Wanda Gág

Wanda Hazel Gág
Gág in December 1916
Born	March 11, 1893 New Ulm, Minnesota, USA
Died	June 27, 1946(1946-06-27) (aged 53) New York City, New York
Occupation	Artist, writer, translator
Nationality	American
Genre	Children's literature
Notable works	Millions of Cats
Notable awards	Newbery Honor, Caldecott Honor

Wanda Hazel Gág /ˈɡɑːɡ/ (1893–1946) was an American artist, author, translator, and illustrator. She is known for writing and illustrating the children's book Millions of Cats, the oldest American picture book still in print.^[1] Her books Millions of Cats and The ABC Bunny were recipients of a Newbery Honor and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Nothing at All received a Caldecott Honor. Gág was also a noted printmaker, receiving international recognition and awards for her prints in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.^[2] In 1940, Growing Pains, a book of edited excerpts from her diaries (covering the years 1908 to 1917), was published to wide acclaim.^[3][4]

Her prints, drawings, and watercolors are in the collections of The National Gallery of Art,^[5] the British Museum,^[6] The Minneapolis Institute of Arts,^[7] The Whitney Museum^[8] and other museums around the world. Artists who have been inspired by Wanda Gág include: Eric Rohmann,^[9] Ursula Dubosarsky,^[10] Susan Marie Swanson,^[11] Jan Brett, Maurice Sendak,^[12] and Ray Johnson^[13]

Early years

Born March 11, 1893, in New Ulm, Minnesota,^[14] to Elisabeth Biebl Gag and the artist and photographer Anton Gag, she was the eldest of seven children.^[15] When still a teen, Gág’s illustrated story "Robby Bobby in Mother Goose Land" was published in The Minneapolis Journal in their Junior Journal supplement.^[16] When Gág was fifteen her father died of tuberculosis; his final words to her were: “Was der Papa nicht thun konnt’, muss die Wanda halt fertig machen.” (What Papa couldn’t do, Wanda will have to finish.)^[17] Following her father's death, the Gag family was on welfare and some townspeople thought that Wanda should quit school and get a steady job to help support her family. Wanda chose to remain in school, however, and after graduating (in June 1912) she taught country school in Springfield, Minnesota, from November 1912 to June 1913.^[18]

Art school in Minnesota

Wanda Gág Self portrait 1915

In 1913 Gág began a platonic relationship with University of Minnesota medical student Edgar T. Herrmann who exposed her to new ideas in art, politics and philosophy.^[19] With a scholarship and the aid of friends, she attended The Saint Paul School of Art in 1913 and 1914, .^[19] From 1914 to 1917 she attended The Minneapolis School of Art under the patronage of Herschel V. Jones.^[20][21] While there, she became friends with Harry Gottlieb and Adolf Dehn.^[22] In 1917, Gág completed her first illustrated book commission (A Child’s Book of Folk-Lore— Mechanics of Written English by Jean Sherwood Rankin.) She also won a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York.^[23]

New York

Gág preparing lithographic stone, 1932

In 1917 Gág moved to New York City where, at the Art Students League, she took classes in composition, etching and advertising illustration. By 1919 she was earning her living as a commercial illustrator.^[24] In 1921 she became a partner in a business venture called Happiwork Story Boxes; boxes decorated with story panels on its sides.^[25] An illustration of Gág’s was published in Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts in 1921.^[26][27] Her art exhibition in the New York Public Library in 1923 was Gág’s first solo show.^[28] Around this time she began using an accent mark in her last name to aid in its proper pronunciation—her last name rhymes with “bog”, not “bag”. In 1924 she published a short-lived folio-style magazine with artist William Gropper.^[29] In 1925 her series of illustrated crossword puzzles for children was syndicated in several newspapers.^[30] Gág’s one-woman-show in the Weyhe Gallery in 1926 led to her being acclaimed as “one of America’s most promising young graphic artists” and was the start of a lifelong personal and business relationship with its manager, Carl Zigrosser.^[31][32] Gág began to sell numerous lithographs, linoleum block prints, water colors and drawings through the gallery. In 1927 her article These Modern Women: A Hotbed of Feminists was published in The Nation, drawing the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and prompting the publisher and designer Egmont Arens to write: “… The way you solved that problem (her relationship with men) seems to me to be the most illuminating part of your career. You have done what all the other ‘modern women’ are still talking about.”^[33][34] Gág illustrated covers of the leftist magazines The New Masses and The Liberator.^[35][36] Her illustrated story Bunny's Easter Egg was published in John Martin's Book magazine for children in 1927.^[37] In a New York Times review, Elisabeth Luther Cary described Gág's print Stone Crusher: “Pure imagination leaps out from dusky shadows and terrifies with light, an emotional source difficult to analyze.”^[38] Her work was recognized internationally, including inclusion in the American Institute of Graphic Arts Fifty Prints of the Year in 1928, 1929, 1931, 1932, 1936, 1937 and 1938.^[39] Gág’s work continued to be shown in New York including The Museum of Modern Art 1939 exhibition Art in Our Time as well as the 1939 New York World’s Fair American Art Today show, of which she was a juror.^[40]

