Wanda Gág at Home
by Kylie Linh Hoang, assistant curator
American artist, author, and illustrator Wanda Gág’s world pulsed with energy, and the places she lived influenced the artwork she created. Mischievous and brilliant, Gág’s landscapes, ranging from skyscrapers to country lanes, are among her most expressive works. Two artworks on view in HERE, NOW: Selections from the M’s Permanent Collection show her desire to capture the essence of elusive landscapes that surrounded her.
Gág (1893–1946) received scholarships at the Saint Paul School of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art before moving to New York in 1917 to attend the Art Students League. From New York City, Gág worried about her six younger siblings back home; the death of their mother Lissi Gág pulled the family into fiscal precarity. Gág sold as much work as possible to fund their room, board, and education, as well as her own art materials and living expenses.
In the early 1920s, Gág attempted to meld the work she found creatively fulfilling with art that she thought might be successful in commerce. Inspired by her frustrations living in New York City, illustrations like No. 5, For the Chronic Congestion at Fifth Ave and Forty Second St. – Suggestions for the Improvement of New York City, 1921 offer inventive solutions for urban annoyances.
In this example from the M’s collection, Gág playfully suggests New Yorkers obtain fairy wings to beat traffic. Groups gather at the edges of the composition in front of competing shops named “WINGS” and “Better Fly Wings.” A man is fitted with wings as his contemporaries soar above a street stacked with cars and buses. A perilously unfinished bridge cuts through the center of the scene, and the horse-led buggy jolting across a gap seems to be the focus of attention.
Considering this ability to tell an exciting story in just one picture, perhaps Gág’s future in children’s books was inevitable—her children’s book Millions of Cats is the oldest American picture book still in print.
Whenever she had the capacity to escape New York City, Gág took solace in her retreats in the country. One of the properties featured a tumble-down house, and she affectionately referred to it as “Tumble Timbers.” Located in Glen Gardner, N.J., Tumble Timbers and its garden, “Gumbo Lane,” often appear in Gág’s work. In May of 1926 (“with the buds bursting into bloom and the tent– caterpillars building their cozy nests in the trees!”), Gág wrote to her gallerist, Carl Zigrosser:
“Just now I am wrangling with hills. In looking at a peaceful, rolling hillside one would never guess that it could be composed of such a disturbing collection of planes. . . My aesthetic existence teems with forms which project themselves tauntingly toward me, recede elusively from me, bulge, flow, and most of all, turn triumphantly over the edge of things, leaving one to wonder what’s going on beyond. But of course that’s exactly the place where I can’t afford to give up, so girding my aesthetic loins (used in a figurative sense only!) and setting face in dogged ecstasy, I go at ’em again!”
Gág spent a prolific summer and fall of 1926 at Tumble Timbers. Moonlight, from the M’s collection, is one of many important works made there. Her desire to capture energy and movement may have motivated her to depict the natural beauty of the rural landscape. Her creative workspaces, garden lanes, and charmingly shabby facades swirl with lines reminiscent of Van Gogh’s olive trees.
Where Gág’s suggestions for the improvement of New York City stem from dissatisfaction, her reflections on the natural splendor at Tumble Timbers feel infused with purpose. She had a particular sensitivity to the “atmosphere”; the “air encircling objects—surrounding it [them] layer by layer, and depth after depth, surrounding forms in flat or curved or angular layers and lines; coating (investing) adequately each form.”3 In Moonlight, trees bend both toward and away from Gumbo Lane. The open gate beckons toward a dark path beyond the archway. Illuminated hills roll quietly, powerfully toward the moon’s singular brightness which offers a brief reprieve from the dark clouds present in the top third of the composition. The scene feels dramatically alive.
Gág’s natural story-telling abilities are embedded into her work, with swirling lines, enticing shadows, and oscillating whirlpools of atmosphere. While her signature style would be impossible to suppress, her landscapes of the places where she felt truly at home are among the most expressive and exciting works in her oeuvre.
