Catalogue extract (UK): GERDA WEGENER

GERDA WEGENER

CONTENT

7 FOreword

Christian Gether 9

A fantastic story Nikolaj Pors

13 when a woman paints women

Andrea Rygg Karberg 41 the transwoman as model and co-creator

Resistance and Becoming in the Back-turning Lili Elbe

Tobias Raun 61 gerda wegener And France

A Passionate Love Affair

Frank Claustrat 81 BiograPhy

Amalie Grubb Martinussen 86 List of works

Lady in a Large Hat, 1909 (28)

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When a woman paints women Andrea Rygg Karberg

Gerda Wegener was a woman with an eye for the beauty of women. Her huge artistic output is densely populated with flirting girls, classic beauties, elegant ladies and strong women.

Many female types have been omitted: there are no old fishermen’s wives and no innocent peasant girls. Gerda Wegener’s pictorial world is reserved for the young, beautiful and fashion-conscious women of the city, flirting with men, with each other or with us – the viewers.

Beautiful women are certainly not a subject of which Gerda Wegener has a monopoly. She shares it with more or less all the major modernist artists of the time – who were almost by definition men. Think of her contemporary, Picasso, who almost sadistically deforms the nude models with his brush. Or Matisse, who with his pure line derives ideal womanly curves and forms from the model in front of him. But there is quite simply something else at work when we know that the artist too is a woman.

Gerda Wegener knows the standard codes for womanliness from the inside as well as the outside. Her women are different inasmuch as they appear not only as the objects of male desire. They are also subjects with a desire of their own and they are fully aware of how they arouse the viewer’s interest. Gerda Wegener reveals the finesses of woman’s body language when the model adopts the very posture that best emphasizes the womanly forms.

Gerda Wegener’s pictures draw sustenance from the spaces of the city, where large numbers of people move among one another without necessarily knowing one another; where

one is constantly seen by the gazes of strangers and can oneself openly observe all conceivable types crowding past. City life makes people act differently. Gerda Wegener’s models dress and act with great self-assurance. Her artistic universe is like a great theatre where everyone moves, ostensibly at random, with the utmost elegance and sends out strong signals of inciting beauty to make an impact in the crowd.

Whatever subject Gerda Wegener paints or draws, it is erotically charged. A seductive attitude is being struck, whether we are looking at a portrait, an advertisement, a satirical cartoon, a fashion drawing or a genre picture in the form of a large scenario with several figures.

The Jutlandic pastor’s daughter Gerda Wegener challenged the norms of her time. She made a point of dressing in ‘the latest thing’ and wore more make-up than was considered proper at the beginning of the last century.

She divided opinion in Copenhagen and was a great success in Paris. She took on a wealth of commissions and earned well. Oral tradition has it that she herself erotically embraced both women and men. Her own spouse, the landscape painter Einar Wegener, was transgender before the word was generally known and appears in many of Gerda Wegener’s most fascinating portraits in the figure of the woman Lili. Gerda Wegener gave Lili her full support in 1930 when Lili was one of the first in world history to undergo a series of operations in order to become a woman physically and legally. Gerda Wegener’s relationship with beautiful women as a motif is thus complex. She was able to depict them with equal 13

Two Cocottes in Hats (Lili and friend), 1920s (60)

1 Gudmund Hentze, “Dansk Foraar”, Politiken, 14.4.1907.

2 In the ensuing debate Hentze also complained that the Museum of Art, the present Statens Museum for Kunst, did not buy works by the Symbolists to the same extent as works from the opposite camp. This may partly explain why Gerda Wegener is on the whole absent from the collections of the Danish art museums.

3 Peter Hansen, “Foraar”, Politiken, 21.4.1907.

This page: Gerda Wegener at home, Rue de Lille, Paris, 1917.

Photo: Presumably Einar Wegener (private collection) Opposite page: Portrait of Ellen von Kohl, 1906 (6)

proportions of personal empathy, profound understanding and erotic desire. Gerda Wegener is a unique artist in her time and the aim of this article is, through selected examples of her works, not necessarily chronologically, to pin down her distinctiveness and give her the place in the history of art that she deserves.

Let us begin with the story of a portrait which unintentionally gave rise to one of the biggest disputes in Danish artistic life.

