11.4.24 — A Small World
One thing about parenting could drive anyone crazy, but children eat it up. Who as a child could not take comfort in Disney’s “It’s a Small World After All,” the song introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair, with its lilt, simplicity, and endless repetition? And who could not identify with something small as you but still an entire world?
Wanda Gág got the message long before, and her art was equally obsessive, in prints and children’s books alike. Now the Whitney sets aside a modest room off the permanent collection for “Gág’s World,” through December 2. ” It’s a small world after all and just maybe enough.
It is also a dark world—or at least a ghostly one. Her prints are not peopled but haunted, like that of Christmas Eve, where no child dares to enter, much less to peek. If Gág troubles with presents, a ghost has carried them away. In a reader, C is for crash, with what might be a wrecking ball, D is for dash, and E is for elsewhere. An enchanter carries off, as another title has it, millions of cats—like a pied piper who cannot be bothered with motley and cares too much for rats. And you know what they say about herding cats.
Perhaps I should have said that her ghosts are her gifts. I cannot swear that her prints count as modern art rather than, as the old put-down had it, illustration. She lends the simplest of scenes enormous detail—not in what she includes, but in how she renders it. Lithographs have the sharp edges of woodcuts, in black and white, but with a greater freedom, and the strokes encroach on one another as woodcuts never could. Her subjects, too, stick to what others might mistake for calendar art, like Winter Twilight. Prewar American Modernism’s social realism, Surrealism, and formal experiment are nowhere in sight.
Does her small-town America have more in common with Grant Wood than with Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton? The curators, Roxanne Smith and Scout Hutchinson, make the case for an artist after all. It has just those two spreads from her children’s book amid prints, also from the Whitney’s collection, and they share a small wall with Christmas Eve. Still, she did not become an artist all at once. Born in 1893 to immigrants from Bohemia, Gág left Minnesota in her thirties to study at the Art Student League, when it was a touch less conservative. She mingled and exhibited easily with her peers.
Like Beatrix Potter, with whom I pair this review and an earlier report on Walton Ford in my latest upload, she was also a student of nature, and she settled in the outer edge of suburbia, with an ingenious home at that—a balcony atop a porch as a cylindrical addition to a square home, both with gabled roofing. Like Potter, too, hers is a humanized nature, but without the cuddly, intelligent animals. Plants run wild only as dangerous companions. Plain wood homes cannot rise in straight lines either, and streets cannot afford escape or access. One can only imagine the strange life within. They are observed all the same, which makes the ghosts that much stranger.
Ghosts worthy of their name require a ghostly light, and Gág’s is neither plainly natural nor artificial. It bears down on a scene face on, leaving broad areas of light and white outlines. Does it makes her an illustrator at heart, taking care for her subject more than anything? No doubt, but her idea of community is both familiar and imagined. It might not so be bad for children after all. Besides, they get to carry with them from their reading Millions of Cats. Could there be worlds within worlds?
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.