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. 26
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