The Glass Box of Feminism and the Discourse of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

It is no unknown matter that before the twenty-first century, the history of art has neglected to include the works and contributions of female artists, these women being overshadowed and discounted by their male counterparts, deeming them as not “good enough” to partake in the intellectual discourse that is visual art. Of course many women have managed to break these barriers, usually through the relation of the male artist for whom they modeled, were friends with, or married to, but even then, every one of these known creative women were automatically put into the category of ‘feminism’ simply by the fact that they are female. Here, I will define some terms that will be crucial to understanding the progression of this paper and the overall critiquing of art history. Female corresponds to the biological sex, whereas woman is a term that refers to a female in her adult state. Feminine refers to female expression, such as a particular set of mannerisms, temperament, and association with certain activities, interests, associations, such as wearing dresses, having long hair, and the colour pink. Lastly, feminism refers to groups of political movements that sought to achieve equality, with a feminist being a member, either actively or passively, of one or more of those groups. I claim that many of these female artists, if asked if they were making comments of the feminist nature would instead claim that they were making comments about the things they knew and the problems they saw. The freedom for women to do so should be viewed as a result or symptom of the feminist movement rather than inherent feminism.

It seems that the entirety of modern and postmodern art historical critique, in an attempt to uncover the lost and forgotten women of art, has judged them within a frame that limits their essential influences on modern society and the masculine art deemed so crucial to our current understanding of said art. The constant association of women with organic, curvy shapes is taking away from the broader understanding of art, according to Michelle Meagher in, “Telling stories about feminist art.” “The logic of disidentification and disavowal, particularly as they are overlaid onto the matrophors circulating in feminist stories, may help to make sense of the persistence of a story that has, for all intents and purposes, been revealed to be a ‘vastly oversimplified as well as prejudicial view’ of what might otherwise be understood as a complex and multilayered tale.”[1] Meagher refers here to a sense of mastery or the master narrative, which engenders all discourses of art history. These group of stories are told from and pertain to the masculine perspective, are generally believed by society to be truth, and disregard all other narratives.

And unfortunately the female artists, like Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who are brave enough and managed to enter into this world, are still placed within this glass box; one which allows them to see and experience artistry, but also prevents them from being considered real artists, like Marcel Duchamp. As Dadaism meant an involvement of unfettered creativity, a removal of constraints, a juxtaposing of contrary forces, in order to be a female Dadaist that would also mean rejecting your feminine qualities. And there, of course, was an invisible prohibition for women to diverge from the expectations of the feminine, to steer away from the stereotypical roles of what it means to be female, to enter into the then-masculine-dominated culture. In this paper and through example of the Baroness and her relationship to Duchamp, I intend to remove the box in which she and other female artists are placed, and propose a new direction of including and understanding the forgotten contributions to modern art.

I – Androgyny

When the name Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is mentioned, the first thing that usually comes to mind is her uncanny, risqué, and peculiar fashion sense, memories of her traipsing around the streets of New York with postage stamps on her face, a bird cage around her neck, and found objects in hand.[2] Considering high fashion in today’s society, the Baroness’ style has found its way onto runways and magazines as in Brittany Murphy’s depiction of the Baroness (Figure 1). This image was one in a series of photographs within the New York Times magazine’s 2002 Pilgrimage issue in which actress Brittany Murphy is photographed in clothes similar to what the Baroness would have worn with references to the bird cage, found objects, vermillion hair, and Duchamp. While it is great that she can be credited with having a hand in the development of androgyny, it is a classic case of the feminine box. Murphy’s clothes are extremely feminine and extremely expensive, highlighting elite fashion designers like Ralph Lauren and Christian Louboutin. The problem here is that the Dadaist aura of the Baroness is missed and ignored.

