Hotspur🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦<p>"Girl and Pug in an Automobile," Gerda Wegener, 1927.</p><p>Wegener (1885-1940) is someone I've featured before, but she's always worth featuring. I love this Art Deco painting, which on the surface is mild and inocuous...a woman and her dog in a car, on what seems to be an early spring day. What could be more everyday?</p><p>All is not what it appears. The woman is Lili Ilse Elvenes, aka Lili Elbe, Wegener's partner, who was trans and one of the earliest known successful recipients of gender-affirming surgery, in 1930. However, for a couple of decades Wegener had been painting haunting portraits of a sexy, almond-eyed femme fatale...and it was a bit of scandal when it emerged in 1913 that this gorgeous woman was assigned male at birth.</p><p>Elbe sadly passed away in 1931, from complications of an attempt to transplant a uterus into her body. Wegener remarried briefly, and her painting style fell out of fashion. She died poor and half-forgotten, but her work has been rediscovered and acclaimed.</p><p>From a private collection.</p><p><a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/Art" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Art</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/DanishArt" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DanishArt</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/GerdaWegener" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GerdaWegener</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/LiliElbe" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>LiliElbe</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/QueerHistory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>QueerHistory</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/TransHistory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TransHistory</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/QueerArt" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>QueerArt</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/PortraitMonday" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PortraitMonday</span></a></p>