Wanda Gág, Part 2

We're gonna pick up right where we left off, so if you haven't listened to the first episode, you should probably go back and do that, or this won't really make all that much sense or have all that much gravity. So we mentioned at the end of part one that Wanda had published an essay called a Hotbed of Feminists.

That's kind of where part one ends. And this was published in the periodical The Nation, And while it was obviously about the Gog household, the family's aim in this piece was changed to merr and it shares the story of growing up in a family of almost all girls. It opens with quote the smell of olive oil and mama in bed. This combination always meant a new baby in our family. It was one girl after another, which pleased me greatly, for I considered boys not only unesthetic,

but extremely unnecessary creatures. It offers insight into the growing up years of the household, noting, quote, my mother, who was a natural iconoclast, arranged our hair in unusual ways, refused to burden us with starch clothes, and considered shoes

and stockings unnecessary in hot weather. Sundays included. It also shares what it was like for Wanda growing up in a non religious home, noting that when her classmates asked her what denomination they were, she just told them they were nothing, which led said classmates to tell Wanda her family was unfit for heaven. When she asked her father about it, he tells her quote, nobody knows what will happen to us. Just do the best you know how,

and everything will be all right. This essay also shares the details of the really difficult times the family faced immediately after Anton's death. It mentions how the final year of her father's life was stressful because he couldn't work, and that while her mother had been told to take in washing to make ends meet. Afterwards quote. But mother, after the strain of the past year, was too weary and ill to even do her own housework, and I could see that the few dollars I would earn as

a clerk in the village store would never solve our problem. Besides, I was needed at home to help with the housework and to take care of the baby. This I did, and by drawing place cards and writing children's stories, which I illustrated, I earned about as much as the store job would have brought. There followed years of struggle for us.

the article and then sought out the exhibition. Still other versions say that Evans was a socialist and recognized Wanda's socialist values and wanted to elevate them. But regardless of how Evans found Gog and loved her work and was in a position to offer her a project that would become a significant part of her legacy. Ernestine Evans was an editor at Coward McCann Publishing, and she offered Wanda

a contract to create a children's book. Wanda actually had a kid's book that she had been working on since at least nineteen twenty. Partner Earle had even helped her shop it around to publishers, but no one had wanted it. For the next several months. After meeting Evans, Wanda worked on the manuscript and illustrations, and it was published before the end of nineteen twenty eight. That book, Millions of Cats, was groundbreaking in a number of ways. The layout of

the book was very unique for its time. This was a period when children's book illustrations were not typically laid out in a way that integrated them with the text.

There was usually text and story on one page and an illustration on the facing page, but Gog's illustrations flow from page to page in concert with the lettering, and the story features an elderly couple who want a kiddie, but when the husband ventures out to find a beautiful cat, he cannot choose just one and ends up leading millions of cats home without thinking about the resources it will

take to care for them. They do things along the way, like they all want to drink water, and if each of them has one lap, they empty out a lake, and they all want to eat. And if they each eat a blade of grass from a hill, the hill is left barren, et cetera. Spoiler alert jump twenty seconds ahead if you don't want to know. The cats all eat each other, except for one skinny straggler who becomes

the couple's beloved pet. One of the most alluring aspects of God's Book for Children, present right here from the beginning and Millions of Cats, is that the stories are actually kind of dark, obviously from that synopsis. In this way, they harken back to the oldest fairy tales, and they're often ghoulish twists. This is generally attributed to the cultural

tone of her family's background and her upbringing. She would have been told stories as a child that came from her parents' bohemian folklore, rather than the more sanitized, hyper positive and cheery children's stories that had become popular in the US in the early nineteen hundreds. This reflected in her own account of her early years, written in nineteen forty quote, I was born in this country, but often feel as though I had spent my early years in Europe.