Books for children

In 1928, Gág’s work caught the attention of Ernestine Evans, director of Coward-McCann’s children’s book division. Evans was delighted to learn that Gág had children’s stories and illustrations in her folio and asked her to submit her own story with illustrations. The result was Millions of Cats, developed from a story that Gág had written to entertain the children of friends.^[41] Gág is widely considered to be a pioneer in the development of the picture book form. Prior to Millions of Cats, illustrated books generally had text on the left page with pictures on the right. Gag integrated the text with the pictures while stretching them across a double page.^[42] Cats is also on the New York Public Library's 100 Great Children's Books list.^[43] In 1935 Gág published the “proto-feminist”Gone is Gone; or, the Story of a Man Who Wanted to Do Housework.^[44] To encourage the use of fairy-tale stories, Gág translated and illustrated Tales from Grimm in 1936. Two years later she did the same with the Grimm story Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in reaction against the “trivialized, sterilized, and sentimentalized” Disney movie version.^[45] Her essay I Like Fairy Tales was published in the March 1939 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. More Tales from Grimm appeared posthumously in 1947. Four of her translated fairy tales were later released individually with new illustrations by Margot Tomes.

Family and personal life

Gág liked to live and work in the country. In the early 1920s she would spend her summers drawing at various locations in rural New York and Connecticut.^[25] She rented a three-acre farm (“Tumble Timbers”) in Glen Gardner New Jersey from 1925 to 1930 and later purchased a larger farm (“All Creation”) in Milford, New Jersey in 1931.^[46] She continued to support her unmarried adult siblings, some of whom lived with her from time to time. Wanda’s brother Howard did the hand lettering for most of her picture books; she also encouraged her sister, Flavia Gág, to write illustrated books for children.^[47] In addition to her long-time paramour and business manager Earle Humphrey, Gág had other lovers, at times simultaneously: Adolph Dehn, Lewis Gannett, Carl Zigrosser, and Dr. Hugh Darby. She married Humphrey August 27, 1943.^[48] In 1946 Gág died from lung cancer in New York City.

Legacy

Awards and memorials

The author's childhood home in New Ulm, Minnesota, is a museum.

Gág was honored by The Horn Book Magazine in a tribute issue in 1947.^[49] Gág’s papers, manuscripts and matrices are held in the Kerlan Collection^[50] at the University of Minnesota, The New York Public Library, The University of Pennsylvania,^[51] The Free Library of Philadelphia and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.^[52] Her childhood home in New Ulm, Minnesota has been restored and is now the Wanda Gág House, a museum and interpretive center that offers tours and educational programs.^[53] Wanda was posthumously honored with The Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958 and The Kerlan Award in 1977. The Wanda Gág Read Aloud Book Award is awarded each year by the University of Minnesota, Moorhead. A memorial bronze sculpture of Gág, with one of her cats, was erected in New Ulm, Minnesota in 2016.^[54]

Books

Writer and illustrator:

• Batiking at Home: a Handbook for Beginners, Coward McCann, 1926
• Millions of Cats, Coward McCann, 1928
• The Funny Thing, Coward McCann, 1929
• Snippy and Snappy, Coward McCann, 1931
• Wanda Gág’s Storybook (includes Millions of Cats, The Funny Thing, Snippy and Snappy), Coward McCann, 1932
• The ABC Bunny, Coward McCann, 1933
• Gone is Gone; or, the Story of a Man Who Wanted to Do Housework, Coward McCann, 1935
• Growing Pains: Diaries and Drawings for the Years 1908-1917, Coward McCann, 1940
• Nothing At All, Coward McCann, 1941

Translator and illustrator:

• Tales from Grimm, Coward McCann, 1936
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Coward McCann, 1938
• Three Gay Tales from Grimm, Coward McCann, 1943
• More Tales from Grimm, Coward McCann, 1947

Illustrator only:

• A Child’s Book of Folk-Lore— Mechanics of Written English, by Jean Sherwood Rankin, Augsburg, 1917
• The Oak by the Waters of Rowan, by Spencer Kellogg Jr, Aries Press, New York, 1927
• The Day of Doom, by Michael Wigglesworth, Spiral Press, 1929
• Pond Image and Other Poems, by Johan Egilsrud, Lund Press, Minneapolis, 1943

Translator only:

• The Six Swans, illustrations by Margot Tomes, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1974
• Wanda Gág's Jorinda and Joringel, illustrations by Margot Tomes, Putnam, 1978
• Wanda Gag's the Sorcerer's Apprentice illustrations by Margot Tomes, Putnam, 1979
• Wanda Gag's The Earth Gnome, illustrations by Margot Tomes, Putnam, 1985

Selected prints

References

Further reading

• Cox, Richard W., The Bite of the Picture Book, pp. 238–254, Minnesota History Magazine, Fall, 1975^[1]
• Gág, Wanda, Growing Pains, Borealis/Minnesota Historical Society Press, Saint Paul, 1984
• Hoyle, Karen, Wanda Gág, Twayne Publishers, 1994
• Winnan, Audur, Wanda Gág: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Prints , Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wanda Gág.

• Works by Wanda Gág at Faded Page (Canada)
• Wanda Gág in MNopedia, the Minnesota Encyclopedia
• , National Gallery of Art
• Wanda Gág - Rights and Restrictions Information (Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress)
• Wanda Gág House
• Collection summary to the Wanda Gág Papers at the University of Minnesota Libraries Children's Literature Research Collections
• Finding aid to the Wanda Gág papers at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries
• Finding aid to the Wanda Gág papers at Penn State University's Special Collections Library
• Wanda Gág at Library of Congress Authorities, with 52 catalog records

1. ↑ http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/44/v44i07p238-254.pdf