Gertrude Langer was born in Austria in 1908 and completed a Ph.D. in Art History in 1933 at the University of Vienna. She moved to Australia in 1939. Langer was well known as an art critic, lecturer on art and patron of the arts. From 1953 she wrote art reviews for the Courier-Mail. She became a member of the Queensland Art Gallery Society and subsequently served as its President and as a member of its Executive. With her husband Karl Langer (q.v.), she was instrumental in constituting the Queensland Division of the Arts Council of Australia, and she served as its President and as a Director. Langer also served as Vice-President of the Federal Division of the Arts Council. She conducted vacation schools on creative arts at the University of Queensland from 1962 to 1977.
After the death of her husband in 1969, Langer wrote poetry for him in German and English, expressing her love and grief. Of these fifty-nine poems and fragments, twenty-three were posthumously selected for publication by the Langer Memorial Committee, under the title Love Transcends Death (1987).
