Gerda Wegener

Biography

The first picture to bring Gerda Gottlieb noisy fame was one that was rejected. “Portrait of Ellen von Kohl” (1906) was taken neither by the Free Exhibition (Den frie Udstilling) nor by Charlottenborg, the Copenhagen academy’s exhibition hall; some saw in it an imitation of the Italian Renaissance, others argued over whether it showed a weak woman or an elegant beauty. The rejection set off a controversy in the newspaper Politiken from April to July 1907, known as the Peasant Painter Dispute. The artist herself, it is reported, took no part in it.

She was born on 15 March 1885 in Hammelev, near Grenå, into a conservative clergyman’s family. Of four children, only she survived. At about seven the family moved to Hobro. Her first lessons came from the painter Viggo Simesen, a teacher at the technical school in Randers, and in 1902 she went to Copenhagen and prepared for entry to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at a private school of drawing and painting. Sources differ on the year of her birth: by some accounts 1885, by others 1886; 1885 is adopted here.

In 1904, while still a student, she married a fellow student, the landscape painter Einar Wegener, and took his surname. Her work was first shown at Charlottenborg that year, but it attracted little notice. Recognition came after she left the academy: in 1907 and 1908 she won drawing competitions announced by Politiken. The subjects were “Copenhagen Women” and “The Figures of the Street”. She made advertising drawings and painted portraits, but in Denmark her manner seemed strange, partly because she often painted her female figures from her husband.

They travelled through Italy, England and France and in 1912 settled for good in Paris. By then Einar was appearing more and more often in women’s clothes, under the name Lili Elbe. Gerda painted her both as a woman and as a man, and most often showed refined heroines with almond-shaped eyes in fashionable dress. In Paris her own subjects also grew bolder: she drew women in seductive poses and erotic scenes, and such sheets appeared in books of limited circulation.

Commissions from magazines began at the same time. She worked for Vogue, La Vie Parisienne, Fantasio, Le Sourire, Le Rire and La Baïonnette. During the First World War she contributed to satirical papers: on the cover of La Baïonnette of 8 June 1916 a woman topples a statue of Venus from its pedestal under the title “Kamelotland”, and she drew Germans grotesquely, in a joking rather than cruel manner. Her work was shown at the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon des Humoristes.

After the war she moved from magazine graphics to book illustration. In 1919 she made twelve plates for Eric Allatini’s “Contes de mon Père le Jars”, then worked for the series “Le Livre du bibliophile” from the publisher Georges Briffaut: Casanova’s “Une Aventure d’amour à Venise” (1927), La Fontaine’s “Les Contes” (1928–1929), Gautier’s “Fortunio” (1934). The watercolours were transferred to colour etchings or coloured by stencil. There were also erotic cycles, among them “Les Délassements d’Éros”, made for Louis Perceau’s “Douze sonnets lascifs” (1925). She designed stained glass, mosaics and the façades of expensive shops. At the 1925 World’s Fair in Paris she won two gold medals and one bronze. Her model was often the Danish ballerina Ulla Poulsen.

In 1930 Lili Elbe underwent one of the first sex reassignment surgeries. Danish law did not recognise marriage between two women, and in October 1930 King Christian X annulled the marriage. Elbe died in 1931.

In the same year, 1931, Gerda married an Italian officer, Fernando Porta, and went with him to Morocco. They divorced in 1936. After that she lived in Italy and Paris, and in 1938 returned to Copenhagen. Her last exhibition took place in 1939; by then fashion had changed, and Functionalism had replaced the refinement of Art Deco. She died in Frederiksberg in the summer of 1940, soon after Germany’s invasion of Denmark. She is buried in Solbjerg Parkkirkegård.

Interest in her returned only after her death. In 2015–2016 the Arken Museum of Modern Art, near Copenhagen, held a large retrospective, and her work is in the collections of the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou.