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.

For Gág, drawing was a vital, sustaining act that overtook her days, interrupted other plans, and brought her boundless joy.  For her surreal still lives and roving landscapes to her scenes of slumbering cats and farm equipment she developed the distinctive practice of drawing on sandpaper. “My own motto,” she recorded in her diary, is “Draw to Live and Live to Draw.”