The ‘Peasant Painter Feud’ and Gerda Wegener’s place in art history In the whole body of survey works on the history of Danish art, Gerda Wegener has never so far occupied an important position. In the latest of the kind, Ny Dansk Kunsthistorie, she is mentioned, it is true, in Henrik Wivel’s volume V on Symbolism and Impressionism from 1994. But this was due solely to her involuntary role in a fierce debate in the newspaper Politiken in the summer of 1907, still known today as the ‘Peasant Painter Feud’.

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The debate started with an angry article by the painter Gudmund Hentze prompted by the rejection by the adjudicating committees at both Charlottenborg and Den frie Udstilling 1907 of Gerda Wegener’s Portrait of Ellen von Kohl from 1906. Hentze saw this as symptomatic of the taste of the time for Naturalism and Realism, as expressed for example in the depictions by the ‘Funen Painters’ of ordinary people in the countryside. These same Funen painters, this “firmly fused lump of peasant painters”,1 occupied several of the seats on the adjudicating committees. Hentze himself belonged to the circle of the Symbolists, who wanted a spiritually elite, stylized kind of painting – and he considered Gerda Wegener’s painting to be an expression of the same school of thought as his own.2 A succession of articles followed. The Funen painter Peter Hansen replied and acknowledged with pride that he was a Peasant Painter.3 The art critic Karl Madsen defended

Lili and Elna Tegner at the Carnival, n.d. Photographer unknown (Rudolph Tegner Museum)

4 Karl Madsen’s articles in Politiken: “Kunst og Natur”, 3.5.1907, “Kunst og Kritik”, 12.5.1907, “Kunsten og Emnerne”, 14.5.1907, “Bondefanger-Kritik”, 18.5.1907, “Et Farvel”, 22.5.1907, and others.

5 Agnes Slott-Møller, “Kunsten og Emnerne”, Politiken, 6.5.1907, Harald Slott-Møller, “Karl Madsen”, Politiken, 8.5.1907, “Madsens Polemik”, Politiken, 16.5.1907, “Afslutning”, Politiken, 19.5.1907, and others.

6 Hentze.

7 Karl Madsen: “Kunst og Natur”, Politiken, 3.5.1907.

8 Hentze.

the Naturalists, the Realists and the Impressionists, as the artists wanted to depict visible reality frankly and honestly.4 Agnes and Harald Slott-Møller were on the same side as Hentze and emphasized the world of the imagination, the emotions and thought as something that it was just as important to paint.5

Regarding Gerda Wegener and her work, one faction emphasized that this was “a skilled and serious work” and showed “unusual – indeed very unusual – formal skill and a great sense of beauty, supported by a splendid technique”6 – while the other faction stated: “Perhaps the adjudicators […] looked at the ability and considered it still weak”.7 Gerda Wegener never said anything herself, but had the work shown along with other works by her at Winkel and 16

Magnussen’s art dealership, where the great publicity made her exhibition a crowd-drawer.

Ever since, the work has been known from an old black-and-white photograph of this exhibition, but in 2015 it has been found for ARKEN’s exhibition and photographed in colour, and it is now being exhibited again for the first time since 1907. This provides a suitable occasion to note that there is nothing wrong with the technical execution. Ellen von Kohl sits like a Renaissance woman in a 16th-century portrait, viewed obliquely from the side with her face turned towards us. The dress, the background and the hair are in the darker colours, while the face, the skin in the neck opening of the dress and the beautiful hands are in lighter shades. The long, slender fingers are typical of Gerda Wegener’s visual idiom, elegant and mannered. To these we can add the strangest thing in the picture, the only thing that our eyes tell us may have seemed objectionable – the eyes and the woman’s gaze. The eyes are not clearly open.

Ellen von Kohl both sees and does not see.

She appears to be half in a trance, present not only in this world, but also in the one she sees with her mind’s eye. The model is not a worn-out old woman “with mittens and a back bent by work”,8 but a well-dressed, highly cultivated and sensitive being, so sensitive that for better or worse she seemed sensual and erotic to the viewers of the time.

If one looks her up in Weilbachs Kunstnerleksikon, there is a fuller body of material on Gerda Wegener which uses the same language about her style that appears again and

Woman in a Mask (sketch for Teindelys ad), 1918-25 (56)

again in Danish and French press coverage of her works: decadent and perverse elegance (in the 1952 edition), sophisticated, sensual, perfumed, rendering the “piquante, slightly tainted female type” (in the 1998 edition).

