Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

She arrived in New York around 1913^[2] and became one of the most disruptive presences in the American avant-garde. Jane Heap of The Little Review called her "the first American Dada^[2]", a label that irritated Duchamp, who was less amused by her attentions than admirers assumed. Her assemblage God (1917), co-created with photographer Morton Schamberg and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was among the earliest Dada objects made in the United States: a cast-iron plumbing trap mounted upside-down on a mitre box.

Her poetry appeared in The Little Review alongside instalments of James Joyce's Ulysses, and she modelled for artists including George Biddle and Man Ray. Despite her notoriety she lived in extreme poverty, surviving by begging and posing, at one point jailed briefly for suspected theft. She left New York in 1923^[2] for Paris, where she spent her last years in near-destitution. She died on 14 December 1927^[2] from gas asphyxiation, most likely accidental, in her Paris apartment. She was buried at Père Lachaise.

Her work was largely overlooked for decades after her death. A posthumous poetry collection, Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings, appeared in 2011 and was named among the year's notable art books by the New York Times. Peggy Guggenheim had included her in the 1943 Exhibition by 31 Women, but it was not until the twenty-first century that art history began to reassess how much of what was credited to Dada^[2] had already been enacted by the Baroness.