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’. 14
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