This gives a very good indication of how one of the two factions that arose in connection with the Peasant Painter feud viewed her Portrait of Ellen von Kohl as plagiarism of the art of the past (Italian Mannerism) or the contemporary English Pre-Raphaelites, and as sick and depraved, whereas Gerda Wegener’s supporters saw the work as insightful, beautiful in its lines, elegant and refined.

The portrait has several resemblances to a number of other portraits by Gerda Wegener in these early years in Copenhagen, which typically show women who were themselves active in various arts such as literature, dance or theatre. Many have a similar gaze, and they are all shown with the greatest possible beauty.

In 1908, the year after the raging of the Peasant Painter dispute, Gerda Wegener won a drawing competition in Politiken with the set task of portraying ‘the Copenhagen woman’ and again in 1909 one about ‘The figures of the street’.

After that she had a regular association with the newspaper in which the Peasant Painter dispute had unfolded, as a cartoonist.

Throughout her artistic life Gerda Wegener worked with both painting and drawing, as well as both finer art and popular mass culture. She alternated between participating in important art exhibitions, primarily in Paris,

where she and Lili lived for a couple of decades from 1912 on, and supplying enormous amounts of advertising, newspaper cartoons and book illustrations in the fields of fashion, satire, humour and the erotic.9 This artistic ‘double life’ made it difficult to place Gerda Wegener in the history of art. Her fame as a cartoonist remained an obstacle to proper recognition in ‘high culture’. It was inherent from the very definition of a modernist, avantgarde artist that such an artist was ahead of their time and opposed to its mass culture, not to mention the entertainment industry. In addition, mass culture was typically viewed as associated with women, whereas modernist art was seen as something masculine.10 Today we do not distinguish in the same way between high and low culture, and innumerable artistic movements in the last halfcentury have been based on the reciprocal inspiration and fertilization between the two areas. Nor do we any longer judge in terms of whether an artist is a man or woman. The time has come to see Gerda Wegener with the eyes of our own time and establish the proper overall picture of her art.

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9 Gerda Wegener’s famous illustrations for various examples of erotic literature are dealt with in Frank Claustrat’s article in the present catalogue, so they will not be discussed further in this article.

10 True, cartoonists and fashion artists were most frequently also men, as was the case with the prototype of ‘the timeless solitary modernist artist’; but the consumers of mass culture were typically seen as being women. And mass culture and the feminine were constantly linked, consciously and unconsciously, in the discussion of the two concepts in Gerda Wegener’s own time. In an article Andreas Huyssen has for example found a wealth of examples from the literature that unconsciously speak of mass culture as feminine: Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other”, in After the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Andreas Huyssen, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 44.

Carnival, Lily, Paris, 1928 (121)

Two Ladies in Large Hats, 1908-12 (12)

Masquerade As an advertising artist Gerda Wegener worked primarily with products for women – stockings, powders, or as in the case of Woman in a Mask, 1918-1925, a sketch for an advertisement for Teindelys, a luxurious, delightful face cream (p. 17). So delightful that according to the drawing it gave an elderly, wrinkled woman the face of her youth back.

It is a highly tempting thought to remove the false mask of the years and rediscover one’s old self – or the self one dreams of becoming.

No wonder the woman is smiling happily at us.

Gerda Wegener is in general preoccupied with masks and masquerading. In many more of her works the mask is something you put on to transform yourself into the person you wish to be. Disguise is a game with identity – and these transformations are a central feature of Gerda Wegener’s works. Both she and her spouse often dressed up and went to parties, first in Copenhagen and later in Paris, as Harlequin, Cupid or some other such figure.11 For Einar Wegener disguise was a way of becoming Lili, and Lili appears in Gerda’s pictures in beautiful dresses, make-up and a succession of wigs as a feminine ideal of beauty with long, slender lines in body and motion. To begin with, Gerda’s art was the refuge where Lili was permitted to become or be herself. In public space the masquerade was a condition of Lili’s potential to live out her desired gender identity, something for which very few people had much sympathy.12 Gerda and Lili themselves clearly thrive on living and appearing together as two women, as testified by many works.

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Einar Wegener, Capri, ca. 1929 (177)

11 In an interview during a visit to Denmark Einar Wegener says: “I love to go to the Carnival […] I remember once I was dressed up as a young girl. I must have kept up the illusion excellently – at any rate I found to my surprise that I was being wooed by nothing less than an English bishop!” (København, 8.3. 1924, 5).

