Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and the Intentional Misattribution of Her Work For Being Too Dada

Is it possible to be too Dada? To be too much the epitome of an art movement or to challenge its belief structure, so much so that the only thing one’s contemporaries can think to do is erase them from history. While it may seem strange that an artist be intentionally excluded from the writings of history by their peers, it is not an uncommon occurrence and can be seen in the false historical narratives of movements such as the Colour Field School, the founding of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the discovery and nurturing of individual artists such as Jackson Pollock. When it comes to the history of the Dada art movement, there is one name in particular seldom found in textbooks that typifies both the movement as well as history’s (male) writers and their propensity to telescope narratives to their (male) artist friends while ignoring the (women) artists they believe to be lesser in value and therefore inconsequential to history. That name is, of course, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. 

Fig 1: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Born in Germany as Else Plotz, the Baroness (1874-1927) was an artist, poet, performer and model who used her work as a form of anti-patriarchal and anti-aesthetic protest that challenged bourgeoise society’s values and beauty ideals. The extent to which she embraced her art form and her eccentricities solidified her as the epitome of Dada. Her father, Adolf, a “violent tempered, intemperate, generous, big hearted, meanly cruel, revengeful, traditionally honest in business man” was the archetype for late-nineteenth-century German patriarch, who was a domineering shadow over the family. Her mother, however, she described as “cultured and genteel” but, being from an impoverished aristocratic Polish family, she had little in common with her husband and whose years of domesticity resulted in shocking behaviour which foretold that of her daughter. “She did things nobody would think of,” Elsa stated, recalling that Ida was known to cut up the expensive material of her husband’s suits and “spoiling” it by using the fabric for unnecessary craft projects, such as handkerchief holders because, in Elsa’s words, “she was tired of doing ‘fine handiwork’. Everybody could do that.” As can be expected from a creative but intellectually unstimulated woman in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Ida was temporarily institutionalised, but it is in her mother that Elsa’s, then still Else, introduction to rebelling against social convention can be seen.1

At age 18, Else’s mother died of uterine cancer and her father remarried just three months later to a woman whom Else described as having a “bourgeoise harness of respectability enveloping her morning till night – with the laced bosom, tight buttoned waist, tight collar, gold watch-chain”, although foreseeing this, Ida had warned that after her death, Else “would have no home with her father”. She soon moved to Berlin where she lived with her aunt and split her time between working at the Wintergarten variety theatre and other “exciting activities, all of which had to do with flirtation”. In 1901 Else married for the first time to artist and master of Jugendstil design, August Endell although issues in the marriage arose quickly which resulted in her being institutionalised for “hysteria” and their eventual separation. In January 1903 she married again, this time to Felix Paul Greve, who was a friend of August’s, and together the three moved to Palermo, Italy although Felix was quickly forced to return to Germany after being charged with fraud by a former patron and subsequently sentenced to a year in prison. While awaiting her husband’s return, Else penned several poems, which he later claimed authorship over despite being imprisoned at the time of their writing. After his release from prison, Else and Felix traversed through England, France and Switzerland before he had the sudden and outlandish desire to establish a farm in rural Kentucky, and so they immigrated to the United States. Once arriving, ‘Else’ anglicised the spelling of her name to ‘Elsa’ and was abandoned by Felix when his farm predictably failed, causing him to fake his own suicide and, taking what little money they had with him, flee to Canada where he became one of the country’s most famous writers. Relatively unencumbered by her husband’s abandonment, Elsa moved to Cincinnati where she settled among the city’s large German population and where she is believed to have met her third husband, Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven, from whom she received her title. The Baron and Baroness moved to New York City in 1913, although, like her previous marriages, this, too, was ill-fated with the Baron being captured and killed by French troops while trying to return to Germany to fight in World War 1.2

