Stranger Than We Can Imagine (5 page)

General Relativity made Einstein a global celebrity. He made an immediate impression on the public, thanks to press photographs of his unkempt hair, crumpled clothes and kind, smiling eyes. The idea of a ‘funny little man’ from the European continent with a mind that could see what others could not was a likeable archetype, one which Agatha Christie put to good use when she created Poirot in 1920. The fact that Einstein was a German Jew only added to the interest.

The reception of Einstein and relativity shows a world more interested in the man than his ideas. Many writers took an almost gleeful pleasure in their failure to understand his theories, and the idea that relativity was impossible for normal people to comprehend soon took hold. Contemporary press reports claimed that there were only twelve people in the world who could understand it. When Einstein visited Washington in 1921 the Senate felt the need to debate his theory, with a number of Senators arguing that it was incomprehensible. President Harding was happy to admit that he didn’t understand it. Chaim Weizmann, later the first President of Israel, accompanied Einstein on an Atlantic crossing. ‘During the crossing Einstein explained relativity to me every day,’ he remarked, ‘and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.’

Relativity arrived too late for the anarchist Martial Bourdin. He wanted to destroy Greenwich Observatory, which was symbolically the omphalos of the British Empire and its system of order which stretched around the entire globe. But omphaloi, Albert Einstein taught us, are entirely arbitrary. Had Bourdin waited for the General Theory of Relativity, he might have realised that it was not necessary to build a bomb. All that was needed was to recognise that an omphalos was a fiction in the first place.

A scene from The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, 1913
(Keystone-France/Getty)

TWO:
MODERNISM

I
n March 1917 the Philadelphia-based modernist painter George Biddle hired a forty-two-year-old German woman as a model. She visited him in his studio, and Biddle told her that he wished to see her naked. The model threw open her scarlet raincoat. Underneath, she was nude apart from a bra made from two tomato cans and green string, and a small birdcage housing a sorry-looking canary, which hung around her neck. Her only other items of clothing were a large number of curtain rings, recently stolen from Wanamaker’s department store, which covered one arm, and a hat which was decorated with carrots, beets and other vegetables.

Poor George Biddle. There he was, thinking that he was the artist and that the woman in front of him, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, was his model. With one quick reveal the baroness announced that she was the artist, and he simply her audience.

Then a well-known figure on the New York avant garde art scene, Baroness Elsa was a performance artist, poet and sculptor. She wore cakes as hats, spoons as earrings, black lipstick and postage stamps as makeup. She lived in abject poverty surrounded by her pet dogs and the mice and rats in her apartment, which she fed and encouraged. She was regularly arrested and incarcerated for offences such as petty theft or public nudity. At a time when societal restrictions on female appearance were only starting to soften, she would shave her head, or dye her hair vermilion.

Her work was championed by Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound; she was an associate of artists including Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, and those who met her did not forget her quickly.
Yet the baroness remains invisible in most accounts of the early twentieth-century art world. You see glimpses of her in letters and journals from the time, which portray her as difficult, cold or outright insane, with frequent references to her body odour. Much of what we know about her early life is based on a draft of her memoirs she wrote in a psychiatric asylum in Berlin in 1925, two years before her death.

In the eyes of most of the people she met, the way she lived and the art she produced made no sense at all. She was, perhaps, too far ahead of her time. The baroness is now recognised as the first American Dada artist, but it might be equally true to say she was the first New York punk, sixty years too early. It took until the early twenty-first century for her feminist Dada to gain recognition. This reassessment of her work has raised an intriguing possibility: could Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven be responsible for what is often regarded as the most significant work of art in the twentieth century?

Baroness Elsa was born Else Hildegarde Plötz in 1874 in the Prussian town of Swinemünde, now Świnoujście in Poland, on the Baltic Sea. When she was nineteen, following the death of her mother to cancer and a physical attack by her violent father, she left home and went to Berlin, where she found work as a model and chorus girl. A heady period of sexual experimentation followed, which left her hospitalised with syphilis, before she befriended the cross-dressing graphic artist Melchior Lechter and began moving in avant garde art circles.

The distinction between her life and her art, from this point on, became increasingly irrelevant. As her poetry testifies, she did not respect the safe boundaries between the sexual and the intellectual which existed in the European art world. Increasingly androgynous, Elsa embarked on a number of marriages and affairs, often with homosexual or impotent men. She helped one husband fake his own suicide, a saga which brought her first to Canada and then to the United States. A further marriage to Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven gave her a title, although the Baron was
penniless and worked as a busboy. Shortly after their marriage the First World War broke out, and he went back to Europe to fight. He took what money Elsa had with him, and committed suicide shortly afterwards.

Around this time the baroness met, and became somewhat obsessed with, the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp. One of her spontaneous pieces of performance art saw her taking an article about Duchamp’s painting
Nude Descending a Staircase
and rubbing it over every inch of her body, connecting the famous image of a nude with her own naked self. She then recited a poem that climaxed with the declaration ‘Marcel, Marcel, I love you like Hell, Marcel.’

Duchamp politely declined her sexual advances. He was not a tactile man, and did not like to be touched. But he did recognise the importance and originality of her art. As he once said, ‘[The Baroness] is not a futurist. She is the future.’

