Wanda Gág’s World

Mar 28–Dec 2, 2024


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“Everything I looked at cried out to be captured”

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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

Christmas at Tumble Timbers, 1928

Woodcut-style illustration of a window with a view of a stormy night, an oil lamp, and billowing curtains.
Woodcut-style illustration of a window with a view of a stormy night, an oil lamp, and billowing curtains.

Wanda Gág, Christmas at Tumble Timbers, 1928. Wood engraving, 5 7/16 × 7 5/8 in. (13.8 × 19.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund 96.68.110



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On the Hour

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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