My father was born in Bohemia, as were my mother's parents. My birthplace, New All, Minnesota, was settled by Middle Europeans, and I grew up in an atmosphere of old World customs and legends, of Bavarian and Bohemian folk songs of German Markin and turnver inactivities. I spoke no English until I went to school.

by James Earl Jones, and I highly recommend it. Wanda was a cat lover herself, although she only had two cats, not millions, which was named Snoopy, which is so cute, and she used her own cats as models to create the drawings of the hordes of Cats in the books. We'll talk about the success of Millions of Cats and what the book meant to Wanda in just a moment, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Millions of Cats was hugely popular right out of the gate.

It had sold ten thousand copies by January of nineteen twenty nine, and another five thousand by the end of February, and it just kept going. Its success offered Gog her first taste of real money and lasting financial stability, and that book is still in print almost one hundred years later, making it the longest running illustrated book in print in the US. Millions of Cats was an accidental insurance policy

for economic uncertainty. The royalties from this and later book projects provided Gog with a dependable income even throughout the Depression. Though the first thirty eight years of her life had involved a lot of financial difficulty, Millions of Cats really ended all that very quickly, and it also won her a Newberry Award. Writing for Minnesota History Magazine in nineteen seventy five, Richard W. Cox noted quote when Wanda took her manuscript of Millions of Cats to publishers in nineteen

twenty seven. Little did she suspect the significance of this moment to herself or American art. Millions of Cats became the prototype for the picture book, defined as one in which a single artist conceives, writes, illustrates, and supervises the printing of the whole book project. Her success in the children's book field should not have come as a surprise, as her upbringing and later training left her peculiarly prepared

for the new genre. Telling, reading, writing, and illustrating stories was a major pastime in the Goog home, and Wanda proved to be more imaginative here than the other children. Wanda may have been the most imaginative of her siblings, but she was not the only one with artistic talent, and she involved her family in the project. Her brother, Howard lettered the book. This was in service to its quality.

Coward McCann had a letterer do the work, and Wanda had rejected it, so then she had her brother do it instead, and he would letter everything she worked on going forward. Millions of Cats, as we said, made Wanda money, and it also made her famous. She was suddenly put in a position of having to do interviews and have appearances, but the success for her was all about putting her in the more important position of being able to make

art for art's sake. Everything in her life was in service to her art, and she was adamant that the priority was always going to be art. Coward McCann and other publishers were eager to make deals for more books with her signature style, but her business decisions were always guided by the question of whether it would enable her to make the art she wanted to make, Like basically, how much can I make on this project and how long can I then just go to my studio and

paint the stuff I want to make. Everyone knew Wanda because of millions of cats, but to her this book was just a tool to sustain her true calling. She also had a lot of offers to illustrate children's books written by other people, and that was always a hard pass, with one sort of odd exception.

Many of Gog's most well known works have sort of long stories in how they develop over time, for example,

jumping forward for a moment. In nineteen forty one, she produced a lithograph called Macy's Stairway, and this shows a fairly pedestrian view of an industrial style stairway illustrated in Gog's moody, almost cartoonish way, showing the coiled up emergency fire hose on one of the landings and the mounted handrail along the exterior edge of the stair with a glimpse of the heavier wooden mules and balusters on the other side of the stair. But she started working on

this image eleven years earlier. She apparently loved Macy's department store. She often shopped there, and she spent an afternoon there drawing in January of nineteen twenty nine, and then that drawing was refined to a finish drawing and then was made into an etching. She was not very happy with the etching, and then it wasn't until eleven years later that she was ready to revisit this image for its lithographic form, which is essentially a copy of that original

finished drawing. Later, in nineteen twenty nine, gog published her second book with Coward McCann, The Funny Thing. The story is about a man named Bobo who serves the birds and rabbits and mice beautiful food that he prepares, until one day a very strange creature shows up. That quote looked something like a dog and a little like a giraffe, and from the top of its head to the tip of its tail there was a row of beautiful blue points.

