A few pieces by the underrated sapphic icon of the 1920s & 30s, Gerda Wegener
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Wegener attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1900s, where she met Lili Elbe, her soon-to-be spouse. Nearly a decade into their marriage, Elbe began to model for Wegener’s portraits and discovered she felt more comfortable wearing female-aligned clothing and identifying as a woman. She became one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery, however she died in 1931 due to complications of a womb transplant. Shortly before Elbe’s death, the couple had to annul their marriage as Danish law prohibited any marriage between two women.
In the early years of Elbe’s transition, the couple fled to Paris where Wegener flourished as an out lesbian. She began to paint lesbian erotica along with her portraits of Elbe, which made their way into art exhibitions causing backlash from conservative critics. However, Wegener appreciated the attention, and soon became a well-known artist in both France and Denmark.
Although they were unmarried and Elbe had found love with Claude Lejeune, a French art dealer, Wegener sent flowers to Elbe’s home consistently. When Elbe died from health complications in 1931, Wegener was broken— she began to drink and lost almost all motivation for her work, settling into a marriage with an Italian officer and making a living selling hand-made postcards. They divorced in 1936. Wegener died four years later, shorter after Nazi Germany had invaded the country.