12 . Testimony to this is the harsh statement about Gerda Wegener in the Danish sculptor Rudolph Tegner’s posthumously published memoirs: “Never have I met a person whose flattering nature concealed so many amiable lies which had intime become truths for herself.

Pretence had so much entered her blood that she was not without blame in the tragic fate that struck her husband by driving him to Continues on p. 21

Two women In the early years there are already works by Gerda Wegener that reflect very close relations between two women. For example a drawing which in its formal idiom resembles a woodcut, perhaps a Japanese one or one

by Edvard Munch, Two Ladies in Large Hats from 1908-1912 (p. 19). One woman is dressed in light colours, the other in dark colours. If Ellen von Kohl’s eyes were only half-open a few years before, these two women’s eyes are almost completely closed. Their bodies are close to melting together and in this case the trance is becoming total. The closing of the eyes corresponds to floating into self-oblivion, and the drawing is extremely sensual and must have seemed disturbingly erotic in its time.

As mentioned, Gerda Wegener also drew and painted several pictures of Gerda and Lili together. In 1922 she painted one of the finest examples on one of the couple’s many journeys 20

to Italy, including several to Capri – the double portrait On the Way to Anacapri (p. 22). Gerda and Lili are seen standing in profile in front of a magnificent view of a sea bay in moonlight surrounded by mountains and with the town below. Lili turns her head and looks directly at the viewer, holding her arm fondly and protectively around Gerda. Gerda looks forward dreamily with an apple in her hand. Both women wear make-up as well as jewellery and dresses in red shades. Lili is tallest and brownest; their rings are identical. The picture is painted in delicate colours and has an almost ethereal, dreamlike lightness as if the moment is timeless. Again there is a certain Renaissance atmosphere, especially in the strict profile of the self-portrait.

In another self-portrait from the same stay, Lady with Anemone, Gerda is still wearing the same dress, now with the red shawl over her which Lili wears in the first picture (p. 23).

Again she is shown in strict profile, this time with an anemone in her hand as an attribute

Einar Wegener, Gerda at Beaugency, 1924 (173)

which in a Renaissance work would have had a given symbolic value.

It is as if this particular borrowing of the formal language of a bygone time elevates the scenario beyond time and place and gives it the character of the eternal. The works take on a special meaning, showing both Gerda’s and the couple’s love of Italy, art, beauty and each other .

Incidentally Einar Wegener too painted a picture, Capri from ca. 1929, where we can see Gerda and Lili in the distance with their dog on Capri. This is one of the few cases where Einar has painted Lili. The picture is in bright pastel colours, and the two women appear almost to be giddy girlfriends who turn their bodies so that hips and bosoms, apparently at random, are emphasized in a typically flirting attitude.

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12 Continued risky operations to transform himself into a coquettish girl.” (Rudolph Tegner, Mod lyset – arbejder, oplevelser og erindringer, Copenhagen: Palle Fogtdal, 1991, 239).

13 Lili Elbe, Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, ed. Ernst Harthern, London: Jarrold Publisher’s, 1933.

Cupid and Psyche, before 1927 (107)

In Gerda Wegener’s Two Cocottes in Hats, 1920s, it is presumably Lili in the light-coloured wig with flowers and feathers in her hat, who looks at us with seductive bedroom eyes (p.

12). In her hand she holds the symbol of the female sex, a rose whose scent permeates the atmosphere of the picture and probably also helps to attract the other woman’s attention. The two stand close to each other and are further united by the composition’s close cropping of the subject.

Many times, too, Gerda Wegener depicted her spouse as a man (p. 76), and in general her pictures of men are often of a particularly androgynous character. They tend to be very long-limbed and graceful and often have strongly contoured eyes and the like.

In a mythological subject like Cupid and Psyche (before 1927), the profile of the kneeling, light-coloured woman looks like Gerda’s own, with the cute nose tip, and she looks devotedly at precisely such a sexually rather ambivalent man, now in a winged version.

Whatever Gerda Wegener paints is always feminized in her universe.

