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Draw to Live and Live to
Draw: Prints and Illustrations by Wanda Gag (1893 - 1946)
November 11, 2008 - May 17, 2009
The daughter of Anton
Gag, a Bohemian immigrant who settled in New Ulm, Minnesota, Wanda Hazel
Gag (1893 - 1946) is recognized today as one of the most
pioneering female illustrators and printmakers of the 1920's and 30's. The
exhibition presents her lithographs and book illustrations, as well as a
selection of her drawings, letters and sketchbooks. The oldest of seven
children, Wanda's parents died early, leaving her as a young teenager to
raise her siblings and finish her own education. She illustrated magazines
to help support the family, and won scholarships to study in Minneapolis
and later in New York. (right: Wanda Gag, American, At 1061 (Self-portrait
with sketchpad, at 1061 Madison Ave., New York), Gary and Dolly Harm
Wanda Gag's graphic art is distinguished by its use of
dramatic shadows and highlights, as well as its sinuous, flowing shapes
and lines. These features of her prints and drawings demonstrate her love
for nature, and her desire to produce unity and rhythm out of "all
the helpless fringes and frayed edges of our groping lives," as she
stated in 1921 in a letter to artist Adolf Dehn.
Many of Gag's prints show the interiors of her grandmother's
and relatives homes and farms, and her own rural farmstead in New Jersey,
which she called "All Creation." The folktales told by her Czechoslovakian
and Bohemian-immigrant relatives would later inspire many of the illustrated
books Wanda Gag produced.
A successful show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in 1926
and publication in 1928 of her well-known children's book Millions of
Cats enabled her to give up work as a commercial artist and move to
rural New Jersey, where she continued to produce drawings, lithographs,
and children's books until her death in 1946.
Wanda Gag contributed illustrations to the socialist magazines
The Liberator and New Masses. Ahead of her time in many ways,
Gag was an early feminist, a member of a progressive group of Greenwich
Village artists in the 1920s, and a proponent of sexual freedom who did
not marry until later in her life. She preferred living in rural areas and
wore clothing she often designed herself based on traditional German and
Wall text and object labels from the exhibition
- Along with her extremely popular children's books, Wanda
Gag is well-known for her drawings and prints, which were always done in
black and white. Gag used watercolor to paint in color, but she did not
paint in oils until very late in her career, and considered her oil paintings
to be experimental.
- "I wonder about myself and painting," she mused
in a 1934 diary entry. "Is there a barrier between me and it which
can be removed? Or is painting -- color -- not my expression.. . ? I know
definitely that if I had to choose between form and color as an objective,
I would choose form without the least hesitation."
- Wanda Gag's first prints were small etchings done in
1918, when she was a student at the Art Students League in New York. She
and Adolph Dehn, a fellow Minnesotan who was a student with Gag at the
Minneapolis School of Art, had both been awarded scholarships to study
in New York.
- The majority of Wanda Gag's prints were lithographs,
printed by George Miller at his studio in New York. In both her books and
her independent art, Gag insisted on quality. In her prints, this meant
a full range of values, from highlights to the blackest of blacks.
- Gag's prints and her illustrated book were typically
separate spheres of activity. But in 1933, dissatisfied with the quality
of images printed for her ABC Bunny book, Gag convinced her publisher
to let George Miller print the plates as lithographs.
- Wanda Gag also created wood engravings and relief (linoleum
block) prints, which were printed by The Spiral Press in New York. To be
able to print some of her own plates, Gag bought a small etching press
for the studio at All Creation. The printmaker Howard Cook and his wife
visited Gag in the spring of 1932, and together they printed etchings from
metal plates she had prepared.
