Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven made assemblage sculpture out of rubbish, wore tin cans and stamps as clothing on the streets of New York, and may have been the person who submitted Fountain in 1917. She was born in Pomerania, left home after her mother died of cancer she believed was caused by her father's syphilis, and moved through Berlin and Munich in the avant-garde before marrying a baron who abandoned her and killed himself in 1919, leaving her the title and nothing else. In New York from 1913 she became the most conspicuous figure of the American Dada circle: she shaved her head and lacquered it, wore a coal scuttle as a hat and a birdcage with a live canary round her neck, and made objects like God, a plumbing trap on a mitre box, and Portrait of Marcel Duchamp from feathers and machine parts. Duchamp wrote to his sister in April 1917 that one of his female friends under a masculine pseudonym had sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; the letter is genuine and its interpretation is argued about, with the Baroness the leading candidate. She wrote poetry that The Little Review published and that got the magazine prosecuted more than once. Djuna Barnes supported her financially and tried to write her biography. She died in Paris in 1927 of gas poisoning, possibly an accident. Her poems and papers went to the University of Maryland. Irene Gammel s 2002 biography made the Fountain argument at length and moved it from a footnote to a live scholarly dispute. She had been a model and artist in Germany before emigrating, and married three times.

• Lived: 1874 CE – 1927 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: artist, writer