Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

The Baroness Who Made the Urinal: The Wild Genius of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

She once walked into a Manhattan post office wearing postage stamps as makeup. Her hat? A tin can. Around her neck: a birdcage with a live canary. That was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — performance artist before the term existed, punk before punk, and possibly, just possibly, the true mind behind the most scandalous piece of modern art: Fountain — the upside-down urinal signed “R. Mutt” and long attributed to Marcel Duchamp.

Elsa was a poet, a sculptor, a force of entropy in the corseted world of early 20th-century art. She was Dada’s heartbeat and middle finger, a woman who chewed on norms and spat them into poetry that looked like ransom notes from the subconscious. Her life was a series of detonations — against propriety, patriarchy, and the illusion that art must be orderly.

But history has a habit of misplacing difficult women.

She was born Else Hildegard Plötz in 1874, in a narrow, Protestant town in Pomerania, then part of Germany. Her father was a tyrant. Her mother died early. From a young age, Elsa learned to survive by turning pain into performance. She fled — first into art school, then into the arms of artists, then across continents.

By the time she arrived in New York in 1913, she’d reinvented herself a dozen times: chorus girl, bohemian, baroness. The last came from a brief, fractious marriage to Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German aristocrat with a drinking problem and, one suspects, limited patience for Elsa’s dynamite soul. He disappeared in World War I. Elsa stayed in America, where the war made her a suspicious foreigner — and her art, a radical gesture of resistance.

New York in the 1910s was a fever dream of invention. Cubism, jazz, skyscrapers. But even here, Elsa stood out. She painted her face green. She shaved her head. She shoplifted with poetic abandon. She lived in poverty — sometimes literally rummaging through garbage for materials — but her style was deliberate chaos, a kind of sculptural drag that turned the city into her stage.

She wrote poems that howled and sputtered and refused to behave. One, titled “CARL EINSTEIN,” begins:

CARL EINSTEIN
TANK —
BOMB —
NAUGHT —
BELLOW —
ZAP —
WHOOSH

Language wasn’t a tool; it was a grenade. Her work made even the wildest modernists — Pound, Eliot, Stein — seem tidy by comparison. She was also one of the first poets to use collage in her writing, slicing up the visual field of the page, decades before the Beats or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets got there.

But where the men of Dada got museum retrospectives, Elsa got evicted. While Duchamp was celebrated for coolly questioning art’s boundaries, Elsa lived the question — messily, erotically, dangerously.

Then there’s Fountain.

In 1917, a urinal showed up at the Society of Independent Artists show in New York. Titled Fountain and signed “R. Mutt,” it was rejected — even though the exhibit had promised to display every submission. Duchamp, on the board, resigned in protest. The urinal became a legend. Critics hailed it as the birth of conceptual art.

But some scholars — and many artists — believe Elsa sent that urinal. In fact, Duchamp may have admitted it, offhandedly, in letters. It would have been just like her: the use of found objects, the crude humor, the gender provocation. Elsa was obsessed with plumbing fixtures, once declaring herself “the first American plumber.”

Her 1917 poem “A Dozen Cocktails — Please” reads like a manifesto of urinal logic: brash, unsentimental, full of liquid symbolism and mockery of bourgeois taste.

But Elsa didn’t have a knack for legacy. She didn’t copyright her work. She didn’t flatter gallery owners. She didn’t behave.

And then she vanished.

In 1923, broke and likely exhausted by America’s cold shoulders, Elsa returned to Berlin, then Paris. Europe was no kinder. Dada was dying. The war had sucked the humor out of absurdism. She scraped by, writing to friends for money. James Joyce tried to help. Djuna Barnes, one of her only literary champions, admired Elsa’s raw flame and published her work.

In 1927, Elsa was found dead in her tiny Paris apartment. Gas leak. Suicide or accident — no one knows. She was 53. She had a cigarette in her hand.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven didn’t get a proper art retrospective until the 21st century. Feminist scholars exhumed her legacy from the footnotes, and artists — from Cindy Sherman to Lady Gaga — began to cite her as a prophet. Her poetry has been anthologized. Her story turned into plays, films, even fashion editorials. In a world newly obsessed with “disruption,” Elsa is finally having her moment.

But the question remains: Why did it take a century?

Because Elsa didn’t ask nicely. She didn’t package herself. She didn’t brand.

And in the end, that may be the most radical thing about her. She treated her life as art, not to be preserved but to be lived. She burned fast. She made noise. She made enemies. She made Fountain, maybe — and didn’t care if history gave her credit.

Which is why we’re giving it to her now.

There’s something unsettling about standing in front of Fountain at the Tate Modern or MoMA and thinking of Elsa — penniless, half-starved, stomping through Manhattan in scrap-metal heels, reciting verses about menstruation and machine guns. There’s something holy about it, too. The museum, suddenly, is not a place of worship but of revenge. The woman in the urinal finally gets to stare back.

And she’s laughing. Always laughing.