Baroness Elsa
Subtitle: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity--A Cultural Biography
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: April 30, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 472
ISBN-13: 9780262072311
Subjects: Biography: general; History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -; Individual artists; Women's studies; 20th century; Biography / Autobiography; 20th Century Art; Biography & Autobiography; Germany; Biography/Autobiography; Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von,; Artists, Architects, Photographers; European; History - Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945); Art / Individual Artist; Artists; History - General; 1874-1927; Biography
Description: "Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) is considered by many to be the first American dadaist as well as the mother of dada. An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, "the Baroness" was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances. Some thought her merely crazed, others thought her a genius.

The editor Margaret Anderson called her "perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary." Yet despite her great notoriety and influence, until recently her story and work have been little known outside the circle of modernist scholars.".

"In Baroness Elsa, Irene Gammel traces the extraordinary life and work of this daring woman, viewing her in the context of female dada and the historical battles fought by women in the early twentieth century. Striding through the streets of Berlin, Munich, New York, and Paris wearing such adornments as a tomato can bra, teaspoon earrings, and black lipstick, the Baroness erased the boundaries between life and art, between the everyday and the outrageous, between the creative and the dangerous.

Her art objects were precursors to dada objects of the teens and twenties, her sound and visual poetry were far more daring than those of the male modernists of her time, and her performances prefigured feminist body art and performance art by nearly half a century."--BOOK JACKET.