Impact & Influence

Biography

Major Works

Scholarly Works

Audio/Video

Impact & Influence

Gág is often credited with giving birth to children's picture books, as her illustrated stories, reviving hand-lettered text, were the first to use double-page spreads. She was accepted as a major artistic success following a show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in 1926. Two years later, her best-known work, Millions of Cats, was published. Thanks to the book's success, Gág was able to stop working as a commercial artist and focus solely on her drawings, lithographs and children's books. She favored a black and white folk style of drawing and was lauded by critics for creating "real" art. She also developed a unique style of painting or drawing directly onto sandpaper. Over the years, Gág collected a number of accolades, including the Newbery Honor in 1929 for Millions of Cats and another in 1933 for The ABC Bunny, as well as Caldecott Medals for Snow White and Nothing at All. Today, her artwork remains in a number of major museum collections. Gág lived by a standard she recorded in an adolescent diary:

"My Own Motto — Draw to Live and Live to Draw." (Diary 10, 28 October 1910).

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Biography

Born in 1893 in New Ulm, Minnesota, Wanda Gág was destined to be an artist. Her father, an artist and photographer who emigrated from Bohemia, died when she was 15 and famously told her, "What your Papa could not do, Wanda will have to finish." Suddenly, the family was without money or source of income, and Gág was forced to start earning money to support herself and her six younger siblings. She sold illustrations to the Minneapolis Journal's Junior Journal and took other writing and illustrating jobs while refusing to give up her schooling. In 1913 she attended the St. Paul School of Art; a year later she attended the Minneapolis School of Art. In 1917, a scholarship made it possible for Gág to attend the Art Students League in New York City, where she contributed illustrations to magazines such as The Liberator and New Masses. Eventually she moved to New Jersey, where she lived with and eventually married her longtime beau. Soon after, in 1946, she died of lung cancer.

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Major Works

The Funny Thing (1929)
Millions of Cats (1928)
The Day of Doom by Michael Wigglesworth; illustrated by Wanda Gág (1929)
Snippy and Snappy (1931)
Wanda Gág's Storybook (1932)

The ABC Bunny (1933)
Tales from Grimm (1936)
Gone is Gone; or, the Story of a Man Who Wanted to Do Housework (1935)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938)
Nothing At All (1941)
Three Gay Tales from Grimm (1943)
More Tales from Grimm (1947)
Growing Pains: Diaries and Drawings for the Years 1908-1917 (1984, published posthumously)

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Scholarly Works

The Gág Family: German-Bohemian Artists in America, by Julie L'Enfant
Wanda Gág: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Prints, by Audur H. Winnan
Wanda Gág, by Karen Nelson Hoyle

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Audio/Video

Sorry, none available at this time.

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