Duchamp is known as the father of conceptual art. He abandoned painting on canvas in 1912 and started a painting on a large sheet of glass, but took ten years to finish it. What he was really looking for were ways to make art outside of traditional painting and sculpture. In 1915 he hit upon an idea he called ‘readymades’, in which everyday objects such as a bottle rack or a snow shovel could be presented as pieces of art. A bicycle wheel that he attached to a stool in 1913 was retrospectively classed as the first readymade. These were a challenge to the art establishment: was the fact that an artist showcased something they had found sufficient grounds to regard that object as a work of art? Or, perhaps more accurately, was the idea that an artist challenged the art establishment by presenting a found object sufficiently interesting for
that idea
to be considered a work of art? In this scenario, the idea was the art and the object itself was really just a memento that galleries and collectors could show or invest in.

Duchamp’s most famous readymade was called
Fountain
. It was a urinal which was turned on its side and submitted to a 1917 exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists, New York, under the
name of a fictitious artist called Richard Mutt. The exhibition aimed to display every work of art that was submitted, so by sending them the urinal Duchamp was challenging them to agree that it was a work of art. This they declined to do. What happened to it is unclear, but it was not included in the show and it seems likely that it was thrown away in the trash. Duchamp resigned from the board in protest, and
Fountain
’s rejection overshadowed the rest of the exhibition.

In the 1920s Duchamp stopped producing art and dedicated his life to the game of chess. But the reputation of
Fountain
slowly grew, and Duchamp was rediscovered by a new generation of artists in the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately very few of his original works survived, so he began producing reproductions of his most famous pieces. Seventeen copies of
Fountain
were made. They are highly sought after by galleries around the world, even though they need to be displayed in Perspex cases thanks to the number of art students who try to ‘engage with the art’ by urinating in it. In 2004, a poll of five hundred art experts voted Duchamp’s
Fountain
the most influential modern artwork of the twentieth century.

But is it true to say that
Fountain
was Duchamp’s work?

On 11 April 1917 Duchamp wrote to his sister Suzanne and said that ‘One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it.’ As he was already submitting the urinal under an assumed name, there does not seem to be a reason why he would lie to his sister about a ‘female friend’. The strongest candidate to be this friend was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was in Philadelphia at the time, and contemporary newspaper reports claimed that ‘Richard Mutt’ was from Philadelphia.

If
Fountain
was Baroness Elsa’s work, then the pseudonym it used proves to be a pun. America had just entered the First World War, and Elsa was angry about both the rise in anti-German sentiment and the paucity of the New York art world’s response to the conflict. The urinal was signed ‘R. Mutt 1917’, and to a German eye ‘R. Mutt’
suggests
Armut
, meaning poverty or, in the context of the exhibition, intellectual poverty.

Baroness Elsa had been finding objects in the street and declaring them to be works of art since before Duchamp hit upon the idea of ‘readymades’. The earliest that we can date with any certainty was
Enduring Ornament
, a rusted metal ring just over four inches across, which she found on her way to her wedding to Baron Leopold on 19 November 1913. She may not have named or intellectualised the concept in the way that Duchamp did in 1915, but she did practise it before he did.

Not only did Elsa declare that found objects were her sculptures, she frequently gave them religious, spiritual or archetypal names. A piece of wood called
Cathedral
(1918) is one example. Another is a cast-iron plumber’s trap attached to a wooden box, which she called
God. God
was long assumed to be the work of an artist called Morton Livingston Schamberg, although it is now accepted that his role in the sculpture was limited to fixing the plumber’s trap to its wooden base. The connection between religion and toilets is a recurring theme in Elsa’s life. It dates back to her abusive father mocking her mother’s faith by comparing daily prayer to regular bowel movements.

Critics often praise the androgynous nature of
Fountain
, for the act of turning the hard, male object on its side gave it a labial appearance. Duchamp did explore androgyny in the early 1920s, when he used the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy and was photographed in drag by Man Ray. But androgyny is more pronounced in the baroness’s art than it is in Duchamp’s.

In 1923 or 1924, during a period when Baroness Elsa felt abandoned by her friends and colleagues, she painted a mournful picture called
Forgotten Like This Parapluie Am I By You – Faithless Bernice!
The picture included a leg and foot of someone walking out of the frame, representing all the people who had walked out of her life. It also depicts a urinal, overflowing and spoiling the books on the floor, which had Duchamp’s pipe balanced on the lip. The urinal is usually interpreted as a simple reference to Duchamp. But
if
Fountain
was Elsa’s work, then his pipe resting on its lip becomes more meaningful. The image becomes emblematic of their spoiled relationship.

Fountain
is base, crude, confrontational and funny. Those are not typical aspects of Duchamp’s work, but they summarise the Baroness and her art perfectly. Perhaps more than anything else, it is this that makes a strong case for
Fountain
being her work, which she sent to Duchamp from Philadelphia to enter in the exhibition, and which he took credit for over thirty years later when both she and the man who photographed the original were dead. To add weight to this claim, Duchamp was said to have bought the urinal himself from J.L. Mott Ironworks on Fifth Avenue, but later research has shown that this company did not make or sell that particular model of urinal.

This is not to suggest that Duchamp deliberately took credit for the female artist’s work in a similar manner to how the American painter Walter Keane took credit for his wife Margaret Keane’s painting of big-eyed waifs in the 1950s. Psychologists now have a better understanding of how the accuracy of our memories declines over time, which they can model with a diagram known as the Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting. In particular, the excitement that accompanies a good idea emerging in conversation with others can often lead to many people thinking that the idea was theirs. Forty years after Duchamp had submitted
Fountain
to the exhibition, it is entirely possible that he genuinely believed that it had been his idea.