The Story of Art Without Men

by Katy Hessel

Although their male contemporary Marcel Duchamp is often credited with inventing the ‘readymade’ (after all, he coined the art-historical term), there are those who claim that he was in fact predated by a woman: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927), who experimented with found objects and assemblages. According to her friend Jane Heap, editor of the Little Review, she was ‘the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada’. Born fifteen years prior to Höch and Taeuber-Arp, by the turn of the century the Baroness had already endured a most eventful life. Raised in a tumultuous household in Prussia, from which she ran away to join the European avant-garde, she helped her husband fake his death and arrived in America in 1910. Making her way to New York City – which was soon to become the artistic centre of the Western world – she married her third (and final) husband, a cash-stricken Baron (hence her title), and, to make ends meet, modelled for Man Ray. She attended salons and befriended Duchamp, who was enraptured by her poetry recitals, fractured lines assembled from slogans, known as ‘ready-made poems’. He once said of her: ‘[The Baroness] is not a Futurist. She is the future.’