The first paragraph of Brian Kim Stefans’ L.A. Review of Books article about Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, one of Dada’s leading ladies:

“The typical thumbnail portrait of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven usually goes like this. She was the Queen of New York Dada from 1913 to 1923, the first to wear clothes made of discarded clothes and rubbish (including a brassiere made of tin cans). She constructed assemblage-style art in the manner of Marcel Duchamp, and her scatological proclivities may have inspired his seminal Fountain. She was prone to spontaneous ‘performance,’ often in the nude, and was sexually aggressive in a decidedly ‘masculine’ way. She courted Duchamp actively and mocked him in poems (dubbing him ‘M’ars’ — my arse), and chased right to his front lawn in Rutherford, New Jersey the relatively prudish doctor-poet William Carlos Williams, who, legend has it, learned how to box in order to deck her in self-defense.”