Else crossed the line between genius and madness before, during and after her time with FPG. 

The one time nude model, chorus girl, actress and poet was institutionalized in both Germany and New York, yet her poems were published,  her paintings sold, and her sculptures remain prized by museums as examples of New York Dada art.

Else Hildegard Ploetz was born 12 Jul 1874 to a German mason and his Polish wife, in a border town on the Baltic Sea. Her father brutalized her. Her mother went mad before dying of cancer. Her father then married a woman Else hated. At 18 Else ran away to Berlin where she worked as a nude model and chorus girl, trained as an actress, and had affairs with writers, artists, playwrights, and other members of Berlin's arts community.

She studied art in Munich, then married up and coming architect August Endell in 1901. The following year she began an affair with FPG, whose first two novels subsequently recorded fictionalized versions of her biography, detailing her father's abuse and her  teenage sexual exploits. She ended that year in a sanatorium. 

Between 1904 and 1905, seven poems by an author named Fanny Essler were published. Both FPG and Else subsequently claimed authorship. By 1906, Else's poetry was the rage of Berlin cabarets.

FPG and Else married in Aug 1907 and continued to live beyond their modest means. Swamped by debt he could not repay, FPG faked his own suicide in 1909 and emigrated to the U.S. Else joined him a year later. They spent time in New York, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, then farmed near Sparta, Kentucky before their marriage ended in late 1911.

Leaving Kentucky, Else modeled in nearby Cincinnati before eventually finding her way back to New York, where she found work as a nude model for painters in Greenwich Village.

In November 1913, Else, 39, married Baron Leo, 29, the itinerant black sheep of the poor but titled Freytag-Loringhoven family. He returned to Germany alone a few months later, became a World War I prisoner of war, and committed suicide in 1919. 

Reverting to her German stage name, Elsa, the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, became the talk of Greenwich Village. "She's not a futurist; she is the future," said Marcel Duchamp. 

The enigmatic artist known as the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a friend and collaborator of Duchamp, Man Ray Djuna Barnes and others, is today considered by art historians to be the first New York Dadaist.

An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, the Baroness was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial street theater. Some thought her crazed, others thought her a genius. Margaret Anderson called her "perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary."

The "Dada Baroness" single-handedly presented futuristic fashion to the bohemians of Greenwich Village, scandalizing her neighbors by parading semi-nude along 14th Street, barely covered with feathers. According to her autobiography, most of her art objects were produced out of other people's rubbish, but her criminal record suggests at least some were stolen.

She paraded her dogs skimpily dressed, her head shaved bald and sometimes painted. She purloined art materials from five-and-dime stores. At least once she dodged arrest for  offensive behavior by leaping from the paddy wagon.

In 1918 The Little Review published 20 of her poems and more than a dozen of her essays and notes. The magazine gave Elsa a forum for the next four years, establishing her among Dada luminaries. The first movie made by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray was about Elsa, titled The Baroness Shaves her Pubic Hair.

The Baroness was one of the most bizarre characters seen in Greenwich Village during the 1920s. She recited her poetry on the street almost nude. She was feared and admired in verse by the likes of Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Djuna Barnes. 

In Baroness Elsa, University of Prince Edward Island English professor Irene Gammel traces Else's extraordinary life and work. Striding the streets wearing such adornments as a tomato-soup can bra, teaspoon earrings, and black lipstick, the Baroness erased the boundaries between life and art, between the everyday and the outrageous, between the creative and the dangerous. Her art objects were precursors to dada objects of the teens and twenties, her sound and visual poetry were far more daring than those of the male modernists of her time, and her performances prefigured feminist body art and performance art by nearly half a century.

Elsa's art objects were anti-religious -- a plumbing trap titled God, a bit of splintered shingle called Cathedral.

Her money ran out as the Dada art period wound down. She drifted from one situation to another, ending up in a two-room tenement, employed in a factory. In April 1923, Williams paid her way home to post-war Germany, where she hoped to rekindle her career, but found just more desperate poverty. Reduced to selling newspapers on the streets between 1923 and 1926, she persisted in her belief that deep within her was "glittering wealth."

In 1926, Barnes and others raised enough money to move the Baroness to Paris and to settle her into a flat. She apparently found peace and companionship once again, but it lasted only a few months. Her lifetime of insomnia and nightmares came to an end 14 Dec 1927. Either someone entered her room and turned on the gas, or she had turned it on herself. Today we cannot be sure what happened, but her death in Barnes' words was the result of "a stupid joke that had not even the decency of maliciousness."
 

Else












Baroness Elsa, 1915

God, 1918