She was considered one of the most controversial and radical women artists of the era. Her relationship with her father was temperamentalβshe emphasized how controlling he was in the family, as well as how cruel, yet big-hearted he was.
She worked as an actress and vaudeville performer while having numerous affairs with artists in Berlin, Munich and Italy. She studied art in Dachau , near Munich. They had an "open relationship", and in she became romantically involved with a friend of Endell, the minor poet and translator Felix Paul Greve who later went by the name Frederick Philip Grove. After the trio travelled together to Palermo, Sicily in late January , the Endells' marriage disintegrated. By , Greve was in deep financial trouble.
Greve suddenly deserted her in and went west to a bonanza farm near Fargo, North Dakota, and to Manitoba in There are no records of a divorce from Greve. At that time Elsa began to make sculptures out of found and discarded objects. The Baroness was given a platform for her poetry in The Little Review , where, starting in , her work was featured alongside chapters of James Joyce 's Ulysses.
Jane Heap considered the Baroness "the first American dada. Most of her poems remained unpublished until the publications of Body Sweats. Her personal papers were preserved after her death by her editor, literary agent, artistic collaborator, and lover Djuna Barnes.
The University of Maryland's special collections has an extensive digital archive of her manuscripts. In New York, the Baroness also worked on assemblage , sculptures and paintings, creating art out of the rubbish she collected from the streets.
