Dada's Women,
Ahead of Their Time
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published in the New York Times: July 6, 2006
Francis M. Nauman
Fine Art, to July 28, 2006
The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven made
an indelible first impression. "She shaved her
head. Next she lacquered it a high vermilion. Then she
stole the crepe from the door of a house of mourning and
made a dress of it." This is the editor Margaret
Anderson, founder of the avant-garde journal known as The Little Review, describing a visit in 1921.
"She came to see us. First she exhibited the head
at all angles. Then she jerked off the crepe with one
movement. 'It's better when I'm nude,' she said. It was very good. But we were
just as glad that some of our more conservative friends didn't choose that moment
to drop in."
Known to walk the streets of Greenwich Village in spats
and a tin-can bra, the Baroness — née Else
Plötz — was a living embodiment of the spirit
of Dada in New York. She was also a gender-rattling,
convention-puncturing performance artist half a century
ahead of her time.
And she is being celebrated, along with five of her contemporaries,
in "Daughters of New York Dada" at Francis
M. Naumann Fine Art on the Upper East Side, a small show
that adds a crucial chapter to the current Dada exhibition
at the Museum of Modern Art.
All six artists
included are remarkable; no two are alike.
Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) is
the best known, a star. She studied with Robert Henri
at the Art Students League, then went to Europe for
more study. But when her first New York solo brought
snippy reviews, she chucked the training and went her
own way, painting fantastical fetes and floral still
lifes (there are two beauties in the show), while throwing
parties for the coolest artists of the day, Marcel
Duchamp among them.
Duchamp was of course Mr. Dada.
As smooth and tart as sorbet, he was everyone's hard-to-get
darling. Katherine S. Dreier (1877-1952) took a shine
to him and, more important, to his art, which she collected,
preserved and evangelically promoted. In the process
she helped shape the course of American art through
the second half of the 20th century into the present.
As a painter she is little known. But her abstract
portrait of Duchamp — a thrusting spike and drooping arrow — catches
her passive-aggressive subject to a T.
Clara Tice (1888-1973) was
a kind of Dada "it" girl. With her short skirts
and bob, she was a fashion pioneer. And when a show of
her drawings of nudes was shut down by the city vice
squad, her career was made. Much sought after as a graphic
artist, she worked briefly for Vanity Fair, a magazine
that made Dada chic and sweet for mainstream marketing.
The Naumann show has two of Tice's poster designs for
Dada costume balls, both charming, along with another
by
Beatrice Wood (1893-1998).
Wood was a Duchamp protégé. It was he who
suggested that she add a provocatively placed bar of
soap to a sculpture of a nude female torso she submitted
to the 1917 Independents Exhibition. Her piece was a
sensation, the prologue to a career as a ceramicist that
lasted until she died at 105.
Far more sensational today, though, is a watercolor she
painted the same year. Titled "Marcel's Bed," it
depicts Duchamp, Wood and Mina Loy mixed in with others
as an after-the-ball jumble of body parts and sheets.
Loy (1882-1966), a British-born
poet and artist, is an exceptionally interesting figure,
and, like the baroness (though in a very different
way), a myth in her own time. Her poetry drew attention
on both sides of the Atlantic for its experimental
language and forthright eroticism. (Roger L. Conover
edited a treasurable book of her writing, "The Last Lunar Baedeker," for
The Jargon Society in 1982.) Her early Symbolist-inspired
painting also had success.
But life absorbed her. After a bad marriage, three children,
and a fling with Futurism in Italy, she came to New York
in 1916. Like Duchamp, she was a notable beauty and an
instant hit. In Dada circles she met the poet-pugilist-performer
who called himself Arthur Cravan. Madly, they went to
Mexico, married and wandered around, destitute, before
Cravan vanished, never to be seen again.
Loy went to Paris, supporting herself as a lampshade designer,
then as an agent for the New York art dealer Julien Levy,
her son-in-law. Then she was back in Manhattan, where
she lived near the Bowery, befriended street people and
collected the materials for her art.
Two large collage pieces from the 1950's are in the show.
In one, "Communal Cot," 10 small twisted papier-mâché
forms suggest bandaged sleeping figures. In the other,
"Christ on a Clothesline," a cutout painted
paper face, more demonic than benign, hangs like a tattered
flag in front of tenements made from scraps of wood.
The baroness, who by this time was 30 years dead, had
ended up on the street, or very close to it. Her aristocratic
title was nothing more than the souvenir of a short marriage;
there was no money attached to it. She was in fact the
rebellious child of a middle-class family in Germany.
And a few years before Duchamp had even reached the age
of reason, she was formulating the ideas for the art project
that would be her life: utter liberation from convention,
irrationality over all.
Only much later was there a name for such art: Dada.
And for many who knew her, she was Dada in the flesh, "the
only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada,
lives Dada," as The Little Review's co-editor,
Jane Heap, put it.
Living Dada was no piece of cake. Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven
barely scraped by on pennies earned as an artist's model.
Before returning to live in Europe in 1923, she had to
camp out in parks in Northern Manhattan. Personally she
was so demanding as to exhaust the help of even her most
devoted supporters. Yet she was also level-headed enough
to see straight through the art world's pretensions,
and modest enough — Dada enough — to create
almost no collectible art.
Francis M. Naumann, who
is a leading scholar of New York Dada as well as a dealer,
organized an unforgettable gallery survey of her work
two years ago. It was comprehensive and tiny.
Only images of her made by others — photographs,
paintings — are in the current show. But this as
it should be. The art historian Amelia Jones, in her book
"Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of
New York Dada" (MIT Press, 2004) writes, "The
Baroness lived, performed a kind of unhinged subjectivity
that most other artists of her day only examined or illustrated
in their work and that many, in spite of their aspirations
to thwart bourgeois norms and define themselves as avant-garde,
assiduously avoided." Duchamp created his readymades
for museums; the baroness made Dada in the street.
Were she and her colleagues really daughters of Dada?
I think not. Sisters, maybe. Or mothers. The reality is
that the more closely the history of modern art is examined,
the more evident it becomes that women were its primary
creators.
Like virtually no other 20th-century art movement of abiding
interest, New York Dada is, directly or indirectly, their
work. The baroness was Dada before Dada, and she was so
Dada that she didn't bother with names. Just living art,
doing it, was a full-time job.
The exhibition continues through
July 28 at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, 22 East 80th Street,
off Fifth Avenue, 5th floor; (212) 472-6800.
