Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  Her work was championed by Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound; she was an associate of artists including Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, and those who met her did not forget her quickly. Yet the baroness remains invisible in most accounts of the early twentieth-century art world. You see glimpses of her in letters and journals from the time, which portray her as difficult, cold or outright insane, with frequent references to her body odour. Much of what we know about her early life is based on a draft of her memoirs she wrote in a psychiatric asylum in Berlin in 1925, two years before her death.

  In the eyes of most of the people she met, the way she lived and the art she produced made no sense at all. She was, perhaps, too far ahead of her time. The baroness is now recognised as the first American Dada artist, but it might be equally true to say she was the first New York punk, sixty years too early. It took until the early twenty-first century for her feminist Dada to gain recognition. This reassessment of her work has raised an intriguing possibility: could Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven be responsible for what is often regarded as the most significant work of art in the twentieth century?

  Baroness Elsa was born Else Hildegarde Plötz in 1874 in the Prussian town of Swinemünde, now Świnoujście in Poland, on the Baltic Sea. When she was nineteen, following the death of her mother to cancer and a physical attack by her violent father, she left home and went to Berlin, where she found work as a model and chorus girl. A heady period of sexual experimentation followed, which left her hospitalised with syphilis, before she befriended the cross-dressing graphic artist Melchior Lechter and began moving in avant garde art circles.

  The distinction between her life and her art, from this point on, became increasingly irrelevant. As her poetry testifies, she did not respect the safe boundaries between the sexual and the intellectual which existed in the European art world. Increasingly androgynous, Elsa embarked on a number of marriages and affairs, often with homosexual or impotent men. She helped one husband fake his own suicide, a saga which brought her first to Canada and then to the United States. A further marriage to Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven gave her a title, although the Baron was penniless and worked as a busboy. Shortly after their marriage the First World War broke out, and he went back to Europe to fight. He took what money Elsa had with him, and committed suicide shortly afterwards.

  Around this time the baroness met, and became somewhat obsessed with, the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp. One of her spontaneous pieces of performance art saw her taking an article about Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase and rubbing it over every inch of her body, connecting the famous image of a nude with her own naked self. She then recited a poem that climaxed with the declaration ‘Marcel, Marcel, I love you like Hell, Marcel.’

  Duchamp politely declined her sexual advances. He was not a tactile man, and did not like to be touched. But he did recognise the importance and originality of her art. As he once said, ‘[The Baroness] is not a futurist. She is the future.’

  Duchamp is known as the father of conceptual art. He abandoned painting on canvas in 1912 and started a painting on a large sheet of glass, but took ten years to finish it. What he was really looking for were ways to make art outside of traditional painting and sculpture. In 1915 he hit upon an idea he called ‘readymades’, in which everyday objects such as a bottle rack or a snow shovel could be presented as pieces of art. A bicycle wheel that he attached to a stool in 1913 was retrospectively classed as the first readymade. These were a challenge to the art establishment: was the fact that an artist showcased something they had found sufficient grounds to regard that object as a work of art? Or, perhaps more accurately, was the idea that an artist challenged the art establishment by presenting a found object sufficiently interesting for that idea to be considered a work of art? In this scenario, the idea was the art and the object itself was really just a memento that galleries and collectors could show or invest in.

  Duchamp’s most famous readymade was called Fountain. It was a urinal which was turned on its side and submitted to a 1917 exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists, New York, under the name of a fictitious artist called Richard Mutt. The exhibition aimed to display every work of art that was submitted, so by sending them the urinal Duchamp was challenging them to agree that it was a work of art. This they declined to do. What happened to it is unclear, but it was not included in the show and it seems likely that it was thrown away in the trash. Duchamp resigned from the board in protest, and Fountain’s rejection overshadowed the rest of the exhibition.

  In the 1920s Duchamp stopped producing art and dedicated his life to the game of chess. But the reputation of Fountain slowly grew, and Duchamp was rediscovered by a new generation of artists in the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately very few of his original works survived, so he began producing reproductions of his most famous pieces. Seventeen copies of Fountain were made. They are highly sought after by galleries around the world, even though they need to be displayed in Perspex cases thanks to the number of art students who try to ‘engage with the art’ by urinating in it. In 2004, a poll of five hundred art experts voted Duchamp’s Fountain the most influential modern artwork of the twentieth century.

  But is it true to say that Fountain was Duchamp’s work?

  On 11 April 1917 Duchamp wrote to his sister Suzanne and said that ‘One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it.’ As he was already submitting the urinal under an assumed name, there does not seem to be a reason why he would lie to his sister about a ‘female friend’. The strongest candidate to be this friend was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was in Philadelphia at the time, and contemporary newspaper reports claimed that ‘Richard Mutt’ was from Philadelphia.