- Draw to Live and Live to Draw: Prints and Illustrations
by Wanda Gag (1893 - 1946)
- Wanda Hazel Gag (rhymes with "log") was a pioneering
female illustrator and printmaker of the 1920's - 40's. The exhibition
presents her lithographs, drawings, sketches and watercolors, as well as
original illustrations from some of her well-known children's books, including
Millions of Cats. Exhibited with them are works by her father Anton,
her sister Flavia, her brother Howard, and prints by some of the artists
she associated with after leaving Minnesota in 1917. The exhibition is
organized around four themes: Bohemian Roots; Author and Illustrator; Free
Thinker; and Nature Worship.
- Wanda Gag's diaries were published under the title Growing
Pains in 1940 and many of her letters were published in a catalogue
of her prints, in 1993. Gag's writings reveal her as a free-spirited, independent
woman, who saw her art as a way to connect with larger creative forces.
She desired above all else to draw, and in 1910 at age 17, she wrote: "My
own motto -r aw to live and live to draw."
- Wanda's father Anton Gag was the son of a woodcarver
who brought his family from Bohemia to Minnesota in 1873. Her mother's
parents came from a town in central Europe only twenty-five miles from
where Anton was born. Wanda and her six younger siblings grew up in a rich
atmosphere of music, stories, art and Old World legends. Her father's example,
combined with her own innate curiosity, skill and ambition, convinced Wanda
that she was destined to become an artist.
- Just before he died, Anton said to 14-year-old Wanda,
"Was der Papa nicht thun kont, muss die Wanda halt fertig machen"
-- what Papa has left undone, Wanda will have to do. She worked to keep
the family and household together, put herself and her siblings through
high school, and drew whenever she could. Within twenty years, the publication
of her first children's book and exhibitions of her prints in New York
made Wanda Gag a household name and a respected artist. By that measure,
she had fulfilled her father's dying wish.
- Wanda Gag's drawings and prints are distinguished by
their use of dramatic shadows and highlights, as well as its sinuous, animated
lines and shapes. Through her art, Gag wanted to produce unity and rhythm
out of "all the helpless fringes and frayed edges of our groping lives,"
as she stated in 1921 in a letter to artist Adolphe Dehn. A successful
show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in 1926 and the 1928 publication
of her children's book Millions of Cats enabled her to give up work
as a commercial artist and move to rural New Jersey where she continued
to produce drawings, lithographs, and children's books until her death
- Draw to Live and Live to Draw: Prints and Illustrations
by Wanda Gag is made possible in part by
a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation
by the Minnesota State Legislature and a grant from the National Endowment
for the Arts.
- The exhibition is developed with the cooperation and
assistance of the Children's Literature Research Collection/Kerlan Collection,
University of Minnesota; Mr. Gary Harms, Wanda Gag's grand-nephew, and
his wife Dolly; the Brown County Historical Society, New Ulm, Minnesota;
the Wanda Gag House, New Ulm; and Julie L'EnFant, author of The Gag
Family: German-Bohemian Artists in America.
- The following individuals and institutions lent artworks
to the exhibition:
- Gary and Dolly Harms
- Children's Literature Research Collection / Kerlan Collection,
University of Minnesota
- Brown County Historical Society, New Ulm, Minnesota
- Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth
- For more information, viewers are referred to the following
published texts on Wanda Gag available in the Olive Anna Tezla Memorial
Library on the museum's first floor:
- Julie L'Enfant, The Gag Family: German-Bohemian Artists
in America, Afton, MN: Afton Historical Society Press, 2002.
- Wanda Gag, Growing Pains: Diaries and Drawings for
the Years 1908-1917, New York: Coward-McCann, 1940.
- Audur H. Winnan, Wanda Gag: A Catalogue Raisonne of
the Prints, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
- Bohemian Roots
- Wanda Gag was born in 1893 in New Ulm, Minnesota, to
parents whose families had both immigrated from Bohemia, in central Europe.
