Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was a German-born avant-garde poet and artist. As a teenager, she moved from Pomerania, Germany to Berlin, and she later became involved in Munich’s Art Nouveau movement. The Baroness moved to the United States in 1910 and settled in New York City in 1913. She worked in a cigarette factory and as a model for artists such as Man Ray, Louis Bouché, and George Biddle. She published poems in The Little Review alongside chapters from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Known for her flamboyance and sexual frankness, she was a central figure in Greenwich Village’s early-1920s Dadaism, and she is credited with inventing the readymade. Freytag-Loringhoven presented her piece Enduring Ornament (1913), a rusted metal ring, a year before Marcel Duchamp shared his first readymade, Bottle Rack (1914).

Freytag-Loringhoven died on December 15, 1927 in Paris, France. A collection of her poems, Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, was published posthumously in 2011. Her lover and editor Djuna Barnes preserved her papers, and the University of Maryland Libraries acquired a collection of her letters, poems, and other works. Her work was included in the Guggenheim’s show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in 1943.