("Shaving one’s head is like having a new sex experience," she once remarked.) She also liked to walk her dogs skimpily dressed, with her bald head covered with vermilion paint. She removed her hat, which has been tastefully but inconspicuously trimmed with gilded carrots, beets and other vegetables."Įlsa presented her baroque-futuristic fashion to the bohemians of Greenwich Village, scandalizing almost everyone by parading nude along 14th Street, except for some strategically placed feathers. According to George Biddle in An American Artist Story, "She once wore a Grecian style dress with full sleeves and a handful of huge signs out of seashells for a Christmas Eve-hash party one arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, which she later admitted to having pilfered from a furniture display at Wanamaker’s. "To be a woman is to be looked at!" said Elsa, but she was beyond being just a dadaist self-costumer or a proto-surrealist designer, which becomes evident from some of the surviving photographs that show her wearing a tomato-soup-can bra, teaspoon earrings, black lipstick and a small bird-cage containing a crestfallen canary.
She made sculpture out of found objects, wrote avant-garde poetry, put on street performances in crazy outfits and posed nude for photographers and artist friends. She also was a friend-collaborator of Man Ray and a lover of Djuna Barnes, considered by some art historians to be the first female dadaist in New York. With the help of Marcel Duchamp she entered the Arensberg circle and became an outlandish fashion designer and anarchistic poet/collagist.
She then moved to New York and took the Manhattan avant-garde by storm. Becoming part of the nobility by marriage, Baroness Elsa von Loringhofen soon found herself a "widow" after her husband fled avoiding the draft. She was a leading cabaret performer in dancehalls in Berlin and a proto-dada writer who later fell in love with a German Baron. |a Initial Bemis load m2btab.test019 in 2019.Holy Skirts, Rene Steinke’s second novel, is about the life of an "avant-goddess," a proto-dada artist from Germany who went to live in Manhattan and died in Paris, and is based on the real-life story of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhofen.ĭuring her meteoric life, Elsa (1874-1927) became a polymorphous artist.
|a Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.) |v Fiction. |a Germans |0 |z New York (State) |0 |v Fiction.
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