Everything I Looked at Cried Out to Be Captured

 

 

Macy's Stairway, 1941 - Wanda Gag

 

From the Whitney Museum.

In Gág’s prints, inanimate objects appear to wobble in space, tilting this way and that in defiance of the logic of linear perspective. Gág elaborated on her perception of space in a 1938 application for a Guggenheim fellowship grant, writing: 

“To me, perspective is more than a mechanical set of rules—I see in it the potentialities for rhythmic forcefulness and even emotional significance. With form and space it is the same: a still life is never still to me, it is solidified energy—and space does not impress me as being empty.”

“Everything I looked at cried out to be captured and set down on paper. 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.” —Gág, diary entry, 1938

“One of the things I planned to do during my short visit there, was to get some very accurate drawings of all these well-known corners, furniture and so on. Even the old couch, on which all the Gágs had sat thousands of times, was still in its old place, with the newspaper rack above it, Aunt Lena’s sewing machine to the left of it, and one of those wild pink, blue and lavender bas-relief calendars on the wall to the right of the couch….I spent most of my time drawing frantically. There were so many spots I wanted to draw.” —Wanda Gág, diary entry, 1938