And so it has. Please enjoy meeting her in the biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven -- even if you'll still have a hard time deciding between "baroness" and "bag lady."
Image: Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay (1889-1948) and Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, ca. 1915. Bain News Service, publisher. Photo: Library of Congress.
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