This creature is the Funny Thing. It calls itself an ammal and tells Bobo that it doesn't want his cheeses and puddings because he eats dolls. This distresses Bobo so much because he cannot bear the thought of children losing their dolls in this way. So he comes up with a way to feed the Funny Thing something else. So, in spite of this dock market crash, people seem to have money to buy the Funny Thing, because it, like millions of Cats, was very popular Gog found herself once

again requested all kinds of appearances and interviews. She also had a book tour during which she visited her family, including her sister Stella, who was at that point married with a child, and she visited her grandparents. These visits were very inspirational for Gog, and she produced a series of lithographs that captured scenes from her family's living spaces,

including Grandma's parlor. One of the hallmarks of Gog's work is this sense that the lines used to create the images are moving or vibrating slightly, and Grandma's parlor is a perfect example of that. What is essentially a static scene showing part of a Victorian looking couch, a bureau, and a small side table that sits in front of a window with long curtains feels very much like there's

movement in the room. It's a really interesting and unique illusion, particularly because the style of the art is not realistic, so it's kind of like looking into a slightly cartoonish parallel dimension. During the nineteen twenties, Gog and Earl Humphries spent a lot of time at a rented place out

in the New Jersey Country they called tumble timbers. The rural life that Wanda loved, which came with few amenities, would not have been possible if Earle had not been willing to handle a lot of the heavy labor aspects of life on a farm. He kept the firewood chopped and ready, made sure they had food, and tended the gardens that Wanda loved so much. His willingness to do the farm's heavy labor made it possible for Wanda to work on her art without having to concern herself with

the day to day chores. But there was tension in this relationship. Earl cheated on Wanda at the end of the nineteen twenties, and Wanda reciprocated by also cheating. The pair decided at that point to have what basically sounds like an open relationship, although they called it vacation. Admittedly, the parlance of an open relationship did not exists then, right, right, So it makes sense that they're like, we're on vacation from our regular Yeah. Yeah, there were no pollocules at this point.

Wanda and Earl moved away from their home at Tumble Timbers in nineteen thirty and they first moved to a place in West Cornwall, Connecticut that was owned by a friend, and there she worked on her book Snippy and Snappy, which is about two sibling field my mind and a wild adventure that they go on when the ball of yarn that they love gets picked up by a little girl and they follow that little girl home. During the years leading up to the nineteen thirties, Wanda had moved

a lot. While she spent spring and summer in the country, she was often back in New York for the entire winter, and she was tiring of the inconsistency of just picking up and moving every few months. She wanted a more permanent and stable home and not to be maintaining two residences. She had reached a point in her career that she had the money to start looking for her own property, so in June of nineteen thirty one, she purchased a

farm in Milford, New Jersey. When she purchased it, the house, which sat on a pretty sizable acreage of land, was not updated, but Wanda and Earl renovated it. They added indoor plumbing. Her brother Howard did some of the renovation work on the house. Wanda also had a separate studio space built on the property away from the house. She called All Creation at the name that eventually came to

be used for the entire farm. Once she was settled in a place that felt truly her own, Gog once again found her groove as an artist, and she produced a lot of lithographs and multiple books. Her lithographic work during this period showed an embrace of nature and a move away from representing city life, instead focusing on landscapes and still lifes. She was working at the time on

what would become the ABC Bunny for Coward McCann. When her artistic interest was drawn elsewhere, she started working on an illustrated version of her favorite book, Henry David Throse Walden.

This was initially something she wanted to submit to a book contest, but although she put in a load of work to prepare it, at the last minute she changed her mind and didn't submit it because she felt that this would only get a limited run if it actually won the contest, and she wanted it to a wider audience. But oddly she never seemed to pursue it any further.

It was never published. Meanwhile, the Great Depression had caused her income from selling her fine art to slow to just about nothing, so she went back to The ABC Bunny, which was published in nineteen thirty three. The ABC Bunny isn't solely an ABC book. It has a narrative structure, with each letter representing the next event in the bunny's story.

