Wegener watercolor

GERDA WEGENER        Haderslev, Denmark 1886 – 1940 Frederiksberg, Denmark

A Fashionable Couple seated at table in a café.

Watercolor over graphite.  Signed by the artist upper left; c. 1925. In very fine condition; the colors very fresh. 

Gerda Wegener was a promising young art student at the Royal Danish Academy when she met Einar Wegener and married him in 1904. While direct evidence is unclear, her parents – her father, Emil Gottlieb was a conservative Lutheran minister – may have disapproved of  her early activity as an artist.   The couple found themselves swept up in the fashionable, sexually adventurous life of the beau monde, and then in Paris from 1912 continued a life of fashionable entertainment while Gerda worked as a painter and fashion illustrator.

She became a close friend of Guillaume Apollonaire and apparently, as well with Valentine de Saint-Point, a dancer and author of La Manifeste de la Femme Futuriste in 1912, or The Manifesto of Lust. She also contributed drawings to the theatrical revue Fantasio. Her husband began at this time to live as a woman who called herself Lili Elbe. Lili  became one of Gerda’s favorite subjects, and Gerda often introduced Wegener as her female cousin. Their rather tempestuous life was recently the subject of a film, The Danish Girl (2015).

By the time represented in our watercolor, circa 1925, Wegener had immersed herself in fashionable café society of Paris, but not without a certain acerbic wit. Our couple, elegantly but rather self-consciously dressed, indeed costumed, in high à point clothing, are depicted with fine details. They seem less interested in each other than in creating an impression of wealth and elegance as they participate in a life of brittle ostentation.

570 x 489 mm    22 7/16 x 19 ¼ inches

La Manifeste was a remarkable and full throttle advocacy of female lust as a life force, ideally freed from all moral considerations.