Figure 1 – Brittany Murphy Channelling the Baroness, Photographed by Jeff Riedel and styled by Elizabeth Stewart, 2002, New York Times magazine Pilgrimage issue

There was nothing extremely feminine or expensive about the Baroness, in fact she was known for her extreme theatrical poses and merging of gender identities (Figure 2) and she was very poor with an interest in wearing the junk she collected. According to Eliza Jane Reilly, “her appropriation of found objects, and of her body, clothing, and make-up as artistic media can be seen as an extended and brutally honest commentary on her own life as a woman — a far riskier aesthetic strategy,” than that of Marcel Duchamp.[3] Duchamp, with whom she had a friendly relationship and was obsessed with), under the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy (rose c’est la vie or pink is life, Figure 3) was also known to engage in gender-bending dress. But unlike Duchamp who masqueraded as a woman and was concerned with the “feminine mystique,” the Baroness lived and breathed the other gender and had an ability to relentlessly meld the feminine with the masculine;[4] the way she dressed and the manner in which she carried herself was the definition of dada, the rejection of the rational.

Figure 2 – Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in Greenwich Village apartment, December, 1915

Figure 3 – Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, Man Ray, 1921, gelatine silver print, 8 7/10 × 6 9/10 inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art

These days, it’s much more acceptable for women to lean towards the masculine, and this lineage of gender identity has its roots in women pushing to be considered in politics and recognized as equal citizens. However, any modern woman who holds a position of authority or expresses independence, as did the Baroness with her contributions to Dadaism, has society’s attention focused on her femininity or divergence from it, and her expression of female expectation in relation to clothes and managing the home, with her intellect being dismissed.[5] As women, there should be acceptance that what they do, how they look, who they are cannot be determine the quality of their work. During a time where the woman’s place was at home, in the kitchen, with the children, there was a “focus on the various acts by which cultural identity is constituted and assumed [and this] provides a felicitous starting point for the feminist effort to understand the mundane manner in which bodies get crafted into.”[6] The Baroness’ style undoubtedly perpetuated aspects of high fashion and ultimately the feminist movement, but the lack of her poetry and sculptures as part of that discourse is a detriment.

II – (Al)ready Made

We will now consider the Baroness’ conceptualization of God (Figure 4) created in 1917, which features an upended iron-plumbing trap secured to a wooden mitre box and photographed by Morton Schamberg.[7] It is a phallic-shaped sculpture that points to a critique on American society’s obsession with technology, especially in the fact that Schamberg is known for depicting works with references to technology and machines, and the male fixation with his genitals, the aspects of power, control, authority, and domination along with it. This work is the epitome of the Baroness and her interest in junk collecting and presenting found objects as art. There is not much literature on this work as original of the Baroness, and this may be due to the omission of co-crediting for creating it. Previously it been thought that Schamberg was sole innovator of the readymade but recently proven that his contribution was limited to securing the fixture to the box and photographing it.

Figure 4 – God, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (and Morton Schamberg), 1917, gelatine silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 9/16 inches, Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the same year, Duchamp created Fountain (Figure 5), which perpetuated his career into fame and deemed him as one of the most talked about and praised artists within the visual art world. This porcelain urinal, rotated 90 degrees and placed on a plinth, presented the twentieth century with the first known ‘readymade’, the selection of banal found objects modified, repositioned, and/or re-represented to highlight new meaning, that turned art and the understanding of art on its head, contributing to a global paradigm shift.[8] What was once a cold, hard, masculine public washroom fixture has been dismantled and upended to place emphasis on the soft, voluptuous, feminine shape and question the role and function of everyday objects as art.[9]

Figure 5 – Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917, replica 1964, porcelain urinal on plinth, Tate Museum

With Duchamp’s history of depicting androgyny, it makes sense that he would incorporate the same gender-bending aspects within his found objects as well. But, knowing that the Baroness was also known for gender-bending and was a friend of Duchamp’s in some fashion, spending a great deal of time with him, would it be fair to assume that God was Duchamp inspired, or is it possible that the opposite occurred?

