Gerda Wegener (b. Hammelev 1886, d. Frederiksberg 1940)
Portrait of the Danish solo ballet dancer Ulla Poulsen. Study. Sign. Gerda Wegener 1927. Pencil, watercolour and gouache on paper laid on cardboard. Sheet size 72 × 53 cm.
In Ulla Poulsen, Gerda Wegener cultivates the perfect classical ideal of beauty for a woman. Poulsen is well known at the time for her pure, oval face and could have posed from the most beautiful Madonnas of the Italian Renaissance. She meets Wegener couple during a tour of Paris in 1927 and ever afterwards appeares in many of Wegener’s works, both when she is actually posing and when Gerda Wegener depicts her from memory.
The final version of the study, the painting “The Ballerina Ulla Poulsen in the Ballet Chopiniana”, depicts the solo dancer and actress Ulla Poulsen Skou dancing sylph in Chopiniana in 1927 in Paris. The work was exhibited at ARKEN, cat. no. 108, and also played a decisive role in the film “The Danish Girl”.
Provenance: Bruun Rasmussen, auktion 18, Copenhagen, 1951, cat. no. 248.
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Modern paintings, sculptures & prints, 20 September 2023