Bringing The Baroness Into the Future
Over the past few years there has been renewed attention placed on a fascinating and until recently mostly overlooked historical figure with some interesting connections to the Philadelphia area. Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, also known as the Baroness, was born in modern day Poland in the former German empire. Watching her Polish mother suffer at the hands of her abusive German father laid the foundations for her impressive rebellion against patriarchy and the narrowminded mainstream social conventions of her time. The Baroness is most well known for channeling her creative rebellion into the Dada artistic movement and for her association with art world super star Marcel Duchamp. Most of the recent focus on her has been in connection with the possibility of her being the secret brainchild behind what is arguably Duchamp’s most famous work, the urinal he signed that signaled a seismic shift in the mainstream contemporary art world. While that subject is worth investigating, my pathway to discovering the importance of the Baroness has primarily been in connection to her artistic practice, specifically her body work which encompassed nude modeling, posing and performance.
Described as a “proto-punk,” the Baroness fearlessly challenged the social norms and mores of mainstream society. After falling out with her authoritarian father, she escaped her small town and moved to Berlin where she posed and performed nude to support herself as an emerging artist.
On the very first day she arrived in New York City from Berlin she was arrested for walking down Fifth Avenue in a men’s suit smoking a cigarette; She Wore Men’s Clothes a New York Times headline proclaimed. Years later Marcel Duchamp would unveil his glamorous alter ego (Rrose Selavy) and it is very likely that his gender bending was inspired by his friendship with the Baroness. “She’s not a futurist, she is the future,” Duchamp once said in an interview. When we look around at all the conversations going on about gender these days we can see that the gender bending of this trailblazing German counter-culture artist was indeed ahead of its time (for Euro-American society at least). This excerpt from the introduction of her ‘Body Sweats’ poetry anthology sums up the uniqueness of the Baroness quite well.
With ice cream soda spoons as earrings and black lipstick, her flamboyant persona certainly evokes Bjork, Nina Hagen, and Courtney Love. With tomato cans strung over her breasts, symbolizing the commodification of an exaggerated femininity, the Baroness also anticipates Madonna’s infamous Jean Paul Gaultier-designed “cone bra.”
As a Björk fan (with a Björk tattoo) I found this association to be particularly interesting as it highlights how my interest in the Baroness stems primarily from my own personal history and journey. Speaking of Björk, it’s worth mentioning the circumstances that motivated me to get the tattoo. It was 2003. At the time I was involved in a “progressive”/gay fraternity based on Penn’s campus. When I recently learned about the intense unrequited passion the Baroness had for Duchamp I had to laugh, thinking back on my own experience with idolizing someone who just didn’t look at me that way. My crush at that time was a handsome upper middle class Penn student who was simply unattainable for someone like myself. And of course the racial and class differences made it even more acutely painful. I was grappling with this infatuation when I saw the ‘Cocoon’ video for the first time. While watching it I was captivated and instinctively recognized it for what I later learned it was: a method of catharsis and working through intimate personal trauma. I was particularly fascinated by her choice to appear “nude” (it was a body suit that gave the illusion of nudity). Years later I learned that Björk’s stalker who mailed her an acid spraying letter bomb recorded himself in the nude while making the bomb as he spiraled downward into madness. For me this is all very interesting. So, for myself in particular there is something very compelling about the Baroness being named as someone who paved the way for groundbreaking artists like Björk; this speaks to her relevance and to the fact that she was indeed very ahead of her time.
As someone who was involved in body work and nude art long before I was aware of who the Baroness was, learning about the artistic practice and associated history of this fascinating artist has added breadth and depth and has infused my own artistic practice with a kind of legitimacy it would have struggled to attain otherwise. Legitimacy was something that was mostly elusive for the Baroness in life, not that she was chasing after such things anyway. For me, there is much that is familiar when looking at the Baroness’ unique life. For me there is something intimately familiar about the struggle of this ahead of her time, visionary artist who was abused and gaslighted by the establishment as well as bogged down by her own complications. While praising her novel ideas and brave execution of Dadaism, her peers mostly viewed her as a wacky eccentric and did not take her or her work very seriously: familiar. While her straight male artist friends ascended, the Baroness fell down into poverty, lacking the safety net of traditional education, inheritance and association with respectable institutions: familiar. The Baroness was intentional in her artistic and personal struggle against mainstream society and its institutions, recognizing them as inherently harmful: familiar. The Baroness struggled with health issues throughout her life: familiar.
