Friends of Art History Visual Culture Series: “Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, aka The Baroness”

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (née Else Plötz, 1874 – 1927), is considered to be the first assemblage and performance artist in America, and was a key figure in New York Dada. Through her poetry, sculptures, drawings and collages, performative acts and work as an artist model, she asserted female agency and embodied an aggressive sexuality that punctured social expectations of how women could and “should” occupy social spaces.

In this talk, Professor Anderson will explore how Freytag-Loringhoven’s radical poetry and artworks, published in “little magazines” such as The Little Review, transition and Broom— important platforms for the development of modernist literary aesthetics and the dissemination of Dada, Surrealist and Expressionist art—conveyed her gendered experience as an artist.