Like her other books, her brother Howard lettered this one, and her sister Flavia also wrote a song for it, which is included in score format at the beginning of the book. Coming up, we'll talk about the last years of Wandagg's life, starting with a sabbatical that she took to just paint and draw whatever she liked. We'll talk about how that worked out after we hear from the

sponsors that keep the show going. After the publication of The ABC Bunny, Gog felt like she had earned some time to once again focus solely on her own art. But once she had that time, she was not feeling especially inspired, so she eventually went back to working on another book, and that became Gone Is Gone, or The

Story of a Man who wanted to do housework. And in this story, a man named Fritzel is convinced that he works harder in the fields than his wife, Lisi works taking care of the house and the animals and the baby, So the pair decide to switch places for a day. Some rather frightening things happen in this book. We've already mentioned that Wanda Gog's art style in her

book style is a little dark. Fritzel almost kills the family's cow by accident, for example, and at the end of the day he begs his wife to please take back the housework so he can go back to the fields. Lisy did great in the fields, by the way, throughout these early years, at all creation when she was working, initially on sabbatical and then on this book. Gog's diaries show a new maturity where she's very reflective about her work and less prone to the sweeping generalizations about artistic

gifts that she made in her younger years. She evolved her view of the artist's job as including the need to cultivate their own work and be judicious about creative choices instead of only following every muse that pops up.

sort of a counter to it, an alternative version. In Gog's telling of the story, the queen turns literally green with envy when the mirror tells her that snow White is more beautiful, and when the Prince finds snow White in an eternal slumber and a casket in the wood, he does not kiss her back to life. He decides to carry the princess back to the castle, and she's jostled on the journey, with a piece of apple lodged in her throat being dislodged that leads to her awakening.

for the peasant class was almost legendary. Her seven dwarfs are frugal, hard working, sensible men, not Disney's famous likable comic fools who anxiously stumble around the forest cottage awaiting snow White's next kiss. Wanda spoke of peasants in the sense of all honest workers trying to maintain their integrity amidst the pressures of the industrial Western world. The picture book proved to be a good way for her to serve humanity and to vindicate herself from earlier accusations of elitism.

And being out of touch with ordinary human beings. She also revealed in her children's books the strength and dignity of women like Wanda herself. Females in her books assert their opinions and make decisions. They suffer the same sins of pride, vanity, and greed as men. One is. Artwork in these books, over which she had complete editorial control,

is whimsical, but it's not simplistic. Gog refused to apply lesser standards to her work for children's picture books than she would to any fine art lithograph she made.

and had even speculated about it in my diary. At times, I found that I was able to regard my youthful outpourings, while with a natural interest and hence not complete detachment, still with considerable objectivity. True, all the usual juvenilities were still there, the slang and silliness, the girlish gush and crush, the introspection, the agonizing over love, the youthful arrogance and trigidity.

But recognizing these traits as typical of the various age groups of which I was successively a part, I saw myself as only one of many going through the normal phases of adolescence.

nineteen forty three, they married rather suddenly. And this sounds pretty romantic, and there may have been an element of romance to it, but this move was actually catalyzed by a work issue for Earl. So because it was wartime, Humphries was working in a war job. He was working in a machine shop, and he had organized the workers there into a union. The shop managers threatened to fire Earle, but their reason had nothing to do with his unionization,

even though it really did. The reason that they gave was that he was living in sin with a woman who was not his wife. So Wanda and Earl fixed that lickety split, and Wanda became a bride at the age of fifty. Wanda was having some health issues at this point. She'd gone to various doctors and they'd all told her that she just needed rest. Problem that still exists today when women go to the doctor. Wanda felt she was having menopause related problems, but the doctors told