  If Fountain was Baroness Elsa’s work, then the pseudonym it used proves to be a pun. America had just entered the First World War, and Elsa was angry about both the rise in anti-German sentiment and the paucity of the New York art world’s response to the conflict. The urinal was signed ‘R. Mutt 1917’, and to a German eye ‘R. Mutt’ suggests Armut, meaning poverty or, in the context of the exhibition, intellectual poverty.

  Baroness Elsa had been finding objects in the street and declaring them to be works of art since before Duchamp hit upon the idea of ‘readymades’. The earliest that we can date with any certainty was Enduring Ornament, a rusted metal ring just over four inches across, which she found on her way to her wedding to Baron Leopold on 19 November 1913. She may not have named or intellectualised the concept in the way that Duchamp did in 1915, but she did practise it before he did.

  Not only did Elsa declare that found objects were her sculptures, she frequently gave them religious, spiritual or archetypal names. A piece of wood called Cathedral (1918) is one example. Another is a cast-iron plumber’s trap attached to a wooden box, which she called God. God was long assumed to be the work of an artist called Morton Livingston Schamberg, although it is now accepted that his role in the sculpture was limited to fixing the plumber’s trap to its wooden base. The connection between religion and toilets is a recurring theme in Elsa’s life. It dates back to her abusive father mocking her mother’s faith by comparing daily prayer to regular bowel movements.

  Critics often praise the androgynous nature of Fountain, for the act of turning the hard, male object on its side gave it a labial appearance. Duchamp did explore androgyny in the early 1920s, when he used the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy and was photographed in drag by Man Ray. But androgyny is more pronounced in the baroness’s art than it is in Duchamp’s.

  In 1923 or 1924, during a period when Baroness Elsa felt abandoned by her friends and colleagues, she painted a mournful picture called Forgotten Like This Parapluie Am I By You – Faithless Bernice! The picture included a leg and foot of someone walking out of the frame, representing all the people who had walked out of her life. It also depicts a urinal, o
verflowing and spoiling the books on the floor, which had Duchamp’s pipe balanced on the lip. The urinal is usually interpreted as a simple reference to Duchamp. But if Fountain was Elsa’s work, then his pipe resting on its lip becomes more meaningful. The image becomes emblematic of their spoiled relationship.

  Fountain is base, crude, confrontational and funny. Those are not typical aspects of Duchamp’s work, but they summarise the Baroness and her art perfectly. Perhaps more than anything else, it is this that makes a strong case for Fountain being her work, which she sent to Duchamp from Philadelphia to enter in the exhibition, and which he took credit for over thirty years later when both she and the man who photographed the original were dead. To add weight to this claim, Duchamp was said to have bought the urinal himself from J.L. Mott Ironworks on Fifth Avenue, but later research has shown that this company did not make or sell that particular model of urinal.

  This is not to suggest that Duchamp deliberately took credit for the female artist’s work in a similar manner to how the American painter Walter Keane took credit for his wife Margaret Keane’s painting of big-eyed waifs in the 1950s. Psychologists now have a better understanding of how the accuracy of our memories declines over time, which they can model with a diagram known as the Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting. In particular, the excitement that accompanies a good idea emerging in conversation with others can often lead to many people thinking that the idea was theirs. Forty years after Duchamp had submitted Fountain to the exhibition, it is entirely possible that he genuinely believed that it had been his idea.

  If Duchamp’s most famous artwork was not conceived by him, how does this affect his standing as an artist?

  The key to his work can be found in a posthumous tribute paid to Duchamp by his friend, the American artist Jasper Johns. Johns spoke of Duchamp’s ‘persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference’. The frames of reference he was referring to were those of the traditional art establishment, where art was understood to be paintings created by the talent of an artist and then presented to a grateful audience. The reason why Duchamp presented mass-manufactured objects as art was to challenge and ultimately undermine the understanding of what a piece of art was.

  Duchamp experimented with chance by dropping pieces of string onto a canvas on the ground, and then gluing them in the position they fell. The aesthetic result was produced by luck, not talent. He did this to undermine the idea that an artist could take credit for their work. He was not prolific, but there was a consistent intention in his work after he abandoned painting. He continually explored the idea that art could not be understood as the product of an artist, for as he said in 1957, ‘The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.’ His ‘persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference’ were necessary to reveal the spectator’s role in the existence of art and to demonstrate that what is observed is in part a product of the observer.

  All this leaves us in a strange position. If Duchamp did not conceive or produce Fountain, even though he thought he did, and if his goal was to reject the simplistic idea that art is what is produced by artists, then does Fountain make him a better, or a worse, artist?

  ‘Persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference’ were common in the art of the early twentieth century.

  Cubism was developed by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the years after 1907. Painting had begun to move away from lifelike representations of its subjects, but few were prepared for these startling and confusing works. They were strange, angular abstracted images in drab and joyless colours. A common adjective used to describe them was fractured, for a cubist painting often looked like an image reflected in the pieces of a broken mirror.

