In the early 1900s, Danish artist Gerda Wegener came up with a creative solution after her model was running late: She had her husband, landscape painter Einar Wegener, pose for her in stockings and heels instead. That brief experience stirred something inside of Einar, who, from then on, would start dressing up as a woman named Lili Elbe. In 1930, Lili became one of the first people to embark on sexual reassignment surgery.
The story of Lili and Gerda unfolds in Tom Hooper’s new biopic, The Danish Girl, which stars Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander. The film is based on David Ebershoff’s novel of the same name, which drew inspiration from Lili’s original journals that she kept while she was transitioning from a man to a woman. Hooper and production designer Eve Stewart decided early on that the best way to tell the story of these two avant-garde artists was through their own work, particularly Gerda’s portraits of Lili. “The paintings were the way in,” Stewart said by phone. “Because they not only illustrated Lili’s journey, but they also illustrated their lives in a way.”
While Einar’s bare landscapes were a hit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Gerda’s feminine portraits were never quite accepted by the Danish art community. After Einar started transitioning into Lili, she became Gerda’s muse. Her Art Nouveau portraits of Lili became her breakthrough and earned her fame and recognition as an artist in Paris. “It was alluring to people to see someone as spectacularly beautiful as Lili and as different,” Stewart explained of the paintings’ success.
Stewart teamed up with British artist Susannah Brough and they eventually settled on roughly 70 artworks to re-create for the film. “We laid them all out and went through the script with Tom and writer Lucinda [Coxon] and plotted which ones would hit each scene,” she said. “We only had two months to re-create all of them. By the end we were all in that painting room!
The film’s paintings weren’t exact replicas of Gerda’s work, however. “We had to adapt them slightly because they didn’t look like Eddie,” Stewart said. The original portrait of ballerina Ulla Poulsen, the one that changed Lili’s life forever, was also altered to resemble actress Amber Heard’s face. In addition to the release of The Danish Girl, this month, Denmark’s Arken Museum of Modern Art will be displaying the largest exhibition of Gerda’s work so far, a development that delighted Stewart. “I think she would have been so thrilled that finally she was taken seriously by the Danish.”
