Two young ladies in the rose garden

Gerda Wegener revolutionised the Danish and French art scenes at the beginning of the 20th century. Steeped in Art Deco aesthetics, her paintings were considered radical for their engagement with gender, identity and sexuality. Reversing the traditional art history model of the male gaze (whilst also pioneering the bending of gender boundaries in the process), Wegener gazed upon women with a different eroticism and admiration for her female subjects, whom she depicted as powerful individuals: ‘I like to think of her as the Lady Gaga of the 1920s,’ Andrea Rygg Karberg (born 1970, Danish art historian and director of Nivaagaards Malerisamling, Denmark) once said (in an interview with Helen Russell, ‘Gerda Wegener: “The Lady Gaga of the 1920s” ‘, The Guardian, 28 September 2015), and continued:

Gerda was a pioneer who spent two decades as part of the Parisian art scene and revolutionised the way women are portrayed in art. Throughout history, paintings of beautiful women were done by men. Women were typically seen through the male gaze. But Gerda changed all that because she painted strong, beautiful women with admiration and identification – as conscious subjects rather than objects.

Living among artists, actors and dancers in Denmark’s capital, Gerda was, originally, inspired by the idea of performance and painted stylised, long-limbed, made-up figures who looked active rather than passive, as if challenging the viewer. Helen Russell writes:

Gerda became interested in gender as a performance – long before philosopher Judith Butler – and in 1904, when one of her models failed to turn up for a sitting, she asked her husband to pose instead. He agreed, adopting the alter ego of “Lili”, who soon became Gerda’s favourite model. Lili started to dominate Einar’s life, too, and he eventually identified as male-to-female transgender. When Gerda’s paintings and drawings began to sell, the couple moved to Paris in 1912 and lived as two women in an artistic community.

Wegener refused to be defined by what society wanted or expected. Just as Lili did. Both women created themselves from scratch and shared a happily married life together where Gerda provided for them both (especially after having produced illustrations for La Vie Parisienne, Le Rire and La Baïonnette, which made her hugely famous, whilst also considerably outearning her spouse). Rygg Karberg pointed out this fact in the interview with The Guardian: ‘What is more impressive is that she got ahead without trying to be more like the men to do it. She loved makeup and fashion, and didn’t see why embracing these traditionally feminine things should make her any less strong. She wanted it all.’

The other string to Gerda’s lyre was eroticism. Her playful nudes, including graphic illustrations for the memoirs of Casanova, were celebrated throughout liberal society and the avant-garde scene for their groundbreaking ploy of depicting female sexual pleasure, ‘which’, as pointed out by Rygg Karberg, ‘isn’t something you see too much of in art!’.

Throughout her career, Wegener consistently muddied the divisions between fine art and popular culture, creating a formal language that incorporated elements of Art Nouveau and Art Deco along with a particularly erotic sensibility. The consistency of her distinctive style allowed her to move freely between media while remaining true to her core interest: exploring the boundaries of gender and sexual identity. Though perhaps too risqué for the conservative tastes of Copenhagen, her paintings and illustrations attracted commentators and collectors in Paris. Her output included paintings, illustrations and advertisements featuring modern women as well as erotic illustrations of uninhibited lesbian pleasure and sexual encounters between ambiguously gendered individuals. The majority of Wegener’s works express a charged, seductive attitude. Yes, she painted the typical female types of the modern city – dancers, actresses, garçonnes and bohemians, often including Lili and their friends as models – but she reflected their desires by appropriating the ‘feminine’ codes of the time in order to subvert them. Wegener’s works often thus depict their female subjects as emancipated and erotically self-assured: not merely the objects of desire, but possessing desires of their own.

Even though Two young ladies in the rose garden doesn’t really belong to Wegener’s more sexually charged erotic works (focusing on gender fluidity, sexual identity or lesbian sex), it is still a very good example of Wegener’s sophisticated and elegant style. One can definitely sense the inspiration and influence from a variety of artist’s, belonging to a slightly older generation, like Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1918, Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement, noted for his paintings, murals and other objets d’art. Klimt’s primary subject was the female body and his works are marked by a frank eroticism), Koloman Moser (1868 – 1918, Austrian artist who exerted considerable influence on twentieth-century graphic art. He was one of the foremost artists of the Vienna Secession movement and a co-founder of Wiener Werkstätte) and, perhaps, most of all Aubrey Beardsley (1872 – 1898, English illustrator and author whose black ink drawings, influenced by Japanese woodcuts, depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic).

Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grotesque erotica, which were the main themes of his later work. He satirized Victorian values regarding sex, which at the time highly valued respectability, and men’s fear of female superiority, as the women’s movement made gains in economic rights and occupational and educational opportunities by the 1880s.

The oeuvre of Beardsley, a leading figure in the aesthetic movement, which also included James McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903, American painter and printmaker, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom, a leading proponent of the credo ‘art for art’s sake’) and Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900, Irish poet and playwright, best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts), whose Salome (1893) Beardsley famously illustrated, must surely have served as an important source of inspiration for Wegener’s pictorial style.

Signed: ‘Gerda Wegener’.

Provenance

Holger Ferlov A/S, Copenhagen.

Private collection.

Bukowskis, Stockholm, Sale 645, Important Winter Sale, 7 - 9 December 2022, lot 635.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above sale).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation