Gerda Wegener

Gerda Wegener was a Danish artist and fashion illustrator primarily working in Copenhagen and Paris. She was born in Hammelev, Denmark in 1886. As a teenager, she moved to Copenhagen and studied at Julie Meldahl's and Charlotte Sodes's drawing and painting school and after that until 1907 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She got married in 1904 with her fellow student Einar Wegener, later Lili Elbe, who was one of the first recipients of sex reassignment surgery. Their relationship was recently portrayed in the movie "The Danish Girl" from 2015.
During the years 1904-1909 Wegener exhibited at the autumn exhibition in Charlottenborg and she became renowned as an illustrator after winning a competition in the Danish daily newspaper Politiken.
Wegener successfully worked as a fashion illustrator for various magazines such as Vogue and La Vie Parisienne and became celebrated in the artistic circles in Paris. She illustrated the daily newspapers but also executed dedicated erotic art which she signed with a masquerade eye mask. This contributed to her not being as successful at home in Denmark as in Paris because her work was considered controversial and provocative. Wegener’s work reflects the ideals of the time and has clear elements of Art Deco. Her paintings frequently depict elegant and sensual women and she often used Elbe as a model. Wegener portrayed women's beauty with equal parts of empathy, understanding and fascination. Sensual, confident, modern and graceful women, who were not afraid to be just that.
The catalog number depicts three fashionable women and a dog under an umbrella, a typical motif for the artist.