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    Holy Skirts: A Novel of a Flamboyant Woman Who Risked All for Art
    Unavailable
    Holy Skirts: A Novel of a Flamboyant Woman Who Risked All for Art
    Unavailable
    Holy Skirts: A Novel of a Flamboyant Woman Who Risked All for Art
    Ebook542 pages7 hours

    Holy Skirts: A Novel of a Flamboyant Woman Who Risked All for Art

    By René Steinke

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    No one in 1917 New York had ever encountered a woman like the Bar-oness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven -- poet, artist, proto-punk rocker, sexual libertine, fashion avatar, and unrepentant troublemaker. When she wasn't stalking the streets of Greenwich Village wearing a brassiere made from tomato cans, she was enthusiastically declaiming her poems to sailors in beer halls or posing nude for Man Ray or Marcel Duchamp. In an era of brutal war, technological innovation, and cataclysmic change, the Baroness had resolved to create her own destiny -- taking the center of the Dadaist circle, breaking every bond of female propriety . . . and transforming herself into a living, breathing work of art.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 8, 2008
    ISBN9780061734519
    Unavailable
    Holy Skirts: A Novel of a Flamboyant Woman Who Risked All for Art
    Author

    René Steinke

    René Steinke is the author of The Fires. She is the editor in chief of The Literary Review and teaches creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

    Read more from René Steinke

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    Reviews for Holy Skirts

    3.5/5

    30 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An interesting work of ‘bio-fiction’, but rather frustrating. The author takes the life of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a woman who, at 19, travels to Berlin and takes to the stage in what is basically an artistic girly show. She takes numerous lovers, some for pay, eventually weds an artist who cannot consummate the marriage, leaves him for their friend, a poet who ends up discouraging her own poetry, they travel to New York where he leaves her, she marries a Baron who is a compulsive gambler who abandons her to go back to Germany and ends up dead. Left penniless, she takes to modeling for artists and falls in with the new Dadaist movement and occasionally selling poems. The censors of the day force the little artistic magazines out of the bookstores and out of the mail system. Her is basically one shoe falling after the other. Every time she starts looking up, a bird craps in her face so to speak. The woman was apparently a talented poet, and probably psychotic, though whether it’s from inherited syphilis or something else one can’t tell. She was a walking bit of performance art, dressing in found art jewelry and clothes altered with all sorts of materials. The book leaves her still in New York; I know she later moved to Paris and had further adventures. The author goes deeply into the Baroness’s mind & soul, making her a sympathetic, fascinating character. Other members of the Dada movement are brought to life; Man Ray uses her as a model and Marcel Duchamp is her unrequited love interest. Sadly, the book not only fills in the gaps missing from history to fill out the Baroness’s story-necessary in a story like this- but some things get changed around. Names of husbands and dates of marriages don’t follow the actual facts, and I wonder how much else was altered to make a better story. I would have thought the Baroness was an interesting enough person to not do this.
    • 4/5
      I love this book, and I am not much for nonfiction or biographies. It is an incredibly rich and fascinating read, and if even a quarter of Elsa's life was truly as it is portrayed in Holy Skirts, she lived the kind of life I an deeply in awe of. This is a book that leaves me with a fresh and joyous perspective on my own life each time I read it...highly, highly recommended!
    • 3/5
      An interesting work of ‘bio-fiction’, but rather frustrating. The author takes the life of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a woman who, at 19, travels to Berlin and takes to the stage in what is basically an artistic girly show. She takes numerous lovers, some for pay, eventually weds an artist who cannot consummate the marriage, leaves him for their friend, a poet who ends up discouraging her own poetry, they travel to New York where he leaves her, she marries a Baron who is a compulsive gambler who abandons her to go back to Germany and ends up dead. Left penniless, she takes to modeling for artists and falls in with the new Dadaist movement and occasionally selling poems. The censors of the day force the little artistic magazines out of the bookstores and out of the mail system. Her is basically one shoe falling after the other. Every time she starts looking up, a bird craps in her face so to speak. The woman was apparently a talented poet, and probably psychotic, though whether it’s from inherited syphilis or something else one can’t tell. She was a walking bit of performance art, dressing in found art jewelry and clothes altered with all sorts of materials. The book leaves her still in New York; I know she later moved to Paris and had further adventures. The author goes deeply into the Baroness’s mind & soul, making her a sympathetic, fascinating character. Other members of the Dada movement are brought to life; Man Ray uses her as a model and Marcel Duchamp is her unrequited love interest. Sadly, the book not only fills in the gaps missing from history to fill out the Baroness’s story-necessary in a story like this- but some things get changed around. Names of husbands and dates of marriages don’t follow the actual facts, and I wonder how much else was altered to make a better story. I would have thought the Baroness was an interesting enough person to not do this.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely love reading about Dada artists, and Elsa is one of the best!