Her love story with her spouse and muse, now a woman, inspired the film The Danish Girl, which was released in 2016. Gerda Wegener, a social portrait painter, exhibited her various abilities in Paris during the Roaring Twenties. Since the beginning of March, devoted to the struggle for women's rights, Beaux Arts has been recognizing 30 female creators you've probably never heard of... But you should be aware of them.
Love is frequently the strongest link in art.
In the case of Gerda Wegener, it was so powerful and fresh for their time, the interwar period, that it inspired a novel before becoming a biopic, The Danish Girl, which was released in 2016.
Because Gerda's relationship with her husband, Einar Wegener (aka Lili Elbe), was, to say the least, unconventional! Gerda Gottlieb was born in 1886 to a rich family that had immigrated to Denmark. She studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1902. During this time, she met her true love, Einar Wegener, a fellow landscape painter, whom she married in 1904.
A few years after their love at first sight, the couple relocated permanently in Paris in 1912.
Life was less puritanical than in Denmark, and the two lovers, thirsting for freedom, hung around with artists and poets like Guillaume Apollinaire.
Gerda Wegener worked as an illustrator for satirical newspapers and fashion magazines, displaying her female portraits at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, where she gained popularity.
Gerda requests that her husband dress up in a frock, stockings, and high heels to replace a missing model. Electroshock. Einar learns his feminine identity.
Muse of his Gerda, he dares to go out disguised as a lady with her permission. Einar Wegener gradually becomes Lili Elbe. This identity shift is accompanied by many sexual reassignment surgeries, a first in history. Still experimental, the procedure is done in Germany in 1930.
The transsexual woman gets a passport and becomes a celebrity in the press.
If Gerda and Lili's love remains strong, their marriage is canceled. Their paths split. Lili Elbe begins a new chapter in her life with gallery owner Claude Lejeune, with whom she hopes to have children. However, the uterine transplant fails, and Lili dies as a result of the procedure in 1931. Gerda will remarry to an Italian lieutenant eleven years her younger.
Morocco's union gets cut short. Gerda, devastated by her marriage, returns to dwell in the fields of her youth.
On July 28, 1940, following a final half-hearted performance, she died of a heart attack at the age of 54.
Her work.
Gerda Wegener, a multi-talented artist, began her career with hilarious drawings in periodicals like La Vie parisienne, Fantasio, and Le Rire. Her fashion illustrations were very popular in the newspapers during the 1910s and 1920s, including Vogue. In Paris, she also designed stained glass windows, mosaics, and luxury brand décor. Between the two wars, she fulfilled several publisher commissions, notably for sensual works like as Aretino's work or Louis Perceau's Twelve Lascivious Sonnets collection.
However, her images of ladies with doe eyes, as sensuous as they were worldly, over an Art Deco background became her signature, ensuring her lifestyle.
Strong ladies also challenged the spectator. For a long time, no one knew that the curvy beauty was hiding her spouse! Her accomplishments in the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, where she received two gold medals and a bronze medal, were the pinnacle of her career.
Seen in France
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