Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, born Elsa Plötz, was a German artist and poet who worked mainly in Greenwich Village, New York, between 1913 and 1923. She wrote poetry and made sculptures, assemblages and street performances, and her provocative life made her one of the first embodiments of Dada in the United States. She matters because she turned her own body and daily life into a central part of her art.

She was born in 1874 in Swinemünde, now Świnoujście in Poland, then part of the German Empire. After a childhood shaped by her father's strict control, she left home for Berlin at eighteen. She worked in cabarets and as an artist's model, and studied art in Dachau. Her first marriage, to the architect August Endell, was an open one; she later lived with the poet Felix Paul Greve and, in 1913, married the German baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven in New York, taking his name.

In New York she posed for painters and moved in circles that included Djuna Barnes, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. She made sculptures and assemblages from street debris and appeared in public wearing costumes of spoons, tin cans and other rubbish, in performances that challenged ideas of femininity. Her short, phonetic poems began appearing in The Little Review in 1918, alongside chapters of Joyce's Ulysses, yet most of her writing stayed unpublished until 2011.

She returned to Berlin in 1923, penniless and in poor health, and died in Paris in 1927 from gas inhalation, in unclear circumstances. Her work stayed in obscurity for decades. Today she is studied as a forerunner of performance art and as an early voice on the body, gender and consumerism.