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. 17
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.