  In a cubist painting, the artist’s starting point was the recognition that there was no true perspective or framework from which we could objectively view and understand what we were looking at. This was an insight remarkably similar to Einstein’s. As a result, the painter did not choose one arbitrary perspective and attempt to recreate it on canvas. Instead, they viewed their subject from as many different angles as possible, and then distilled that into one single image. Here the adjective fractured is useful, but misleading. It is not the subject of the painting itself that has become fractured, as is often assumed, but the perspective of the observer. That ‘fractured’-looking image should not be thought of as a straight representation of a deeply weird object. It was the painter’s attempt to condense their multiple-perspective understanding of a normal subject onto a two-dimensional square of canvas.

  Cubist painters weren’t radical in their choice of subject. Like the painters who came before them, they were more than happy to paint naked women and still-life groupings of fruit and wine. It was not their subjects that made them radical, but their attempt to create a new and more truthful way of seeing the familiar. As Picasso once said, ‘I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.’

  This is the opposite approach to the cubist’s contemporaries, the expressionists. The most famous example of expressionism is probably The Scream by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, in which a man standing on a bridge is depicted as a hellish howl of anguish. Unlike cubism, expressionism sticks with one perspective. Yet it can only justify doing so by recognising how subjective that single vision is. It highlights the artist’s emotional reaction to their subject, and makes that an integral part of the work. It understands that the painter’s vision is personal and far from objective, but it embraces this limitation rather than attempting to transcend it.

  This desire to see in a new way is consistent across other art forms of the early twentieth century. Another example was the development of montage in cinema, a technique primarily developed by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein during the 1920s. Montage removed the natural links of time and space, which usually connected sequential shots, and instead juxtaposed a number of separate images together in a way that the director found meaningful. In October: Ten Days that Shook the World, his 1928 film about the 1917 Russian Revolution, Eisenstein intercuts images of Russian churches first with statues of Christ, and then with religious icons from increasingly distant and ancient cultures, including Buddha, tribal totems, and Hindu and Aztec gods. Contemporary Russian religion was, through this montage, revealed as a contemporary expression of a universal religious spirit. He then immediately began intercutting images of the Russian General Lavr Kornilov with statues of Napoleon, and in doing so forced the audience to see the general as part of a similar ancient historic tradition.

  Unlike Braque’s or Picasso’s cubist canvases, Eisenstein’s montages played out in time, so he was able to string together different viewpoints into a sequence rather than merge them into one image. Eisenstein used this clash of perspectives to create many different effects in his filmmaking, from the rhythmic to the symbolic.

  The atonal music that Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern composed in Vienna from 1908 onwards was just as startling and strange as cubism. Schoenberg rejected the idea that compositions had to be based on a central tone or a musical key.

  In traditional composition, a stream of musical notes complement each other in a way that sounds correct to our ears because the pitch of every note is related to, and determined by, the central tone of the key chosen by the composer. Without that central tone, which all the other notes are based on, we become adrift in what Professor Erik Levi called ‘the abyss of no tonal centre’. This is similar to Einstein’s removal of the Cartesian x, y and z axes from our understanding of space, on the grounds that they were an arbitrary system we had projected onto the universe rather than a fundamental property of it. Without a tonal centre at the heart of Viennese atonal music, the compositions which followed could be something of a challenge.

  Developments in music echoed relativity in other ways. Igor Stravinsky, for
example, made great use of polyrhythms in his 1913 masterwork The Rite of Spring. A polyrhythm is when two different and unconnected rhythms are clashed together and performed at the same time. The effect can be disorientating, as when different perspectives on an object were clashed together in a cubist painting.

  Perhaps more than painting or music, the literature of the early twentieth century has a reputation for being wilfully challenging. What is it about the likes of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos or T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that makes them so unapproachable?

  In prose, it is the ongoing story or narrative that acts as the reader’s touchstone. It doesn’t matter whether the story is told solely from the point of view of one of the characters, or takes the more God-like third-person perspective of an omnipotent narrator. Nor does it matter if the story uses multiple narrators, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which switches between the voices of many different characters in order to advance its plot. Dracula’s varying perspectives are not confusing, in part because they are clearly separated in a way that Eliot’s are not, but mainly because all those different voices are telling the same story. This ongoing narrative in prose helps us make sense of everything that happens, in a similar way to the central tone in traditional music or the x, y and z axes of Cartesian space.

  Writers like Joyce, Eliot or Pound rejected this singular narrative framework. They frequently shifted narrator, but they did so in a very different way to Bram Stoker. In the second part of The Waste Land, the poem’s voice abruptly switches to a conversation between women in a British pub, concerning the return of a demobbed soldier husband. There is no introduction to these characters, nor do they seem directly related to the rest of the poem. The effect is jarring and confusing, because there is no central narrative from which this switch of scene makes sense.

  The original title of the poem was ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, a reference to a line in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend where Betty Higden, talking about her son, remarks that ‘You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’ That shift between different voices, clearly, was an important part of what Eliot was trying to do. But The Waste Land is a better title because that change of viewpoint isn’t what the poem is about.