Among the top lots at Bruun Rasmussen's auction of paintings and sculptures on March 8 in Copenhagen was a work by Danish painter Gerda Wegener from 1924, estimated at 400,000-500,000 DKK (approx. $59,000-74,000).
It depicts Wegener's muse and companion Lili Elbe, who, clad only in silk slippers, is seated on an upholstered rococo-style chair. The pose is reminiscent of The Great Odalisque by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres from 1814. However, instead of looking directly at the viewer like Ingres’ beauty, Lili Elbe is completely absorbed in contemplating a fan she is holding in her hand. Her face, made up in the style of the time, can only be seen in profile. Les grandes chaleurs (‘The great heat’) is noted as the title on the back of the stretcher and the closed shutters in front of an open window in the background are reminiscent of a warm summer evening, when one hopes to be able to lure cooling air into the interior.
However, there is much more to this sensual portrait than meets the eye.
Gerda Wegener, née Gottlieb (1886-1940), began studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1902. There, she met a fellow student, Einar Wegener, four years her senior, whom she married in 1904. However, Denmark soon became too constrictive for the couple, both in terms of art and the development of their private lives.
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After completing their art studies, Gerda and Einar travelled to Italy and France, finally settling in Paris in 1912, where the bisexual Gerda worked as a fashion illustrator for well-known magazines such as Vogue and La Vie Parisienne and was increasingly in demand as a portrait painter, allowing Einar to live as he naturally felt: as a woman. Gerda introduced her companion to her numerous acquaintances in the Parisian art scene as Lili Elbe, a cousin of her husband.
Lili put her own career as a landscape painter on hold and became Gerda's favorite model, appearing in many of her paintings of femmes fatales of the Art-Deco era. This is also the case with this work, with which Bruun Rasmussen set a new auction record for Gerda: 775,000 DKK (approx. $114,474).
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“The painting is so well-made that the viewer is immediately captured by the aesthetic qualities and beautiful details of the image," said Peter Beck, a specialist in the Department of Modern Art at Bruun Rasmussen, in a press release ahead of the auction. "The gender theme cannot be decoded immediately, and in this way the artist challenges the preconceived notions with which we read a motif. The understanding that the model we are looking at is a woman who was biologically born as a man does not take anything away from the work. It functions both with and without this knowledge – regardless of gender, preferences and orientation – which positions it among the best works by the artist."
In 1930, Lili was one of the first in the world to take the step towards gender reassignment. Since marriages between same-sex partners were forbidden, Lili and Gerda's marriage vows were annulled after the first operation, which was performed in Berlin, and the two women went their separate ways.
The further operations were carried out in the Dresden women's clinic, but after the fourth operation there were serious complications, from which Lili finally succumbed on September 12, 1931.
Gerda found out about Lili's death in Morocco, where she had been living for a short time after she had married the Italian diplomat and officer Fernando Porta, who was 11 years her junior. Only five years later, Gerda got divorced and returned to her homeland, where she came to realize that her painting style, which was so popular in the 1920s, was no longer fashionable. Wegener died of a heart attack on July 28, 1940.
The moving and courageous story of Gerda and Lili was more recently brought to the attention of a wide audience through the novel The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff, which was made into a successful film in 2015, starring Eddie Redmayne as Lili and Alicia Vikander as Gerda.
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