Wanda Gag: Art for Life’s Sake
Philadelphia Museum of Art
2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy
Philadelphia
Showing through June 1, 2025
Seen March 31
In Wanda Gag’s world, an eggbeater is more than a blender — it’s a centerpiece.
Eggbeaters, kerosene lamps, sinks and soap dishes are the kind of mundane subjects that the artist sought to bring alive through her rolling and lively black-ink style developed during the early 20th century. Her belief in the omnipresence of beauty is the moral of her best known work, Millions of Cats, which is the oldest American picture book still in print today.
I discovered a first edition copy of that 1928 childhood story at the Philadelphia Art Museum, along with a wider portfolio of artistic work by Gag previously unfamiliar to me, during a visit to the exhibition, “Wanda Gag: Art for Life’s Sake.”
The majority of pieces on display are banal scenes painted on sandpaper. Gag was able to instill vitality and vibrancy into colorless grit, playing with the inherent instability of bouncing shadows, rolling hills, and furniture-packed rooms as a way of describing the imperfect personality of all things.
That’s the same idea behind Millions of Cats. In that story, an old man sets out to find a pet kitten to keep his lonely wife company. He is bombarded by the bounty of gorgeous felines he finds out in the world — but upon returning home, he realizes he can’t take care of the countless animals brought to his doorstep. He asks them to choose among themselves the prettiest one for adoption, and in the voting process the cats all consume one another. In the end, only one is left; a raggedy kitten who presumed himself too ugly for consideration. The couple take in the last one standing and happily deem him the most beautiful cat in the world.
It’s curious why this story has such longstanding power. It’s partly due to Gag’s ingenuity; she was one of the first writers to pioneer the double-page book spread, letting her illustrations unfurl across two open pages at once as a means of moving the story forward.
That sense of constant shifting is what’s most compelling about her stand-alone artistic work, as well.
The eggbeater, with its whisky tail end and rotating handle, was a fitting muse for the pioneering author and illustrator. Inspired by the post-Impressionist contouring of Van Gogh, Gag focused on concentricity as a way of spinning life into objects even in their ostensibly motionless states. Gag’s motto, recorded in her journal, was “Draw to Live and Live to Draw.” Gag’s self-imposed purpose was to visually describe the world around her; the eggbeater’s manufactured purpose was to beat eggs. Gag imbued a beater's churning ability into the atmosphere surrounding the everyday item. Spherical salt and pepper shakers stand in the background, seasoning the picture with a meta simplicity of black and white. Through Gag’s brush strokes, the now antique object remains alive and alluring.
Another representative image is Gag’s 1929 depiction of an empty Macy’s stairway. At a time when bustling store counters were all the rage, Gag was less interested in popular commotion than she was in quiet radiance. In her eyes, light leaps off silent railings; radiator tubes appear reminiscent of the folded intricacy of human intestines. It’s an astute tribute to observe from today’s perspective; our cartoonist, Izzy True, recently documented the melancholic passing of grandiose department stores with the closing of Philly’s Wanamaker Building. Seen post-liquidation, Gag’s drawing chronicles the humble beginnings of modern American consumerism.
A paragraph from her now-public diaries articulates Gag’s unique perspective: “Everything I looked out cried to be captured,” she reflected on her career. “It mattered little whether I looked at a landscape or a junk heap, a cat or a flower or a weed, my Sears-Roebuck bed, or my bare kitchen — each thing had a personality and a life of its own, and all arranged themselves in ready-made compositions about me.”
There may be millions of cats and millions of eggbeaters in this world, but Gag always ensured each individual — sentient or not — got its own kind of special treatment. Through her literary success, she offered evidence sentimentality is a self-sustaining, human force.
