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.”
Strangers in the Land
I ended Asian-American Heritage Month with a Big Fat History Book: Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.
Michael Luo started thinking about writing such a history in the fall of 2016. He and his family were standing in front of a restaurant in Manhattan when a woman screamed “Go back to China” at them— twice. The only response Luo had was “I was born in this country!” It was a few weeks before Donald Trump was elected on a platform that rested in part on the nativist ideology that has been a consistent and ugly undercurrent in American politics. Strangers in the Land tells the story of the long history of anti-Asian racism which is the background for that encounter and the anti-Asian violence that swept the country during the COVID pandemic. Luo begins with the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the California gold rush of 1848 end ends with his own family’s immigration to the United States thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Luo’s prose is clear, even elegant. His accounts of historical events are vivid, and rooted in the broader context of the time. He makes historical links between the Chinese experience in American and the Civil War, the end of slavery, the larger question of nativism, the labor movement, China’s changing role in international politics, and the Cold War. At the same time, he has a good eye for the telling detail.
But despite Luo’s mastery of his craft, Strangers in the Land was a difficult book to read. His accounts of attacks on Chinese miners and railroad workers by their white counterparts, of violence against Chinese residents in small towns throughout the Western and Pacific regions of the United States, and the destruction of urban Chinatowns by enraged mobs were both new to me and all too familiar. I was reminded over and over of attacks on Black Americans: the Reconstruction, the Red Summer of 1919, the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. The repeated destruction of Chinese owned businesses made me think of the destruction of the Black Wall Street in the Tulsa race riots in 1921. Anti-immigrant rhetoric by politicians and rabble-rousers in the past could have come from a present day political rally.
It left me ashamed. And determined to learn more. It’s the reason I am trying to read my way through the heritage months this year. It is important to grapple with the tension between acknowledging our country’s mistakes and appreciating the things we have done well—a condition that social psychologist Dolly Chugh describes as being a “gritty patriot.” I’ve said it before. I’ll doubtless say it again. History can be hard.
They Called Us Enemy
And now, I return to the Japanese internment camps in World War II,* this time in the form of George Takei’s graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, written in collaboration with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker.**
Jumping back and forth in time,*** They Called Us Enemy tells the story of the camps from the inside, both through Takei’s eyes as a young boy and then through his growing understanding of what he experienced as a result of conversations he had as a teenager with his father about their times in the camps. As the book’s narrator, Takei explores the disconnect between his childhood memories of happy moments and humor as well as confusion and trauma and his later understanding of the events he lived through. He contrasts his experience as a child with that of his father—both as he saw it at the time and later. (In one particularly powerful scene, the teenaged Takei accuses his father, and Japanese Americans as a whole, for cowardice in not protesting their treatment. That scene is immediately followed by his later shame for his outburst.) Takei’s personal experiences are clearly set against the historical context of the internments—some of which I was not familiar with.****
The art is a powerful element of the story. Grey-scale drawings evoke the details of the camp. Children are drawn with less detail than the adults and setting around them, in a style reminiscent of Peanuts characters or the earlier Campbell Soup kids of Grace Drayton, evoking the childhood innocence that is a critical part of the book. Small details add to the whole, such as the subtle and brilliant use of guard towers and barbed wire in the title. (Click on the image in your browser to see this detail clearly.)
They Called Us Enemy ends with a montage of “clips” of Takei’s later activism. This section looks at the racism and fear that led to the camps in comparison to modern issues, specifically action against Muslim Americans taken during the first Trump administration and the detention of Mexican Americans in camps along the U.S. border. (The book was published in 2019.)
*Despite my claims that the beginning of the month that I wasn’t going to read more about the internment camps.
**And yes, I know I also rejected the idea of reading celebrity memoirs by Asian-Americans, but Takei spends only a few pages on his role as Lieutenant Sulu of the Starship Enterprise. This is not a book about Takei’s rise to fame in the face of adversity.
***FYI, some reviewers complained about this when the book came out. Personally, I did not find it distracting.
****Or perhaps I had seen those elements before, but needed to read another book about the subject to make me remember them.
****
They Called Us Enemy has been compared to two other powerful graphic historical works: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize- winning Maus, which draws on his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, and Rep. John Lewis’s three volume graphic memoir, March, which tells the story of Lewis’s life in the civil rights movement. Both are worth your time.
If you are interested in a slightly more hopeful graphic work about the internment camps, I strongly recommend the graphic novel Love in the Library by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, which is based on the story of her grandparents who met in an internment camp in Idaho. It is a story of joy, love, and resilience, though Tokuda-Hall in no way minimizes the racism that placed her grandparents in the camps, or the trauma related to it.