She's not a futurist. She is the future.
If you find a tin can on the street stand by it until a truck runs over it. Then bring it to me
“She Wore Men’s Clothes,” the headline reads in a box at the top of page six of the Saturday New York Times.
The piece has a reasonably happy ending, but the paragraph-long story trades in the hushed tones of scandal.
“Mrs. Elsie Greve, recently of New York, but formerly of Berlin, was arrested in crowded Fifth Avenue this forenoon while walking by the side of her husband, F. P. Greve of New York, dressed in men's clothes and puffing a cigarette,” the paper reported on September 17, 1910. “Both Mrs. Greve and her husband were taken, protesting, to the central police station and locked up as suspicious persons.”
Admitting no fault, the pair threatened to appeal the arrest to the German ambassador the following day. The Pittsburgh police officers ultimately gave in and let the couple finish the walking tour on which they’d initially embarked.
A year later, Greve would abandon his wife, taking up life on a massive “bonanza farm,” outside Fargo. It’s unclear whether they bothered to officially divorce. It was, seemingly, a fraught marriage throughout. In 1909, the former Else Hildegard Plötz had assisted her husband’s fake suicide in order to evade financial ruin.
By 1913, however, she was nobility. A marriage to a German Baron earned her the title, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Now settled in Greenwich Village, the newly-minted Baroness once again embarked on a scandalized walk, this time across 14th street, half-naked but for strategically-placed feathers. On other days, she could be found more fully-clothed, covered in objects like postage stamps and live birds. She beat Andy Warhol to the punch by several decades with a fashionably early tomato can bra.
Her sculptures, much like her wardrobe, were largely assembled from found objects, with the Baroness proving a rather enterprising dumpster diver. “Sarah,” she wrote to a friend and fellow artist, “if you find a tin can on the street stand by it until a truck runs over it. Then bring it to me.”
In 1917, she created “God,” a 10.5-inch cast iron plumbing trap mounted on top of a wooden box. "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges,” Duchamp would later quip. The same year, he submitted “Fountain” to the Society of Independent Artists. “[I]t is by no definition, a work of art,” the Society wrote at the time. The porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” is now considered a defining works of the 20th century.
“One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture,” Duchamp wrote in a letter to his sister. The Baroness has subsequently been the most prominent name floated as the “female friend” in question. The true provenience of the piece will likely forever remain shrouded in mystery.
The Baroness did happily sign her name to a number of readymade sculptures in subsequent years. “Cathedral” was constructed from a large, sharp sliver of construction wood. “Limbswish,” a curtain tassel hung inside a metal spiral, blurred the line between her clothing and sculpture, as she would sometimes wear the sculpture while walking.
In 1920, she created “Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” with an assemblage of feathers, twigs and assorted other objects overflowing a wine glass — a possible good-natured dig at the titular artist. “[C]heap bluff giggle frivolity that is what Marcel now can only give,” she would later write of her friend. “What does he care about 'art?’ He is it.”
Of the Baroness, Duchamp would say, “She's not a futurist. She is the future."
Sources:
The Dada Baroness http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/oisteanu/oisteanu5-20-02.asp
She Wore Men’s Clothes https://www.nytimes.com/1910/09/17/archives/she-wore-mens-clothes-on-walking-tour-with-husband-mrs-greve.html
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Artworks https://www.theartstory.org/artist/von-freytag-loringhoven-elsa/artworks/