Wanda Gág’s World

For Gág, the space surrounding an object was just as active as the object itself. Writing in her diary in 1929, she explained:

“I am still as deeply absorbed in the form of the atmosphere around objects as I was several years ago and I have tried this and that way of expressing this feeling. . . . There is, to me, no such thing as an empty place in the universe—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, that is a rhythm created by its surrounding forms. . . . When a space can be as definite, as surely invested with volume and character as a tangible object—what is one going to do about it?”