Art heros - Wanda Gag

Wanda Gag is an artist I first met in childhood - possibly because her illustrations appeared in Jack and Jill magazine, and I was struck by her "strange" name ... and the strange quality of these pictures. What I didn't know then was her rather romantic story - how as a teenager, after her father's death in 1907, as the oldest of seven children, she supported the family by her art. They lived in a house built by her father in New Ulm, Minnesota, which has now been restored.
Wanda went on to study and work in New York, and in the mid-1920s her career took off. Now she's known for her children's books, starting with Millions of Cats in 1928.


Her non-children's book work often has a slightly spooky tinge, for instance "Lime Light" -See more of her prints here.

The family had spoken German at home, and in addition to having the visual-art input from her father, Wanda heard folktales from her storyteller mother. In 1936 the first of her translations from the brothers Grimm was published; the best known is probably Snow White, published in 1938. (Grimm's fairy tales are an important part of my own background, read to us kids in German by my grandmother from her old book, printed in "black-letter" (fraktur) style.)

Wanda Gag's motto was "draw to live and live to draw", and she never let her family or her marriage get in the way of her career. A lifelong chain smoker, she died of lung cancer in 1946.