Talk
of the town in 1920, Gerda Wegener strolled hand-in-hand on the streets of
Paris with her partner Lili. Gerda was a world-famous artist at this point,
known for her many Salon exhibits and her two gold medals from the 1925 Paris
World’s Fair, but when she had first married fellow painter Einar Wegener in Copenhagen
in 1904, she had no idea what was in store for the pair.
Gerda’s
early work consisted of a lot of portraiture. She painted mostly women and
their beautiful clothes. She clearly had an eye for Parisian fashion…and a love
for women.
It was here in Paris that Gerda’s work became more risqué. She painted intimate photos of women in suggestive positions and sometimes even nude. Her favorite model, though? Lili.
Upon arriving in Paris, Einar Wegener began to transition. She dressed as a woman, introduced herself as Lili, and pretended to be Gerda’s sister-in-law. The two lived happily as a lesbian couple, with Gerda making the focus of her work supporting Lili’s transition. Patrons flocked to buy portraits of the beautiful muse of Gerda, and Lili’s face became a frequent sight at Salons around France. Their love is immortalized in the dozens of works Gerda made throughout Lili’s transition and is the topic of the Oscar-winning movie The Danish Girl.
The Creative Spark discusses the formation of gender and gender roles in early human history, then goes on to explore sexuality. Fuentes argues that “humans don’t just have sex; they have sexuality” (184). It is an innate part of being human to want and enjoy sex, not just for procreation but also for fun. While some people in the American conservative sphere would like you to believe that "gay" and "transgender" are new creations, the lives and works of those like Gerda Wegener and Lili prove human gender and sexuality have always been fluid.
Gerda’s paintings illustrate the deep love and understanding she had of Lili. She always had an interest in painting women, but it was when she fell in love with a woman that her work took on a new, more interesting, and more intimate form. Check out more of Gerda's works here: https://www.wikiart.org/en/gerda-wegener/all-works#!#filterName:all-paintings-chronologically,resultType:masonry
I loved this post and it was so cool to hear about what inspired the film The Danish Girl! Any time I hear about sapphic artists, it's wither someone very current or it's someone like Sappho from a *very* long time ago, so it's interesting to learn about Sapphic art in this time period.
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