Part of this familiarity I have with the work and philosophy of the Baroness stems from my attempts to work through my own complicated relationship with mainstream feminism. While I’ve always found male privilege to be as distasteful as racial privilege, the gender situation is often clouded by the realities of white supremacy and how it intersects with gender within a colonial, capitalist society. As a queer Black man who has a specific relationship to masculinity and who appreciates the erotic aspects of it, I have however found it distasteful how this fetish for the masculine is carried over into everyday mainstream life. This boys club / fraternity atmosphere is what the Baroness grappled with. While reading about her life I began to understand more clearly how misogyny and anti-Black racism function in similar ways. One important realization that dawned on me last year while in Germany & meditating on Étant donnés is that women have been gaslighted by the system of male privilege in a similar way Black Americans have been gaslighted by the system of racial privilege. Those systemically oppressed by patriarchy and anti-Black racism are often cajoled and coerced into denying the harshness of the reality we’re living in under white male domination.
Speaking of Étant donnés, this final work of Duchamp’s that he worked on in secret for nearly twenty years is a local treasure on permanent exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; more people should be aware that it lives here. It is my belief that, based on the historical facts, this incredibly intriguing work of modern art is, among other things, a kind of homage to the Baroness who was so influential on Duchamp, and who he had a complicated and sometimes contentious relationship with while she was alive. The relationship between Duchamp and the Baroness is in fact alluded to by the way the Duchamp section is curated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Directly across the room from Duchamp’s famous urinal is a piece credited to the Baroness that was only fairly recently correctly attributed to her after being mistakenly attributed to a man for decades.
The entire Duchamp exhibit at the PMA is of course worth seeing, however, his most interesting and thought provoking work is Étant donnés. I’m indebted to my honors program art history professor at Community College who took our class to see this eons ago, placing special emphasis on the fact that many visitors to the museum overlook it thinking that the room is empty.
As you can see from the above photo of myself looking through the peephole, this is the only way to view Duchamp’s last work. On one level it reads like a peepshow, but when you know the history of the Baroness and her association with Duchamp several other dimensions reveal themselves. The nude, faceless figure we see through the peepholes is holding a gas lamp — perhaps the central item of this piece. It should be known that shortly before the Baroness died, she moved to Paris and was financially assisted by Duchamp in her efforts to start an art school to instruct and empower nude models and those interested in body work.
Unfortunately, the idea was too ahead of its time and the school was forced to close. Not long after this disappointment the Baroness died of gas inhalation in her Paris apartment. Nineteen years later in 1946 Duchamp began working on Étant donnés in secret, no doubt inspired by his former protege who he once described as “the future.”
If not for my own personal connection to Germany and my affinity with the philosophy and world view of the Baroness, I’m not sure if I ever would have stumbled upon this aspect of Étant donnés, an already much discussed and dissected work of art. On the wikipedia page the nude figure is only referenced in connection with those who were the physical models:
The Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, who had Duchamp as a lover from 1942 to 1949, served as the model for the female figure in the piece, and his second wife, Alexina (Teeny), served as the model for the figure’s arm.
Duchamp began his affair with Maria Martins (who was at the time married to the Brazilian ambassador to the United States) the same year he began working on Étant donnés. He was obviously inspired by her body, however, I maintain that the conceptual basis of the piece and the impetus for its creation was Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, aka the Baroness, the Dada artist whose romantic advances he spurned yet who was such a huge influence on his artistic practice. A clue is embedded within the title of the piece. The full name of Duchamp’s last work is Étant donnés (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas; in French: Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage). The question is what exactly is this gas meant to be illuminating? I believe we can piece this together from the available information. First there’s the gas lamp held by the nude figure; then there’s the very specific way the audience is directed to engage with this work; next there’s the centrality of Germany to WWII and the central role that nudity played in the nazi genocide.
Duchamp, being the enigmatic genius that he was, never explained much about his final work of art, leaving it to the audience to draw their own conclusions. Perhaps he found a way to make amends to the Baroness in his own way, ensuring that she would make it into the future she represented for him. For him she was “ahead of her time” —and the nude figure in the display is essentially headless. When attempting to unravel the enigma of Étant donnés, the circumstances of the Baroness’ life and death and how they intersect with Duchamp’s work are clues that we cannot ignore. I’ll leave it there for now.