The Baroness’s understanding of her father’s rigid authoritarianism being an instrument of social control and her mother’s mental illness being the result of pressure to conform to domestic duties are frequent themes of her work, as is her distain for the self-appointed purveyors of high-art. Using objects she found on the street as well as items she stole from department stores to create her art-to-wear costumes, Margaret Anderson, founder of The Little Review magazine, recalled that Elsa “decorated her breasts with tea infusers; sported a birdcage as a necklace, a live canary its jewel; appeared naked but for two tomato cans tied across her nipples; wore postage stamps as rouge; made bracelets of curtain rings; and adorned her person with waste paper baskets, safety pins, vegetables, and cutlery.”3 Much to the horror of early twentieth-century bourgeoise society, she would promenade through the streets of New York in her wearable art, challenging Euro-American standards of beauty and femininity and enraging passers-by. A witness to one such stroll recalled her wearing a skirt onto which she had attached some sixty to eighty, “lead, tin or cast-iron toys: dolls, soldiers, automobiles, locomotives and music boxes” all likely taken from a department store shelf and shoved into her pocket before being noticed by store employees. After running into her in the Village, artist Louis Bouché recalled her wearing a peculiar dress with the bustle having been adorned with “an electric battery taillight”, when Bouché questioned the light fixture she responded, somewhat logically, “Cars and bicycles have taillights. Why not I?”4 The furore caused by the Baroness was only deepened by those who saw her on the days she carried one of her favourite accessories – a plaster cast of a penis.5 Her overt display of the penis plaster-cast not only reflects the New Woman’s transgression into historically masculine spaces, but also declares that this biologically determined guarantor of privilege was, in fact, transferrable, suggesting that so too could be the success and authority it ejected.

Fig 2: The Baroness and Claude McRay

Her “shocking” behaviour was, of course, typical of the German Dadaists’ whose particular brand of Dadaism had causing social controversy and political disturbances at its core, and, since the movement adapted to the individual circumstances of each country it entered, it is unsurprising that the German form of Dadaism didn’t land well with New York audiences, with her eccentricity and sexual liberation leaving her as an undefended target for violent projections from men and the wider bourgeoise society who were determined to force her into being the same subservient hetaera as her mother was. 

Throughout her short time producing art, much like the feminist and performance artists she preceded by half a century, the Baroness used her work to tread the line between subject and object, art and artist, woman as artist and woman as object, and to explore the role of sexuality and gender in art and society as a hole. Her work was subversive, and unapologetically so, but history remembers her as being a periphery Dada artist who had little to no impact on the movement or wider scene. Such a delineation of her work is surprising given her well-documented and frequent socialisation with other artists and writers involved with the Dada and Surrealist movements in New York, including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Walter Arensberg, Sidney Janis and Morton Schamberg. Although, it is through her association with the latter, and his 1917 sculpture entitled God, that we may begin to understand why. 

Fig 3: God (1917)

According to leading Dada scholar Francis M. Naumann, God “is so powerfully iconoclastic that it has come to represent the single purest expression of Dada sensibilities in New York”.6 It can, therefore, be of no surprise that such an important work in the history of New York’s Dada activities has been intentionally misattributed to Morton Schamberg (1881-1918) alone, despite the Baroness’s involvement being clearly noted in its first ever documentation seen in a 1954 catalogue of donations from the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, wherein the work is listed under Schamberg’s name but states, “This construction was made by both Schamberg and Von Loringshofen [sic]”. When the Museum published the catalogue later in the same year, the Baroness’s name was again clearly written as the artist alongside Schamberg’s but was revised to, albeit a still incorrect, “Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven”.7 Nevertheless, in 1994 when Naumann published his study New York Dada: 1915-23, he noted that throughout the forty years since the first recording of God in the PMA catalogue, with the notable exception of just two publications, “all subsequent scholars writing on either the Baroness or Morton Schamberg have failed to note this dual attribution”.8 Even today, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who still owns the sculpture, makes only a subpar attempt to correctly credit Elsa by omitting her as creator in their archive search function and making little mention of her on the artwork’s collection page, which attributes the work primarily to Morton Schamberg and only references Elsa as a contributor. Also as they did seventy years ago, the PMA again denies her Baroness titleship by incorrectly referring to her as “Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven”.9 Such a wilful miswrite of history is only made more bemusing when one examines Schamberg’s artistic output which, barring God, consists entirely of paintings. 

Fig 4: Morton Schamberg, Self-Portrait (1912)

After graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1906, Morton Schamberg continued to paint in the distinctly Fauve style he had during his studies eventually exhibiting five of his paintings at the 1913 Armory Show alongside the likes of Duchamp, Picabia and his long-time friend Charles Sheeler. After the Amory Show, Morton moved into Cubism and began incorporating mechanical forms which soon became the sole subject of his work, and for which he is most well-known. These images of machines and machine parts were executed with a fastidious precision and consideration, usually in an array of bright hues, that is reflective of both his neat and sophisticated attire which consisted of finely tailored suits, flawlessly shined shoes and a perfectly trimmed and moustache, as well as his shy and timorous nature. But his oeuvre, his attire and his personality make God an entirely incongruous artwork for him to produce. Naumann thus concludes that, based on other works by Morton and Elsa from this period, Schamberg was likely only responsible for assembling the structure and for photographing the work, as he did positioned in front of one of his machinist paintings, before signing the print, sans the Baroness’s name, and dating it “1917”.10