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Beaugency Gerda and Lili holidayed for many summers in the French town of Beaugency with a large group of other artists. These stays, like much else, are described in Man Into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, a so-called fictionalized autobiography of Lili, edited and completed by several other people. In this book the town is called Balgencie.13 Gerda and Einar Wegener both painted many works from this town, where Lili also frequently appears as a sister to Einar. From the summer of 1927 comes the large, remarkable work A Summer Day, where Gerda Wegener, presumably only this once, has painted both Einar and Lili in the same picture (pp. 10-11).

Einar stands in the background with his palette, painting a picture that we cannot see. In the forefront lies Lili, nude and with her back to us, again with a scented rose. A publisher’s wife lies with a book beside her, and on the other side sits Rudolph Tegner’s wife, Elna Tegner, with an accordion. Sunbeams send a fan-shaped pattern down through the trees, just as rays of light radiate in similar paths

from the faceted rings of Lili and the woman beside her. These rays, which order the composition in a geometrical pattern, make the work a good example of Gerda Wegener’s Art Deco, a style characterized by just such geometrical and decorative elements as a patterning principle.

This odd mixture of a group portrait and an allegory makes clear how Gerda’s spouse is split into two very different people, a man and a woman, a painter and a muse. And Einar has also painted Gerda – in a portrait where she sits

innocently and girlishly with crossed legs and a straw hat fastened with a bow (p. 21). Einar was not normally a portrait painter, he mainly painted many landscapes and street scenes from Beaugency in a modernist colour scheme (p. 77).

In Gerda Wegener’s On the Banks of the Loire, 1926, we see innumerable Bohemians from the artists’ colony on a summer’s day in swimsuits far from the city of Paris. We recognize Gerda in the same straw hat and dress as in Einar’s portrait of her, and in the background, crosslegged, sits Lili in the same posture as in a 27

On the Banks of the Loire (the artists’ colony at Beaugency), Paris, 1926 (106)

This page: Olympia, 1931-1936 (143) Opposite page, left: Young Man, Bare Chested, 1938 (152) Opposite page, right: Adrienne Sipska, Paris, 1925 (99)

of the city without being accosted and misunderstood. The definition of the Impressionists as ‘the painters of modern life’, for example, is therefore problematic in the case of an artist like Berthe Morisot.14 Gerda Wegener on the other hand romped freely through city life, whether this was well received or not. At any rate it became normal – not least during the First World War, when the French men were at the front, and the women had to take over many of the men’s former tasks. The women grew stronger, and many a soldier in the trenches must have fervently wished he was a woman rather than assuming the enforced, impossible masculine heroic role. After World War I Europe was traumatized, and the survivors lived wilder lives than before – quite simply so they could feel alive. The 1920s were thus typified by festivities and amusements and by gender roles in transition. Everything was permitted, much more than before.

14 Griselda Pollock argued in Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, Routledge, 2003, 76, that there was a double exclusion of the female artists in the 19th century. In the first place the women were in general excluded from moving freely in public space without losing their dignity, and secondly the female artists were excluded from the canon of art history, because it was the works that showed urban life, the cafés, the brothels and the night clubs that contained the essence of the modern – and the painter of modern life therefore had to be a man.

well known painting of her whose present whereabouts is unknown. The same clothes, jewellery, or other props recur often in different pictures, as do the same figures, and motifs from drawings are re-used in paintings, which are in turn used in magazine illustrations. In Gerda Wegener’s huge output and consumption of pictures we find a wealth of cross-references, and studies, once done, are used again and again for new purposes, as is often the case with artists.

The female gender role in transition For female artists just a generation before Gerda Wegener’s it was not possible at all for a woman to move around freely in the spaces 28

Gerda Wegener was a curious observer in this whole period as she participated in life in the metropolis of Paris. In her innumerable pictures of women she accordingly revealed very different female types, just as the pictures of Lili send out a wide variety of signals. Lili who is often sweet and innocent looks rather like a provocative sinner in Queen of Hearts from 1928 (p. 6). Here she is playing cards, which in the history of art has always been symbolic of a life of sin, and in the sixteenth century was regarded as ungodly. An ashtray, a bottle and a glass are on the table, and Lili has a cigarette in her mouth. She has her feet up on two different chairs and is wearing snakeskin shoes

and a red dress that has slipped slightly down along her legs, revealing the petticoat. The room in which Lili sits is more well-defined than in most other Lili portraits and is full of realistic details. The picture is no longer detached from time and place or ethereal.

