Wanda Gág, Printmaker with a”Grimm” Aesthetic

Until a few weeks ago, the name Wanda Gág meant nothing to me, but it turns  I was very familiar with her most famous work.

I discovered Gág while I was happily reading a book about professional women artists in the first half of the twentieth century who had all been students of a single male teacher. (Just because.) One of his students was a printmaker named Wanda Gág. I found her work, as portrayed in the book, very appealing and slightly familiar.

Grandma’s Kitchen. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

And then I hit a surprise.  The author mentioned in passing that Gág was the author and illustrator of an iconic children’s book, Millions of Cats. Published in 1928, it is considered the first modern picture book and is the oldest picture book still in print. And I had read it many times as a child.

Rabbit hole time!

Wanda Hazel Gag* was born in 1893 in New Ulm, Minnesota. Her parents and grandparents had emigrated from the Bohemia region of Czechoslovakia. She grew up in a German-speaking, art-centric household, the eldest of eleven children.

Wanda later wrote that her childhood was steeped “in the serene belief that drawing and painting, like eating and sleeping, belonged to the universal order of things.” Her father was a painter who supported his large familydecorating houses and churches. On Sundays he painted for himself, and he encouraged Wanda to draw, too. Her father, who was self-taught, dreamed that she would get formal art training.  By the time she was twelve, she knew she wanted to become an artist.

Her father died of tuberculosis in 1908, when Wanda was fifteen. The family was impoverished. Their savings had been eaten up by her father’s illness. Her mother took in washing to earn money, but soon collapsed from exhaustion. Neighbors urged Wanda to quit school and get a job to support her family. Instead she found ways to use her art to support her family and to ensure that she and all of her siblings finished school. For three years, she took care of her family. She was finally able to give up her role as the family’s sole provider, when two of her sisters became school teachers and were able to help.

In 1913, at the age of twenty, she won a scholarship to attend the Minneapolis School of Art. Four years later, she won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York–which was a really big deal.** In New York, she cut her hair in a stylish bob, added the accent to her name, and flung herself into the art world. In addition to attending classes, she spent a lot of time visiting New York’s art museums, where she marveled at Old Masters that she had previously seen only in books, and small galleries, where she was inspired by modern artists from Europe. (Van Gogh and Cezanne were particular favorites.)

Wanda Gág preparing a lithography stone, ca 1930

The scholarship was a really big deal, but it wasn’t enough to live on. She was forced to spend much of her time on commercial work, including fashion illustrations*** and painting lampshades, plus occasional stints as a model. At the same time, she was developing a distinctive style of drawing and lithographic print making. She focused on interior spaces, rural landscapes, and architectural structures, using strong tonal contrasts and twisting contours. The result was modernist in style, with fairy tale overtones. In 1925, she began to enjoy success in the art world with the first of several solo exhibitions. (Her work sold out.)

Wanda finally found financial security in the world of children’s illustrated books. In addition to writing and illustrating her own books—of which Millions of Cats remains the best known—she also illustrated books written by others. In the 1930s, she returned to the stories she had read in her childhood, translating and illustrating the German fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers. She never strayed from the “grim” in those tales, or her own. Alice Gregory describes her children’s books as “fairy-tale familiar.” Certainly that is true of Millions of Cats, which I re-read a few days ago. I had remembered the premise, but not the plot. The word “macabre” came to mind. Also weird. And yet visually enchanting. No wonder I loved it as a child.

 

*She added the accent mark later. I am sure she had her reasons.  I just have no idea what they were.

**The Art Students League was founded by a group of students who wanted more varied and flexible art instruction than that offered at the venerable (i.e. stuffy) National Academy of Design. One of the ways in which the Art Students League was more flexible was the number of women it accepted as students. The school became a center of American modernism.  Thomas Eakins, of the Ash Can School, was one of the first board members. Some of the school’s most well known students included Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and Louise Nevelson.

***She preferred working on “stylish stouts” rather than the idealized waif-like flappers, whom she described as “fashionable ghostlings.”