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Title:
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Cast-Off: The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Dada Montage God and her Legacy in Modern Art
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Creator:
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Wagner, Kathryn Drury
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Subject:
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Thesis (M.A.) – Art History
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Subject:
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Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Art History
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Rights:
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Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
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Abstract:
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“Part artist, part human grenade, Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) was born in Prussia and lived in New York from 1913 to 1923. There, she was a part of a circle of creatives that included artist Marcel Duchamp, photographer Man Ray, modernist writer Djuna Barnes, and influential editors Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson. Like her avant-garde peers in Europe, such as Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, and Hannah Höch, Freytag-Loringhoven blurred pre-existing distinctions between painting, textiles, literature, and performance. She used everyday materials such as plumbing supplies, dime-store finds, and trash from the street in her collages, paintings, costumes, sculptures, assemblages, and montage art. Her 1917 sculpture God, which is the focus of my thesis, is the prime example of how she used castoff materials and sublimated them into an artistic performance. Despite her influence on the Dada movement, Freytag-Loringhoven was largely absent from the annals of art history until the 1990s, when she was rediscovered by scholars such as Irene Gammel, Amelia Jones, and Francis Naumann. Many scholars have concentrated on Freytag-Loringhoven’s embodied Dada expressions, since she turned her own body into easel, draped in wearable assemblages made of disparate elements such as parsley, old chandelier pendants, and curtain rings. Other scholars have focused their work on her provocative Dada poetry, which mixes words with sounds, colors, shapes, and fragmentary punctuation. Fewer scholars have explored Freytag-Loringhoven as a conceptual artist. There has also been little research on her impact on later art movements in the United States, such as Neo- Dada, Pop Art, and assemblage art of the 1960s. Generally, Dada and found art in the U.S. is discussed as the legacy of Duchamp and Duchamp alone. By exploring Freytag-Loringhoven’s work God through the lens of Dada montage, I will challenge this narrative. I argue that God is a prime example of Freytag- Loringhoven’s artistic and intellectual practices, and furthermore, that it was fundamental to the formulation of Duchamp’s readymade, Fountain. Freytag-Loringhoven had a lasting influence on the trajectory of conceptual art, and the proof lies within her work God.” –Abstract
Keywords: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, body, conceptual art, Dada, Marcel Duchamp, feminist, found art, Fountain, gender, God, montage, performative, refuse, trash.
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Publisher:
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Savannah, Georgia : Savannah College of Art and Design
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Date:
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2023-05
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Format:
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1 online resource: 1 PDF (Thesis, 108 pages, color illustrations)
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