54. Here and in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967) he also circulated some of the legends about her periodic arrests for stealing and indecent exposure, her cleptomania, and the fact that she owned animals that acted out exactly what Williams feared in relation to the Baroness herself (copulating on her bed in front of him; see the Autobiography, 168). Williams notes that he visited the Baroness in “the most unspeakably ?lthy tenement in the city. Romantically, mystically dirty, of grimy walls, dark, gaslit halls and narrow stairs, it smelt of black waterclosets, one to a ?oor, with low gas?ame always burning and torn newspapers trodden in the wet. Waves of stench thickened on each landing as one moved up” (“Sample Prose Piece,” 11). Biddle described her extremely sympathetically as “the most sensitive, critically understanding, and emotionally generous” of all the collectors he had known. Biddle, An American Artist’s Story, 141. He is writing here of her as an art collector, but much of his article is devoted to describing her collection of urban detritus.
Gammel points out the wordplay of the piece, as well as the connection between “swish” and homosexual male culture from that period
57. On Duchamp’s careful placement of his work in museums, see my chapter 3, “The Living Author-Function: Duchamp’s Authority,” in Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of p, 63–109.
These descriptions are cited from Irene Gammel’s “Lashing with Beauty: Baroness Elsa and the emergence of Assemblage Art in America,” in The Art of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 14
55. Anais Nin, “Ragtime,” in her Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1948), 59. 56. The Bicycle Wheel is dated 1913 (Duchamp “made” the ?rst version while still in Paris), and Duchamp discusses it as his ?rst readymade in Pierre Cabanne, ed., Dialogues
58. Cathedral is miscatalogued as four inches high in Gammel, Baroness Elsa, plate 10, n.p.; and in The Art of Baroness Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven (New York: Francis M.