#gert wollheim

During Pride Month, take a closer look at this 1926 painting of a gender-ambiguous couple on view now in Scenes from the Collection.Gert Wollheim, a German-Jewish artist, lived in Berlin at the height of the Weimar Republic. His portrait depicts the pair standing in a café during a period in Germany of economic instability and reckoning with the ghosts of World War I, when social convention and sexual mores were challenged. While fashionable and theatrical, the figures are not obviously women. Newly granted the right to vote, women of the era were called Neue Frau and enjoyed greater earning power and sexual freedom than ever before. Wollheim painted the couple to reflect those newfound liberties, and also used a visual trope to identify them as lesbians.