Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity--A Cultural Biography (review)

Reviewed by: Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography Anke Finger (bio) Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. xxv + 535 pp. $39.95 (cloth); $ 21.95 (paper). Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) is primarily known among scholars and aficionados of New York modernist art in general and New York Dada in particular. A femme terrible who turned her body into Dada artwork, acquiring ever more—and ever more outrageous—accessories with which to adorn herself as model and ready-made, she roamed (and haunted) the New York salons and galleries between 1913 and 1923. As such, she has been fêted as both myth and muse of the art world in early twentieth-century New York, but is largely forgotten today as an artist, a writer, and a poet. She finds mention chiefly in connection with other artists and writers (William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, and the editors of The Little Review) who have written about her and brought her "performances" and some of her work to the attention of others (most importantly Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in The Little Review). Yet, much of her own writing has still to be published or reissued. Her artwork continues to be suspiciously connected [End Page 142] to other artists' names (notably her sculpture "God" linked to Morton Schamberg), and Robert Hughes, author of the encyclopedic American Visions (1997), has perpetuated her reputation as a crazy bystander of New York Dada by describing her as "a bizarre denizen of Greenwich Village bohemia" who represented "America's first punk" and who was "mad as a March hare." Regrettably, her autobiography is out of print. The Baroness's phase in New York, however, characterizes but one snippet of her adventurous, pained, voracious, and chaotic life. Who knew? Irene Gammel's biography—the first—admirably and comprehensively fills the gaping holes left in the Baroness's story at long last and addresses the numerous accumulated questions about this woman who impersonated and propelled so much more than merely New York Dada. Indeed, of the four parts in Baroness Elsa, only one is dedicated to her life in the United States. Part I, "The Psychogenesis," unravels the obscure beginnings of Elsa Plötz's life in the remote sea resort of Swinemünde on the Baltic island of Usedom. By 1893 she escapes from her dysfunctional family to seek liberation in Berlin, and Gammel reads much into her subsequent "sexcapades" that are the subject of Part II, entitled "Sexual Modernities in Berlin and Munich": "Her ambivalence as androgyne allowed her to test a stunning range of erotically charged positions—young ingénue, female flâneur, erotic art worker, priapic traveler, chorus girl cum prostitute, actress, cross-dresser, lesbian, and syphilitic patient—all in a span of just years" (57). Plötz poses for, collaborates with, and circulates around some of the most prominent artists and writers of the era, including Henry de Vry, Ernst Hardt, Melchior Lechter and other members of the George circle, Frank Wedekind, and August Endell. She takes painting lessons in the art colony of Dachau in 1900 and marries Endell in 1901. By 1904 she is divorced and engaged to Felix Paul Greve; their collaboration, Fanny Essler (1905), is based on her letters, and Elsa herself has embarked on writing poetry. With Greve, Elsa seems to have met her match, though. They marry in 1907, and, constantly at odds with the law, Greve stages his own suicide and departs for the United States via Canada with Elsa Plötz Endell Greve following a year later. It is in Sparta, Kentucky—alone and desolate—that she continues more seriously with her poetry; yet, Greve (to become the Canadian novelist Philip Grove) abandons her in 1911, and she returns to her posing career in Cincinnati before arriving in New York in 1913. Part III, then, addresses "New York Dada" and the period of her life that is best known and researched, including the various disputes and scandals—Gammel calls them "battles"—that seem to accompany every stage of her life and career. By 1914, her third husband...

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