her she was too young for that. In some cases, they were reportedly shocked when she told them she was almost fifty. She was very petite and thin for her whole life, and a lot of times that made her seem a lot younger than she really was. She was mistaken for a teenager well into her adult life, but none of that addressed why she felt terrible a lot

of the time. Yeah, there are some references in her diary where you can tell she's talking about not feeling great, and it reads as being almost tentative to actually write down what she's experiencing because it seems a little scary. By nineteen forty four, though, Wanda was often complaining of shortness of breath, and it was bad enough that she could not work on her art, which for her was like not being able to breathe, and then just day to day things like brushing her teeth became simply too

much for her. At this point, she had started staying exclusively in an apartment that she had gotten in New York because the winters at all Creation were too cold and traveling between the two was too arduous. Finally, in February of nineteen forty five, she was admitted to Doctor's Hospital for exploratory surgery, and the resulting news was very bad.

Wanda had lung cancer and had months to live. This news was not given to Wanda, but to Earle and Earl and Wanda's brother, Howard discussed the matter and decided not to tell Wanda or her sisters. This is how it was often handled at the time. I'm not excusing it, but that's like how it was often handled at the time. Yes, Wanda still had treatments and her diary entries indicate that she figured out from those treatments that she must have had one or more malignant growths, and she knew she

was only getting worse. Earle did everything he could to make Wanda's life as comfortable as possible. They spent time in Milford when she felt well enough, and he drove her to Florida for a vacation in the spring of nineteen forty five. After they got back to New York and then to New Jersey, she oversaw the planting of her annual vegetable garden and worked on another project, more

Tales from Grimm for Coward McCann. In late June of nineteen forty five, Wanda rapidly declined and was admitted to Doctor's hospital once again. She died there on June twenty seventh. Today you can visit the new Olm House, designed by Anton Goog, that Wanda and her siblings grew up in if you happen to be visiting Minnesota. It is open regular hours June to October and then by appointment throughout

the rest of the year. So if that's something you want to do, highly recommend you check out their website. So that you get all the details before you show up and find out maybe you couldn't go in. But that is Wanda Gog. I have so much behind the scenes stuff to talk about for her, and in the meantime I have a little bit a listener mail. This is a listener mail about one of my favorite topics of recent past, spite houses. This is from our listener Lily,

who writes, Hello, lovely ladies. Your podcast has been one of my favorites for years, so firstly, thank you for all your good work and wonderful and interesting content. I got especially excited about your episode on spite houses, which is just a hilarious concept to me. In December twenty twenty two to March twenty twenty three, I had the opportunity to work and live in Lebanon, and towards the end of my time there I learned about Abasa translated

to English the Grudge. This is the thinnest building in Beirut and was the result of feuding brothers arguing about how to share the property their father had left them. I was so fortunate to have a friend in Beirut who took me there so I could see the building and the stunningly beautiful view that the one brother wanted to block from the other. Looking for wered to hear about hopefully more spite houses around the world and all

other things you come up with. I've attached photos I took of the grudge and also a few of my little fur ball, Wilma Waffle. She's a ten year old, cuddly and very gracious lady from a little island on the Arctic Circle right off the coast of Norway, Trena, and she lives to lay on the floor for a big belly rub. She also loves smelly shoes and bird watching.

You know, I had a cat that was very obsessed with smelly shoes and we used to discuss that he looked like he was huffin' when he got in there. She is adorable, by the way. I want to rub that tummy so much. And I love the grudge. I mean, I don't love it, but I love it. It's one that did come up when I was looking at spite houses online, but it's a little newer, and also I

didn't have a ton of info on it. But it is a very very narrow house that has been built to block a beautiful view from another house, because that's a number of spite houses come about that way. I'm just laughing about spite houses now. If you would like to write to us about spite houses, or kiddies or wandagg or children's literature or any of the other many many things, you can do that at History podcast at

iHeartRadio dot com. If you have not subscribed to the show and you would like to, I promise you that is the easiest thing you will maybe do today. You can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.