In the relatively conservative community of New Ulm, the Gag family was
conspicuously liberal and artistic. Anton Gag was a painter, photographer,
muralist and decorator, who encouraged all his children to draw and to
appreciate music, literature and visual art. Lissie (Elizabeth Biebl) Gag
and her parents immersed the Gag children in the folktales of the Old World,
which later influenced Wanda Gag's illustrated books and some of her prints.
- In her approach to her art and her life, Wanda Gag exemplifies
common conceptions of the liberal bohemian artist. The word bohemian was
popularized in France in the 1850s, to describe the artists, writers, musicians
and actors who gathered in low-rent districts inhabited by nomadic Romani,
or Gypsies. Today, it connotes non-mainstream, anti-establishment
ways, or unconventional social or political viewpoints. Gag was free thinking,
and politically and socially liberal, far ahead of her time. She presaged
women's rights and feminism, sexual liberation, and the back-to-nature
movements by almost fifty years.
- When she was free of economic pressures, Wanda Gag moved
to the country and crafted an earthy lifestyle. Referring to herself as
a "gypsy," she dressed in comfortable, peasant-style clothing,
sending fashion sketches to her younger sister Stella, who sewed them for
- Author and Illustrator
- Most people know Wanda Gag as an award-winning author
and illustrator of children's books. Her first book, Millions of Cats,
was published in 1928, making her a household name practically overnight.
She authored and illustrated six other books, translated and illustrated
Grimm's Fairy Tales, and in 1940, published her diaries under the
title of Growing Pains. Her work as a professional writer and illustrator
began when she sold stories, poems and illustrations to the Junior Journal,
the children's supplement of the Minneapolis Journal, after her
father's death in 1908. Later, Gag's commercial art included magazine,
advertising and fashion illustrations.
- As her own prints and drawings became known and admired,
Gag often regretted the time she had to spend producing commercial work.
Her books, however, provided a steady income, even during the Great Depression
of the 1930s. They also provided an opportunity to write her own stories,
including versions of beloved childhood folktales. Like Gag's prints and
drawings, her book's illustrations, page layouts and overall designs utilize
rhythm, flowing lines, patterns and strong black and white contrasts, to
provide pacing and cadence. She carefully oversaw the entire process, from
conception, to design and editing, to the final printing.
- Nature Worship
- Wanda Gag described three passions, in order of their
importance to her: art, sex, and growing things. Her diaries reveal that
she read Thoreau's Walden, Knut Hamsun's Growth of the
Soul, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass with great excitement. She
looked to Van Gogh and Cezanne for inspiration. Gag's intellectual curiosity
was vast, but ultimately nature itself, not art, was her greatest teacher.
Artistic techniques and life experiences were a means to an end. Gag's
goal was to create the images that matched her world view, her sense of
natural order, rhythm, and connectedness.
- All of Gag's prints and drawings, and even the few oil
paintings she made, are created with flowing, curved lines, and the spaces
between objects appear to be as important as the objects themselves. Her
interiors use intense contrasts of light and shadow, and even inanimate
objects like furniture and buildings seem capable of movement. Almost all
of Gag's art is black and white, stressing the emotive qualities of line,
value, and form over all else.
- Gag was determined to live in the country, to leave New
York City and the pressures of the commercial art world. To satisfy her
urge to be surrounded by nature, Gag spent the summers of 1923-30 in rented
houses in New Jersey and Connecticut. One of these was "Tumble Timbers,"
a ramshackle house in New Jersey, where she drew the plates for her first
prints. In 1931, she bought a farm in Milford, New Jersey, naming the property
- Free Thinker
- Gag contributed drawings to numerous exhibitions supporting
labor, union movements, and responses to totalitarianism and aggression
in the years between the World Wars. Like many of the younger artists she
met in New York, Gag's illustrations appeared in socialist publications
like The Liberator and New Masses. As a result, she and other
artists were watched by the government, and she has an extensive FBI file
as a result.