III – Authorship and Appropriation

The Fountain was signed “R. Mutt, 1917,” and there has been many theories as to the meaning of this signature. For a long time there was an understanding that Duchamp purchased the urinal from J.L. Mott Iron Works, a New York manufacturer and retailer of bathroom plumbing fixtures. But research has proven this not to be true, as J.L. Mott Iron Works had no history of ever manufacturing this particular model. Furthermore, Duchamp claimed that it was a reference to Mutt and Jeff, a popular American newspaper comic strip about an odd pairing, a tall thin man and a short fat man respectively, with the “R” standing for “Richard,” referencing the French slang term for ‘money-bags,’ the opposite of poverty.[10] In contrast, another interpretation of the signature could be a reference to the German word ‘armut’ meaning poverty.[11] In this latter case, we see that there is some reference to The Baroness and her German ethnicity, possibly Duchamp making a comment about the poor life she lived and rejecting the multiple sexual advances she made towards him. Similarly, there is also some uncertainty as to what the Baroness meant by titling her plumbing fixture God, with one being in reference to religion as she has other works with obvious anti-religious references such as Cathedral (Figure 6, a wooden shard vertically fixed to a wooden block by a metal wire). However, a more likely interpretation could be a reference to the French word ‘gode’ meaning dildo. And in light of Duchamp’s rejection of her, it could be her reaction to said rejection and his French ethnicity. From 1923-24, the Baroness created Forgotten Like this Parapluie am I by You — Faithless Bernice,” (Figure 7) a small gouache drawing on foil. The Baroness created this work in a response to all the people who walked away from her life and abandoned her, and this reading is evident when analyzing each aspect of the work. Within we see an upside-down and closed parapluie, or umbrella, the shoed foot of someone out of frame, and a urinal overflowing with water pouring onto and soaking some books below. The theme of abandonment is a clear reference to the tragic end of her relationship with Duchamp and the imagery of the overflowing urinal as a reference to Fountain. One thing is for sure: there was a conversation between them.

Figure 6 – Cathedral, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 1918, wooden shard on wooden block, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art

In 2015, John Higgs published, “Stranger than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century,”[12] a book in which he examined some of the aspects of history which involved breakthroughs in science, technology, and art and constructed all the events of reality in a way that made sense. He postulated that by the turn of the twentieth century, society and cultural saw a shift in the understanding of these aspects, a shift that confused reality with the imaginary, the tangible with the ideological, the material with the conceptual. In the section titled, “The shock of the new,” Higgs addresses an issue of authorship in terms of whether Fountain was the original work of Duchamp or the Baroness. It is not necessarily the issue of who authored the work that I am concerned with here however, but rather an important aspect of appropriation that may change the reading of the work if we were to assume Fountain as original of the Baroness. As a male who dominated the conceptual art world, Duchamp’s name, when discussed as part of that discourse, cannot be in fact be discussed without the aspect of mastery. Earlier in this paper, I mentioned the master narrative and it is at this point that I will address the mastering gaze. This is a position that is taken on by a male, and for years accepted by women as well, where the male artist concerns himself with the physical appearance of the woman to the point of objectification of and control over her. The mastering gaze was nothing that men were conscious was happening, but rather it was a part of the general understanding within historical discourse. I raise this issue because, for assessing the work of modern male artists, it is necessary to remind our selves as art historians, how the personal desires of the artist can influence the creation of a work and more importantly, its interpretation. With Fountain, it’s possible that the re-represented urinal in its voluptuous state is reflective of this mastering gaze, or it could simply be a depiction of opposing forces, indicative of Dadaist art. In The Acquaintance Principle, Aesthetics Judgments, and Conceptual Art, Andrea Sauchelli explains how the proximity of the viewer to an artwork or the previous experience of that artwork, whether in relation to expression, appreciation, or knowledge, greatly influences how the work is read or judged. That preconceived expectations of aesthetics, often due to the other works or experience of the artist, are automatically applied to objects and in this manner, the object or conceptual art is subjected to a test of validity.[13] What exactly am I looking at? If I could do this, can this really be art? As I mentioned in the introduction, observers of conceptual Dadaist art have a difficulty in understanding art being removed from aesthetics in the first place, that the object and its meaning exist discretely. So the question is, should our understanding of a work change just because a woman created it?