The hands are not long and graceful. It is the real Lili of flesh and blood that we see here, an emancipated and erotically self-assured woman. And so it is naturally the Queen of Hearts that she holds in her hand.

Gerda Wegener often paraphrased well known art-historical works or styles. In the period 1931-1936, for example, she did a humorous version in watercolours of Manet’s famous work Olympia from 1863, which shocked Paris when it was exhibited for the first time in 1865.15 In Manet’s picture a nude

woman lies on a bed with a black cat at the foot, and a black servant girl brings her a bouquet of flowers; she is only almost nude, for she is wearing slippers, which reveals that she is no mythological figure, but belongs to Manet’s own time. This makes her obvious nakedness unsettling, since she can only be a prostitute. The work was thus created solely for the gaze of a male viewer, since no decent woman would be allowed to see such a sight.16 Olympia looks the viewer firmly in the eye without a smile, accepting her destiny, and as such the picture evokes a kind of sense of shame in the viewer. Gerda Wegener’s version is totally devoid of social indignation. The black servant girl has become a caricature, typical of the age, of a ‘negro boy’ holding the large white cat. The sumptuous textiles of the bed, the woman’s hair and the 29

15 Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

16 Timothy J. Clark describes in The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Thames and Hudson, 1977, how the women in Edouard Manet’s paintings Olympia and A Bar at the Folies-Bergére are selling themselves, and how the pictures therefore presuppose a male viewer, since they are painted from the customer’s point of view. Griselda Pollock takes his argument a step further in a feminist direction in Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art.

17 Victor Margueritte, La garçonne, Paris: E. Flammarion, 1922.

18 Second verse by Ludvig Brandstrup of Alfred Kjærulf ’s text for the revue song La garçonne (mel.

Vincent Scotto), sung by Liva Weel in the Scala Revue of 1923.

cat’s fur are shown with such fulsome tactility that one almost feels the soft, sensual surfaces.

Olympia is enjoying herself greatly and does not look directly at us. She is rendered by a woman artist who rejoices in the sight. Correspondingly the viewer could well be a woman with a sense of other women’s beauty.

It was in the 1920s that short-haired women first became fashionable – the so-called provocative garçonnes, and Gerda Wegener of course painted them too. The term comes from Victor Margueritte’s novel La garçonne (English title The Bachelor Girl) from 1922, which caused a furore.17 The boyish girl who is the title character broke so much with the habitual thinking of the time that the novel was regarded as harmful to society. Garçonnes became a fad in the whole of the western world, as they smoked and danced the Charleston in flapper dresses – or even worse, trousers – to the sound of the so-called ‘negro music’ of the time. In Denmark they had to listen to harsh words in a revue song performed by the cabaret singer Liva Weel: “Why does she cut that poor hair of hers?

Why does she make up those poor cheeks?

Has she forgotten that her young spring will all too quickly fade?

This figure she puts on is nothing but a whim of fashion, but when she’s sad and grey, then she’ll have to pay.

La Garçonne, La Garçonne neither a woman nor a man, a scarecrow heading for oblivion, tied without mercy in the bonds of time.

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Born to pleasure, she must weep, a woman apart, unnatural, a strange figure, just a sad caricature – La Garçonne”.18 Elna Tegner is depicted in Gerda Wegener’s above-mentioned A Summer Day as a typical garçonne (pp. 10-11). Another unnamed garçonne is driving a car in the marvellous Art Deco work Girl and Pug in an Automobile, 1927. Once more the pictorial elements are arranged in geometrical forms: the trees are fan-like, the upper body of the woman is inscribed in a circular shape like that of the car wheel and the steering wheel, and the car has an unusually full-bodied form. The picture is a tribute to the new, modern age in which engine power is overtaking the horsepower in the background, and we find an independent woman behind the wheel accompanied by her dog rather than a man.

The mixture of sources of inspiration and materials is yet another characteristic of Art Deco – and in the portrait of the short-haired, long-necked Adrienne Sipska from 1925 Gerda Wegener has painted the hair with gold (p. 29, right). The young man she paints with a bare chest in 1938, on the other hand, has soft locks on his brow and marked, almost feminine facial features (p.

29, left). Men and women cross over imperceptibly in many of Gerda Wegener’s pictures as the boundaries between the normal gender roles are gradually erased more and more.

