Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven at Francis M. Naumann - New York

Art in America, April, 2003 by Michael Duncan

When is an art-historical footnote not a footnote? When she is the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), a Dada poet-artist who has emerged after 80 years of obscurity thanks to a 472-page biography and this, her first gallery exhibition, which featured five of her eight known surviving art works. A key figure of New York Dada and an attention-seeking fashionista, the German-born baroness (as she is ever referred to) is being recognized for her bizarre antics as a kind of proto-feminist performance artist, presaging the 1960s actions of Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke and Yayoi Kusama. Her body-art creations included a soup-can bra, taillight bustle and birdcage necklace--complete with live canary. Known on the Dada circuit to the likes of Duchamp and William Carlos Williams, the baroness was seen in Man Ray's first film (1921, later destroyed) shaving her pubic hair.

The show featured documentation of the baroness's street-theater personae, including two anonymous wire-service photographs (1915) that show her posed in a tight, striped body-suit ornamented with beaded tassels and wearing a coal scuttle for a hat. Costume designer Pascale Ouattara recreated the costume for the exhibition. Three portraits of the artist by Theresa Bernstein--herself an under-known painter of the period--reveal a model for whom the pose was all. The Baroness (ca. 1917), a small, quickly brushed portrait, depicts a nude with arms uplifted and head tilted back to show off her handsome body.

The bohemian baroness's sexually proactive persona permeated the poetry she published in The Little Review as well as the four small sculptures that were the key components of the exhibition. Originally gifts to Pavel Tchelitchew and his companion Allen Tanner, these recently unearthed works made from found objects reveal the artist's self-assured modernity as well as her sardonic attitude toward marriage and sexual relations. Earring-Object (ca. 1917-19) is a Cubist-inspired, dangling accoutrement cobbled together from a watch spring and bits of found metal. The jagged striations of Cathedral (ca. 1918), a mounted splintery fragment of wood, suggest the narrow tapering of skyscrapers. Enduring Ornament (1913), a rust-encrusted, 3-inch-diameter metal loop, evokes a cumbersome, oversized engagement ring with an ominous-looking, baublelike appendage.

Most emblematic of the baroness's revolt against sexual norms, Limbswish (ca. 1917-19) consists of a thick metal spring within which hangs a beaded drapery tassel. Worn at her waist like a dominatrix's whip, the piece would thrash against the baroness's thighs as she moved, presumably hinting at the sting of her seductive games. The exhibition coincided with the publication of Irene Gammel's detailed biography, which examines the baroness's wrenching, wildly iconoclastic writings while filling us in on the sordid, juicy details of her remarkable life.