NEW YORK, NY.- If you plan to catch the tail end of the Whitney Biennial, there is an amuse-bouche nestled in the museum’s permanent collection that grounds the palate after that cerebral and political display.
At only 20 works — 18 prints and two books under glass — “Wanda Gág’s World” is hardly a world at all. It’s a window into one. But the view is worth it: a graphic artist hypersensitive to printmaking and perception, and maybe miscast for the hundred years we’ve known of her.
Born in Minnesota to Bohemian immigrants, Wanda Gág fulfilled her artist father’s dying words — “What Father began, Wanda will have to finish” — when she reached New York in 1917, at age 24, first to pursue fashion illustration and then children’s books. Among those she authored and illustrated until her death in 1946 were her delightfully frank translations of the Grimm fairy tales from her native German, and “Millions of Cats” (1928), her prose ballad about an elderly couple who get more than they bargained for when seeking feline companionship.
“Millions of Cats” is considered today a classic in children’s literature, not least for its finely detailed spot illustrations — including wild tabbies stampeding hillsides — that punctuate the story’s comic refrain. One spread is on view here. But as the book enters the public domain this year, Roxanne Smith and Scout Hutchinson of the Whitney have focused on Gág’s lesser-known lithographs (and one linoleum print) for grown-ups.
Lithography — in which a limestone slab is treated to hold ink wherever you draw upon it — promises great detail and fidelity. And “Macy’s Stairway” (1941), an apartment hallway scene, wants to be read. From an upper landing of the staircase, we count 11 folds in the fire hose hung on the wall, nine balusters supporting the handrail, six spokes in the valve of the standpipe …
But the balance is off, a little drunk. The window sill and newel post lean into the stairs as if you’re in mid-tumble down them. The wall caves in like a tepee’s. For “Fireplace” (1930), a child’s-eye view of a living room, the floor ramps upward and the hearth appears to squirm with restlessness.
It’s the fault — or rather the favor — of the way Gág applies her marks. Up close, her domestic still lives shiver because she has shaded their every facet in dense rivers of hatch lines that recall the overlappings of guard hair in the pelt of a mammal.
This labored approach gives an almost living presence to shadow, an element Gág employs more than line to delineate her forms. The nighttime dinette scene “Lamplight” (1929) is thickly darkened, though only the backlit shade of the oil lamp on the table yields to black. The rest is an array of shaggy grays. Across a doorjamb and wainscoting, the shadow of a chair vaults in interleaving flicker marks as if Gág has cranked up the air pressure in that corner of the kitchen.
When seen as a printmaker, this queen of the kids’ section seems more at home with the Precisionist painters of the 1930s, like Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, who limned America’s buildings with a matter-of-factness that flirted with the wiles of cubism.
In fact Gág prepared her stones under George C. Miller, who printed for Sheeler, Thomas Hart Benton and many others. Benton’s bendy social history tableaus might come nearest to the animism we find in Gág, especially her swoopy landscapes like “Spring in the Garden” (1927), also on view.
But Gág is broodier. While homespun, her subjects feel privately observed, to the brink of imaginary. In a philodendron still life from 1944, she subtracts her lithographic crayon from the stone with a knife tip, uniting the leaves and surrounding room with breathy xylem textures. Sometimes she applied her crayon directly to the rough grain of sandpaper. In one such unlikely print, “Upright Landscape” (1926), hills and sky emerge from the grit with equivalent noise, as if beaming in through television static.
This strong selection is a teaser for the retrospective Gág deserves. She painted and drew, too. Instead of the full biographical wall text — which I left hungry for — Smith and Hutchinson quote Gág’s writings, mainly her lifelong diary. In 1940 Gág published the opening years of it in a precocious volume called “Growing Pains.” (“Paula said she liked me better when Love got the better of the Art in me,” she observes, age 20.) The rest sits in manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her metaphysical relationship to perception, these diary excerpts suggest, encouraged the wonderful density of her atmospheres. “There is, to me, no such thing as an empty place in the universe,” Gág wrote in 1929, in one passage at the Whitney, “and if Nature abhors a vacuum, so do I — and I am just as eager as nature to fill a vacuum with something — if with nothing else, at least with a tiny rhythm of its own.”
Following the grief-stricken lithographs of Käthe Kollwitz at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, and those of Willy Jaeckel at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Wanda Gág’s World” recalls just how much feeling artists could wring from the slab in the heyday of this mass medium. These Gágs — and many other Miller collaborations currently off view — come from the Whitney’s own collection. What other museums are sitting on stellar print portfolios?
As you pass a surrealist diorama from 1952 on your way to the Whitney’s elevator, recall that its author, Joseph Cornell, once mounted his boxes extra low for the benefit of children. John Ruskin, in his preface to Gág’s preferred edition of Grimm, described “the majestic independence of the child-public.” Really, Gág’s prints are for everyone: You don’t just look at them. You watch them.
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Wanda Gág’s World
Through December, Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600; whitney.org.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