In a long succession of portraits of the most famous Danish solo ballerina of the time, Ulla

Girl and Pug in an Automobile (sketch for front page illustration in Vore Damer, 1927), ca. 1927 (117)

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This page: Moroccan Newlyweds (Aicha and Djialli), 19311934 (136) Opposite page: At the Mirror, 1931-1936 (142)

19 Nikolaj Pors, “I Gerda Wegeners fodspor” in the exhibition catalogue Gerda Wegener at Øregaard, Øregaard Museum, 1999, 27.

20 In the text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3, Autumn 1975, 6-18, Laura Mulvey describes how the classic Hollywood film is built up around an active masculine gaze and a passive feminine one: “The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed […]” This structure does not only apply in the Hollywood film, it has been dominant in large parts of visual culture.

Continues on p. 34

Poulsen, Gerda Wegener cultivated the perfect classical ideal of beauty for a woman.

Ulla Poulsen was well known for her pure, oval face and could have posed for the most beautiful Madonnas of the Italian Renaissance. She met the Wegeners during a tour to Paris in 1927 and ever afterwards appeared in many of Gerda Wegener’s works, both when she had posed and when Gerda Wegener depicted her from memory.19 In the best known and most monumental portrait of Ulla Poulsen the ballerina takes her bow after a performance of the ballet Chopiniana (pp. 36-37). A typical Gerda Wegener bouquet lies on the edge of the stage, and in Toulouse-Lautrec fashion a little piece of a bass or cello projects from the orchestral pit. Again the light beams shine down over the main figure in a fan pattern, and the ballet skirt spreads around her in a circle. The ballerina is set up as the most beautiful imaginable object for the viewer’s gaze, as is the point of ballet and theatre, for the delectation of everyone. The awareness that someone is looking is so to speak a condition of all theatre, and for that matter of the existence 32

of the phenomenon of fashion – another of Gerda Wegener’s favourite fields.

Lili died in 1931 as a result of the last of the above-mentioned operations, and the same year Gerda Wegener married the Italian Fernando Porta and settled down with him in Morocco until the couple divorced in 1936.

In the course of these years she depicted the Moroccan women with admiration for their exotic aura, colours and beauty. They are far from the Parisian garçonnes and are part of a more traditional gender role pattern. In Moroccan Newlyweds (1931-1936) it is the man who is smoking a cigarette, while the beautiful young woman sits with a flower shedding its petals. We have no eye contact with either of the two, but unobserved we can see how the woman looks obliquely ahead as if sunk in her own thoughts, whereas the man looks directly at her in silent admiration and thus possesses her with his gaze.20 In the mirror In Gerda Wegener’s At the Mirror, 1931-1936, the directions of the gazes are more complicated. A woman sits in front of the mirror and

20 Continued This article attempts among other things to investigate how Gerda Wegener’s art can be placed in relation to the classic understanding of the heteronormative structure of the gaze. In many of Gerda Wegener’s other works she challenges, more than in Oriental couple, this understanding of the act of looking as gender-determined, as Laura Mulvey presents it.

forms a beautiful S-shape with the low-cut back and neck of her dress and the turning of her head. She looks herself deep in the eyes.

We see her both from the back in front of the mirror and her face from the front in the mirror. In the mirror we also see an elegantly dressed man, presumably standing more or less where we are conceived as standing, looking at the woman’s beautiful neck with a slightly worried expression. For she is not looking at him, although she is well aware that he is there. Nor is it certain that it is only for him that she is putting on make-up. He is like a perplexed voyeur who has been discovered.

He seems a little superfluous as a moment of profound solidarity arises between the woman and her ‘sister’ in the mirror.

Gerda Wegener does not only depict empty decorative dolls, but also strong personalities who stage themselves as beautiful women and exercise much of the power at play in their relations with other people. ‘Girl Power’, quite simply.

Portrait of Anna Larssen, 1908 (8)

As mentioned, a viewer is always latently present in Gerda Wegener’s works, as the figures are so aware of the signals they are sending out. The women display themselves with a clear exhibitionistic tendency which is taken to extremes in the pictures of theatre, masquerade and disguise. At the same time the very act of looking at themselves in the mirror is associated with narcissism. This beautiful woman in front of the mirror and in the mirror exhibits and enjoys herself at one and the same time. As always the work is charged with 34

an intense eroticism. This woman is attracted by herself and is also ready to attract others.

And these others could be of either sex depending on who is looking at the picture.