While the dandified refinement of Schamberg’s work and persona is greatly contrasted in the gauche shape and construction of God and its sacrilegious, almost renegado title, these inconsistencies were ignored by those writing the historical narrative of Dada and of both artists – a narrative that is now perpetuated by modern scholars, such as Wayne Andersen, who continues to insist efforts to correct the narrative and understand what he refers to as the Baroness’s “simple and skimpy output called ‘art’”, is nothing more than “the natural quarry of feminist academicians looking for women to champion while ignoring successful women artists, or lacking ability to recognize one”.11 Not only does Andersen’s disparagement reflect the Baroness’s struggle to find men who had the courage to step out of their traditional bourgeoise roles, as she expressed in one letter written in April 1922, but it shows that men of the twenty-first-century still respond in fear when confronted with the New Woman, who they wish to subjugate and silence.  

Fig 5: Baroness Elsa, Enduring Ornament (1913)

Much like the Surrealists’ who would follow the same path as Dada artists in establishing themselves in Europe before exportation to New York in response to a global war, men of the Dada movement included women in their manifestos of rebellion against bourgeoise social convention but, also like the Surrealists’, their inclusion was strictly theoretical. In Dada praxis, the notion of male hegemony and female subjugation was as prevalent as it was throughout the bourgeoise society in which women were weak-minded, amenable and existed for the sole purpose of male desire and pleasure. Woman, as specified by Dada artists, is a machine made by, and for, Man. Her creator gives her “every qualification except thought”, and, therefore, “She submits to his will but he must direct her activities. Without him she remains a wonderful being, but without aim or anatomy”. Consequently, when women materialised in Dada artworks they were depicted most frequently “as a freakish fragment” of themselves or “an incomplete tubular machine”. Men, however, viewed themselves as being the ultimate creator, indeed, the God of all that was and all that could be.12 A Dada man said, ‘Let there be machine,’ and so there was machine. And he called her Woman.  

One could, therefore, mistakenly surmise from the position of a Dada artist where Man is God, whose creation is Woman (who is Machine), that mechanical objects, such as plumbing fixtures, would be the site of femininity. From this outlook, a false reading could be made that God is the sum-total of Man’s creation – the woman-machine that he creates and the tools he uses in his trade, named after he, the God, who is responsible for its assemblage. While this could be a strong argument for the meaning of God, if he is in fact solely responsible for the sculpture then Morton Schamberg’s lack of artistic engagement with Dada’s concept of mechanical objects being feminine and of man’s creation raises further questions as to why the only instance of his engagement with such a complex notion was in this singular artwork. If it is to be believed that God was the result of a collaboration between Morton and Elsa, one could again question how much involvement he may have had when, again, unlike Elsa who was known for the outlandish and scandalous nature of her art and her life, this is his only attempt at combing through the complexities of gender and sexuality within the context of Dada and bourgeoise society. It can, therefore, be understood that Neumann was correct in stating Morton’s involvement amounted to little more than staging and photographing the final piece before signing his name on the photo along with the year.13

Figure 5: Schamberg, 1914

Figure 6: Schamberg, 1916

Fig 6: Morton Schamberg, Landscape (with Bridge) (1914)

Fig 7: Morton Schamberg, Painting VII (1916)

After acknowledging that the Baroness was more than likely the soul creator of God, the sculpture could, then, be seen as her declaration that Woman is God, and while this would be in keeping with her frequent interrogations of sexuality and gender, specifically her challenges of the patriarchy and Dada’s belief that Man is God, such a statement is unacceptable to bourgeoise and contemporary men alike who exalt women as Goddess’s only insofar as she remains a Goddess, that is, the female, and therefore the lesser, companion of a God. For the bourgeoise man, aggrandising a woman, specifically his wife, to the status of a Goddess had the explicit purpose of assuaging her perpetual servitude. For a man of the twenty-first century, however, this same glorification of women has the additional benefit of shielding his expectation of what is essentially her serfdom, under the guise of revering her noble quest to ‘have it all’. However, the opposite can easily be seen as truth when understanding that Dada men positioned themselves as God and both creator and controller of Woman, so as to soothe their castration anxiety and fear of the New Woman.  

