Wanda Gág, Free to Imagine

This is a repost of the first of a series of posts on a few of the author/illustrators of classic children’s literature that I did many years ago. Along with a few friends (here and here, for instance), I’m blogging all fun stuff this week as a throw-back to the old days of blogging when a little frivolity was a fine thing.

According to my long-ago children’s literature professor, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats was the first children’s book to use a repeated refrain throughout. (You know it, right?: “…hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats!”) It was a technique used in oral versions of folk tales, but it hadn’t made its way into books before Wanda Gág wrote this one. It was also the first children’s book to use a double-paged spread and hand lettered text.

People thought of Wanda Gág as a “free spirit”, and her work is unique and innovative, but she was hardly free. She was a Minnesota native, the oldest of seven children, and only fourteen when her father died of tuberculosis. His last words to her were “what Papa has left undone, Wanda will have to do.”

And so she did. It was her work doing odd jobs illustrating magazine articles, greeting cards, and calendars that made the money that kept the family together. She graduated from high school in 1912, but didn’t feel free to accept her scholarship to art school until the next two sisters had graduated, too, and were established as teachers.

Wanda Gag was already a well-known artist with works in the permanent collections of many museums when her Newbery Honor book Millions of Cats was published in 1928. Her other Newbery Honor book is ABC Bunny, but you may also be familiar with Gone Is Gone (my favorite), Nothing At All and others.

Unfortunately, Wanda died from lung cancer in 1946 when she was only 53. Not long before she died, she wrote a brief autobiography for Illustrators of Children’s Books, 1744-1945 by Bertha Mahoney. Wanda wrote in this piece about her experiences serving in the army, living in Paris, and travelling to the Orient and India on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

It was probably what she wished were true, but none of it was. To the last, I guess, Wanda Gag was free spirit, but a free spirit chained by her circumstances.

Do you want to see a few of of her works, which were, by the way, mostly lithographs?

Still Life

Grandma’s Parlor

Spinning Wheel

The Forge

Self Portrait

I don’t know the title to this last one, but I’m including it anyway because I like it. It’s a piece of farm machinery—a potato harvester, I’ve been told, but I can’t vouch for that.