Gerda Wegener(1885-1940)
Gerda Wegener was a Danish artist and illustrator known for her fashion illustrations and later her paintings that pushed the boundaries of her time concerning gender and love. She studied art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen where she met her first husband Einar Wegener. They married in 1904 and he became her model as Lili Elbe. The couple eventually moved to Paris, where her husband/model felt free to appear in public sometimes as Einar Wegener and sometimes as Lili Elbe. Along with her art pushing boundaries, her work in the fashion industry took off as she illustrated for magazines such as Fantasio, Vogue, and La Vie Parisienne. In 1931 her husband Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe died of complications during the completion of his gender reassignment. Gerda Wegener remarried with the Italian Major Fernando Porta. She held her last exhibition in 1939, but by this time, her artwork was out of style as the simpler Functionalism had become more popular in the 1930s. Gerda Wegener passed away back in Denmark in 1940.