Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven



 Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (12 July 1874 – 15 December 1927), sometimes also called Else von Freytag-von Loringhoven, was a German-born avant-garde, Dadaist artist and poet who worked for several years in Greenwich Village, New York City, United States.

Quotes

 * Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life.
 * Quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 53.


 * I had sexlogic implanted and used it.
 * Quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 54.


 * We were people of a circle of supposed highcultivated life conduct by intellectual morality--higher than society in its hypocritical meshes.
 * Quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 54.


 * [I had] pushed through to a spiritual sex: art--that nobody protects as readily as a charming love body of flesh.
 * Quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 54.


 * All who want me would like to eat me up, But I am too expansive and am open to all sides, desire this here and that there.
 * Quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 105.


 * Everything emotional in America becomes a mere show and make-believe. Americans are trained to invest money, are said to take even desperate chances on that, yet never do they invest [in] beauty nor take desperate chances on that. With money they try to buy beauty--after it has died--famishing--with grimace. Beauty is ever dead in America.
 * Quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 251-252.

About

 * [The Baroness] is not a futurist. She is the future.
 * Marcel Duchamp quoted in Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century.


 * People were afraid of her because she was undismayed about the facts of life--any of them--all of them.
 * Djuna Barnes quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 17.


 * [The Baroness was] a citizen of terror, a contemporary without a country.
 * Djuna Barnes quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 17.


 * Else von Freytag-Loringhoven is the first Dadaiste in New York and [...] the Little Review has discovered her. This movement should capture American like a prairie fire.
 * John Rodker, "Dada' and Else von Freytag-Loringhoven," The Little Review 7.2 (May-June 1920): p 36.