Being the embodiment of the New Woman and the most prominent reminder of their castration anxiety, Elsa’s proclamation that God is Woman, was reason enough for bourgeoise society to disparage her as a “pathetic madwoman”, and for historians to offer themselves justification for their ignoring of “both” and “Von Loringshofen [sic]” as written in the PMA catalogue notes while overlooking Morton Schamberg’s lack of correlating artistic output, in order to expunge Elsa from history.14

For the likes of Wayne Andersen who, I don’t doubt, will be quick to dismiss such an interpretation in order to soothe their own castration anxiety and gynophobia, I offer a second reading: As many historians of modernity have noted, there is one unique motif that is its icon – the toilet.15 While plumbing systems have existed in abundance as far back as Ancient Mesopotamia (with the term ‘plumbing’ itself originating in Ancient Rome), the designation of space inside the home for private toilets in the early twentieth-century indicates not only technological advancements in the use of flushing systems and galvanized steel piping, but also, importantly, the prevalence of public-versus-private space debates wherein lies the two relentless fears of male dominated society: bodily consternation and abjection, as manifested in castration anxiety and gynophobia. For bourgeoise and Dada men, this can specifically be seen in relation to the rise of the New Woman. These, being distinctly male fears, link modern masculinity to the site of the toilet in its various forms and with its various components. Given that plumbing is the ultimate signifier of modernity, that modern plumbing systems are undeniably linked with modern masculinity and that the modern man, specifically the Dada man, saw himself as being a God, it would be reasonable to conclude that Man, God and plumbing are one and the same. For those troubled by the conjecture that Woman is God (note, not limited to Goddess), Elsa’s sculpture could only then otherwise be a proclamation that Man is not God, as male Dada artists’ maintained, but that God is plumbing. 

Unfortunately, those troubled by this too, are left with but one other option – to find another artist whose own body of work is relatively insubstantial but has at least a minimal aesthetic correlation to the anxiety-inducing artwork in question, and to intentionally misattribute said artwork to this new, more agreeable artist in historical documentation all while blissfully remaining blind and dismissive of any evidence that points to the truth. While this may seem an outlandish situation, as we know from the historical narrative of God and of the Baroness herself, it is not rooted in fiction. 

1 Eliza Jane Reilly, “Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” in Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 18 no. 1, (1997): 26-33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358677?origin=JSTOR-pdf

2 Reilly, “Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.”

3 Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years' War (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 178.

4 David Hopkins, "New York Dada: From End to Beginning," in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, ed. David Hopkins, (United Kingdon: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2016), 70-88.

5 Francis M. Naumann, ed., New York Dada: 1915-23, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1994), 168-75.

6 Naumann, New York Dada.

7 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives, Gift receipt from the Philadelphia Museum of Art for artworks in the Walter and Louise Arensberg Collection, 1954 March 2, WLA_B034_F021_001, Box: 34, Folder: 21.

8 ibid. Naumann

9 Philadelphia Museum of Art, "God," PMA, 2024 (date of publication), https://www.philamuseum.org/collection/object/51106 

10 ibid. Naumann.

11 Wayne Andersen Marcel Duchamp: The Failed Messiah, (United Staes: MIT Press, 2010).

12 Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, "Preface," in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (Boston: MIT Press, 1998), x-1.

13 ibid. Naumann.

14 ibid. Reilly.

15 Margaret Morgan, "The Plumbing of Modern Life," in Post-Colonial Studies Journal, vol. 5 no. 2, (September, 2002): p. 2.

Figure 1: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Self Portrait as a Dancer (1920). Photograph negative 12.7x17.8cm, Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection, https://lccn.loc.gov/2014714092

Figure 2: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven with Claude McRay (1920). Photograph negative 12.7x17.8cm, Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection, https://lccn.loc.gov/2014714092

Figure 3: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, God (1917). Wood miter box; cast iron plumbing trap. Height: 31.4cm, Base: 7.6x12.1x29.5cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. https://www.philamuseum.org/collection/object/51106

Figure 4: Morton Schamberg, Self-Portrait (1912), photograph, Sheet: 20.6x16cm, Image: 20.6x16cm, Mount: 23x16.8x0.2cm, Secondary Mount: 24.8x18.4x0.2cm. Whitney Museum of American Art. https://whitney.org/collection/works/4905

Figure 5: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Enduring Ornament (1913). Iron, 11.5x8.9cm. Private Collection.

Figure 6: Morton Schamberg, Landscape (with Bridge) (1914). Oil on Canvas, 66x81.3cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. https://www.philamuseum.org/collection/object/299377

Figure 7: Morton Schamberg, Painting VII (Mechanical Abstraction) (1916). Oil on Canvas, 76.5x51.4cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. https://www.philamuseum.org/collection/object/51105