Gerda Wegener’s Seductive Universe

The auction in week 15 is all about gender and love, more precisely the touching story about the Wegener couple, who by now are well-known public figures, not least due to Hollywood’s depiction of them in the film “The Danish Girl”. In rare cases life actually surpasses art and breaks all the rules along the way. The true story of Gerda and Einar/Lili is thus a story of great personal strength and courage, and their fate pre-empts many modern gender, marriage and sexual political issues.

An Ambiguous Gaze

Gerda Wegener is an engaging interpreter of the human body, and she especially enjoys accentuating female beauty. She is very conscious of the power in a gaze – be it masculine or feminine, and her models are capable of captivating the viewer across the picture frame.

Besides the actresses and artistic personalities of the time, she used her husband as a muse. In the many portraits of slender, long-legged female figures, he often poses in women's clothes and with different wigs. Among the lots up for auction, a highlight includes a nude study in red chalk, which illustrates the self-evident ambiguity of the transgendered Einar/Lili’s body during the transformation from man to woman.

Portrait Artist and Commercial Illustrator

The couple left Copenhagen in 1912 and settled in the more open-minded fashion metropolis of Paris. Besides her work as a portrait artist, Gerda Wegener made a living as a commercial illustrator. Her intriguing and often fairly decadent female types with red pouty lips and almond-shaped eyes were highly sought after among the leading women’s magazines of the day. Here in the present, we are also experiencing a great interest in these motifs at our auctions, and the selection of art introduces us to everything from medieval maidens and refined Rococo elegance to chic bathing nymphs wearing the latest within swimwear.

Under the Southern Sun

The marriage with Einar Wegener was annulled in 1930 when Lili Elbe was physically and legally declared a woman. After this Gerda Wegener lived in Morocco for a time with the Italian Major Fernando Porta. Here she among other subjects depicted scenes of the daily life in Casablanca as well as Moroccan women, whom she admired for their exotic charisma. From this period a pair of beautiful portraits of Porta deserves to be mentioned as well as a heated fight scene between two feisty gentlemen, which is also up for auction in week 15.

With this selection, which also includes a couple of studies from the Academy of Fine Arts, we get a very good sense of Gerda Wegener’s entire oeuvre. In short: Join the bidding!

View all the auction lots here