Renewed currency Gerda Wegener was famous in her time – as a cartoonist and illustrator as well as a portrait painter – and notorious for her pictures of her spouse as Lili and for her unorthodox, dramatic life. The French State purchased three of her works for the Louvre which are today at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. No Danish museum acquired works

by Gerda Wegener while she was alive, and only grudgingly have a few appeared later in The Theatre Museum at the Court Theatre, The Rudolph Tegner Museum, The National Museum of Denmark, Designmuseum Danmark and The Royal Library (The Museum of Danish Cartoon Art). If Gerda Wegener is missing from the art museums and in the art-history literature, her œuvre has on the other hand survived massively in the form of beloved treasures among private Danish and foreign collectors. These collectors have always known Gerda Wegener’s value.

Gerda Wegener was part of the artistic life of her time, and drew her inspiration from many sources: the older history of art, including the Renaissance, Mannerism and French Rococo, English artists like Aubrey Beardsley, and everything that went on around her in art and the new modern existence. In the 1930s, in Gerda Wegener’s last decade, Functionalism became the predominant style, and with it

21 The Danish architect and prominent cultural critic Poul Henningsen could not abide Gerda Wegener’s style. He called her drawings “Gerda Wegener’s sleazy regiment”; cf. Mona Jensen in the catalogue of the Gerda Wegener exhibition at the Women’s Museum in Denmark, Aarhus, 1993, 12.

22 . Of great importance to a rehabilitation of Gerda Wegener’s art were the exhibition at the Women’s Museum in Aarhus in 1993 curated by the art historian Mona Jensen, and the exhibition at the Øregaard Museum in 1999-2000 organized by Lise Svanholm.

In recent years important research articles have been published on Lili’s memoirs and the contemporary reception of her gendermodifying operations, but these articles are not about Gerda Wegener’s art.

This page: The Ballerina Ulla Poulsen in the Ballet Chopiniana, Paris, 1927 (108) Next page: Five magazines with front cover illustrations by Gerda Wegener

came a profound contempt for superfluous and refined decoration as well as for the ‘decadent’, in favour of the pure, the simple and the ‘healthy’.21 This shift in the taste of the age was fatal to Gerda Wegener’s recognition for the next half-century. Not until the last couple of decades has a growing professional interest arisen in her art, and at a time when ‘transgender studies’ are a strong new area within the humanities, the ‘story of Lili’ is no longer a barrier to seeing Gerda Wegener’s pictures without any urge to sensationalize.22 Gerda Wegener was a strong woman who broke through the boundaries set for her sex and for gender identity in general, as well as for the field of art with which she worked. As we have seen, she did not distinguish between high and low culture, and her art, despite her love of beautiful lines and the delectably curving surface, is far more than superficial decoration. Gerda Wegener grapples with a number of big subjects on the canvas, with people’s innermost reflections on who they are and why, and how they act and appear.

She not only creates pictures of women and people in general, she also investigates the self-image of human beings and the underlying erotic structures in their relations with one another. And she does all this with a distinct, irresistible twinkle in her eye.

At a time when many women were struggling to achieve the same rights as men, and when many tried to copy them as garçonnes, Gerda’s beloved Lili just wanted to be a woman through and through. Gerda Wegener understood this. She observed all the different female types of the time, depicted, accommodated and understood. Her fundamental tolerance can still serve as an inspiration at a time when the binary view of gender itself is being debated. As such, Gerda Wegener is an important artist and more relevant and topical than ever before. • Andrea Rygg Karberg holds an M.Phil in Art History and is a curator at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art. 36

Gerda Wegener (1885-1940) is a unique figure in Danish art. She divided opinion in Copenhagen and enjoyed great success in Paris.

Coquettish girls, elegant ladies and sensual women populate her pictures. As a woman artist she portrays the beauty of women with equal portions of empathy, understanding and fascination. She married the landscape painter Einar Wegener, known today as the trans woman Lili Elbe. Lili became Gerda Wegener’s favourite model, and art became the space of freedom where Lili could develop her female identity. This catalogue focuses on an artistic career that breaks with the traditional gender relations of painter, muse and model.

Buy the catalogue at ARKEN or order it at reception@arken.dk

Contributions by: Nikolaj Pors Andrea Rygg Karberg Tobias Raun Frank Claustrat Amalie Grubb Martinussen

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