- Despite the liberal ideas reflected in the causes she
supported, very few of Gag's images are overtly political. The 1936 lithograph
Progress shows her disdain for the visual clutter of modern technology
and product advertising in the natural landscape. In the Year of Our
Lord, 1937, is a scene of death and destruction, the aftermath of war.
- In her 1939 article I Like Fairy Tales, Gag spoke
against war-like toys and radio programs, and for the active imaginations
of young children: ". . . I believe it is just the modern children
who need [Fairyland], since their lives are already overbalanced on the
side of steel and stone and machinery -- and nowadays, one might well add,
bombs, gas-masks, and machine guns."
- Like her sense of the spiritual in nature, Gag's politics
and ideology is embedded in the form of the art itself. Ahead of her time
in many ways, Gag was an early feminist, a member of a progressive group
of Greenwich Village artists in the 1920-30s, including Max Weber, Alfred
Maurer, Arnold Blanch, William Gropper, Howard Cook, Yasio Kyunioshi, and
- Wanda Gag wrote the following description of her procedure
in preparing a lithograph for printing, in response to a request from Wesleyan
University, Middletown, CT:
- The Forge
- This lithograph was done with brush-and-tusche and some
crayon. Its texture consists of thousands of tiny strokes, and it took
me several weeks to do it.
- The subject is an old forge near Carversville, Pennsylvania.
I was excited by the varied form of the tools and handwrought objects in
it, many of which had obviously not been moved for a long time and had
fallen into mellow patterns. Almost they were static elements in the picture,
but not quite -- the dynamic zigzag of the saws created a center of energy
which seemed to me to shoot out and by its force compel the more passive
forms to take part in its rhythm. I set myself the problem of controlling
these forces; to keep them moving without them flow out of the picture,
to build them up into a sort of cadence.
- 1) From the rough, yet detailed drawing made on the spot,
I went on to several more, striving each time for a more compact and compelling
organization, and establishing the final values. In my work I do not rely
on happy accidents; I know beforehand exactly what I want the final result
to be and work consciously toward that goal. In this case, after solving
all the problems to the best of my ability, I made a final drawing on tracing
paper, traced its outlines with sanguine crayon, and transferred it to
- 2) With the transferred lines as guides, I drew the main
outlines very lightly on the zinc, using a #5 Korn lithographic pencil.
- 3) I warmed a small dish, rubbed Lemercier tusche around
its inside, and added water to make a fairly dense wash. This was applied
with a watercolor brush wherever crisp rich outlines or small solid masses
- 4) Next, the values were built up very gradually all
over the picture with Korn lithographic crayon (#3 when the room was cool,
#4 when warm).
- 5) Then came the ticklish part; heightening the darks
with the tusche wash without creating a soggy black mess. This is especially
risky on zinc, for, whereas such sections can be lightened up on stone
by scrapping, no corrections can be made on zinc. I use a dry-brush technique
in such a way as to leave a faint sparkle of zinc showing through.
- 6) Finally, I like to keep the lithograph around for
at least a week "for observation," and for last minute touches.
Studying it by twilight or looking at it in a mirror are valuable aides
in the respect.
- In Audur H. Winnan, Wanda Gag: A Catalogue Raisonne
of the Prints, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
Original typescript in the Children's Literature Research Collection /
Kerlan Collection, University of Minnesota.
(above: Wanda Gag, American, Snoopy (Snoopie) in Lewis
Gannett's Garden (Cat in Garden), 1932-33, stone lithograph on paper,
8 5/16 x 10 15/16 inches. Gary and Dolly Harm Collection)
(above: Wanda Gag, American, Backyard Corner (Barnyard
Corner), Tumble Timbers), 1930, stone lithograph on paper, 10 3/8 x
12 7/8 inches, ed. 100. Gary and Dolly Harm Collection)
(above: Wanda Gag, American, Winter Garden (Cats and
Flowers), 1935. zinc plate lithograph on paper, 10 x 8 1/8 inches. Gary
and Dolly Harm Collection)
Additional images from the exhibition
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