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

By Rene Steinke

“Steinke shows palpable admiration and respect for her proto-feminist protagonist. This is an intelligent, spirited work that stimulates interest in the baroness’s work and times.”—Publishers Weekly

“Steinke has drawn a fully realized character whose Dadaist impulses, even though the filter of time and fiction, still startle.”—Chicago Tribune

No one in 1917 New York had ever encountered a woman like the Baroness 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. 

Paperback
384 pages
Harper Collins, 2005
5 x 8 inches
ISBN 9780060778019
Biography, Women Artists, Dada