Craft: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

“Sleep with everyone! Grow old! Be embarrassing and excessive!”

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874—1927) was an avant-garde, Dadaist poet and artist. There is some controversy that it was she, not Marcel Duchamp, who made the ready-made sculpture, “Fountain” in 1917 and that Duchamp just took credit.

She was born Elsa Hildegard Plötz in Świnoujście, which is now part of Poland. She began doing vaudeville acts in Berlin, but came to New York in July 1909. An early “open marriage” ended in divorce in 1906.

von Freytag-Loringhoven “thinking dark dreams behind shining surfaces of glass!”

Her presence was as experimental as her poetry. She wore “a bra constructed from tomato soup cans and a caged canary; hats tinkling with stolen teaspoons; postage stamps worn instead of rouge.” The Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay described her this way: “in her masculine and throaty voice, gaudily accoutred in rainbow raiment, festooned with barbaric beads and spangles and bangles, toting along her inevitable poodle in gilded harness.”