Wanda Gág’s World

Mar 28–Dec 2, 2024

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“Everything I looked at cried out to be captured”

"A still life is never still to me”.
“My aesthetic existence teems with forms”.
“Everything I looked at cried out to be captured”.
“I am out on the hills every day now”.
“Perhaps I have never written of my sandpaper discovery”.
“There is, to me, no such thing as an empty place in the universe”.
"I spent most of my time drawing frantically”.
“I aim to make the illustrations for children’s books as much a work of art”.

Monochrome landscape drawing with surreal, organic shapes resembling trees and arches, evoking a dream-like atmosphere.

“Everything I looked at cried out to be captured”

Gág preferred working in the countryside—first in rural Connecticut, later in New Jersey—where she felt most inspired to draw. Describing the productive summers she spent from 1925 to 1930 in a rented farmhouse she called Tumble Timbers, Gág wrote in her diary:

“Everything I looked at cried out to be captured and set down on paper. It mattered little whether I looked at a landscape or a junk heap, a cat or a flower or a weed, my Sears-Roebuck bed, or my bare kitchen—each thing had a personality and a life of its own, and all arranged themselves in ready-made compositions about me.” —Gág, diary entry, 1938