Figure 7 – Forgotten Like This Parapluie Am I by You, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 1923–24, gouache on foil, 5 1/8 x 4 3/4 inches, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art

V – Anti-Feminism

When we discuss originality and appropriation, issue of production and reproduction arise, as there was previously a misconception of the artist having to produce his/her own work in order to receive the title. This was one aspect of which Dadaist were concerned with dispelling. In “Appropriation and Authorship in Contemporary Art, Sherrie Irvin postulates that there is a difference between an author, forger, and artist, with the first as one having an intent to create meaning, the second as one having an intent to copy and deceive, and the last as one having an intent to create art. It is possible however, to employ both the roles of artist and author, author and forger, any other combination or all three.[14] She says that, “the relationship between authorship and interpretability does not force us to hold that the artist’s actual intentions to fix the correct interpretation of the artwork.”[15] In other words, the author of a work may have a purpose for creating a work, but it is not necessarily their intent that solidifies its interpretation. The intent of the artist is but one aspect of the final presented product. Irvin goes on to say that, “the idealized reconstruction of the artist’s intentions that will eventuate from these assumptions, along with other relevant information about the artist and the work, may be thought to ground adequate interpretation even if it does not correspond to the artist’s actual intentions,” but this would be a hypothetical position.[16] So, while it may comfort us, as viewers of a Fountain, to want to reinterpret the work with an understanding from a female feminist framework, we must be careful that we do not confuse the intentionality of the artist with our own interpretation; they are two separate things. Upon a potential discovery that the urinal is in fact a Baroness original, the interpretation of it should remain, but her intent as its author may change. It is important to know if a woman created a particular work, but only as it contributes to equitable critique of art history. Just because a female created something does not make it feminist or feminine work.

Paralleling the uprising of various feminist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mastery has seen a decrease over the years, a loss of mastery, a renunciation, but the structure of it and belief by society remains. While we are more likely to accept stories from the “other,” mastery still frames how those things are categorized and analyzed. It has been a natural position of the modern art historical discourse to critique works by female artists under the umbrella of feminist or feminine. We tend to adhere to a kind of confirmation bias, a phenomenon in which we pay attention to aspects of a discussion, which support our own views or expectations where, “one does not seek an alternative history, but picks at the conditions of dominant stories to establish what political, epistemological and ontological work they are trying to achieve.”[17] And in regards to the critique of female artist works, the truth is warped. And as many more female artists and their works are being uncovered, it is essential that they a judged with the same level of criticism and be careful about lumping each of them under the general category of feminism within modern art history textbooks. After all, is it not possible for a male artist to create feminist works?

Works Cited

[1] Michelle Meagher, “Telling Stories about Feminist Art,” in Feminist Theory, 12, no. 3, (2011): 313-14.

[2] “’God’ by Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg.” Accessed March 17^th, 2017. http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/261000

[3] Eliza Jane Reilly, “Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” in Woman’s Art Journal, 18, no. 1, (1997): 31.

[4] Ibid, 31.

[5] Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth Century Vanguard Painting,” in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, 1st edition, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, (New York: Harper & Row, 1982): 292-313.

[6] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, 40, no. 4, (Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1988): 525.

[7] “’God’ by Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg.” Accessed March 17^th, 2017. http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/261000

[8] Anne Elisabeth Sejten, “Art Fighting Its Way Back to Aesthetics: Revisiting Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’,” in Journal of Art Historiography, (2016): 3.

[9] Paul Franklin, “Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ and the Art of Queer Art History,” in Oxford Art Journal, 23, no. 1, (2000): 26.

[10] Paul Franklin, “Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ and the Art of Queer Art History,” in Oxford Art Journal, 23, no. 1, (2000): 32.

[11] Anne Elisabeth Sejten, “Art Fighting Its Way Back to Aesthetics: Revisiting Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’,” in Journal of Art Historiography, (2016): 3.

[12] John Higgs, “The shock of the new,” in Stranger than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century. 2015.

[13] Andrea Sauchelli, “The Acquaintance Principle, Aesthetic Judgments, and Conceptual Art,” in Journal of Aesthetic Education, 50, no. 1, (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2016): 2-6.

[14] Sherri Irvin, “Appropriation and Authorship in Contemporary Art,” in British Journal of Aesthetics, 45, no. 2, (2005): 132-33.

[15] Ibid, 136.

[16] Ibid, 136.

[17] Clare Hemmings, “What is a Feminist Theorist Responsible For?” in Feminist Theory, 8, ed. 1, (2007): 72.