Wanda Gág

Best known for her work as an illustrator of socialist magazines and children’s books (such as the beloved Millions of Cats), Wanda Gág blazed a trail as an emphatically independent artist in the U.S. throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

This exhibition presents the museum’s unrivaled holdings of Gág drawings for the first time, celebrating the wonder to be found in her distinctive practice of drawing on sandpaper. For Gág, drawing was a vital, sustaining act that overtook her days, interrupted other plans, and brought her boundless joy. “My own motto,” she recorded in her diary, is “Draw to Live and Live to Draw.”

Presenting forty of Gág’s drawings—from her surreal still lives and roving landscapes to her scenes of slumbering cats and farm equipment—Art for Life’s Sake restores to view the vibrant personal vision of this charismatic artist.