The German artist and writer Else von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), exiled in the New York avant-garde during the second half of the 1910s, elaborated a conception of art as a form of embodiment. She wrote an autobiography dedicated to her search for orgasm to introduce a collection of her poems, which proved impossible to publish. With her body, sometimes naked, she carried out critical actions in galleries and studios, as well as performances before they became known on the streets of New York. She also reinvented model work as an emancipated artistic practice; at the end of her life, she went so far as to open a school without teachers or students, of which she was the artist-model. Not having signed any object during her lifetime, she produced, above all, art without artwork or author. From her practices, now rediscovered, we can conceive a feminist critique of the male avant-garde that allows us to rethink Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, Fountain, recently attributed by some critics to Else von Freytag-Loringhoven.