Elizabeth Olds would have liked that I own her 1941 screenprint The Lighthouse. She was determined to make art that was affordable to everyday people, and the damage on this print (note the missing lower left corner in the image above) made it affordable to me.
I also have Wanda Gág’s 1925 Spinning Wheel on my wall, but Gág couldn’t have cared less. I know this because she barely raised an eyebrow when socialite Abby Aldrich Rockefeller bought five of her works from a New York gallery in 1930. Mostly Gág was amused to think her homey works would hang in a mansion.
Working by lamplight helped Gág create the nightmarish shadows in “Spinning Wheel.”
Unlike Olds, Gág didn’t make art based on who might buy it or to make a point. Instead she made art because a “fiery thing inside,” as she put it, compelled her to. Olds felt a sense of social responsibility; Gág felt a responsibility to herself. These different approaches are on view at Mia in “The Rabblerouser and the Homebody: Minnesota’s Elizabeth Olds and Wanda Gág,” an exhibition of prints, drawings, and book materials in galleries G315 and G316 through the fall.
Gág was born in 1893 in New Ulm, a prairie town founded 40 years earlier by German settlers in southern Minnesota. Her father, Anton Gág, had emigrated from Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) and was an artist himself. He died of tuberculosis when Wanda was just 15, an ailment apparently brought on by painting murals in cold, damp churches. The townspeople of New Ulm felt that Wanda—the oldest of seven children—should put school and art aside and clerk in a shop to help the family.
But Wanda believed unreservedly in her artistic destiny, and her father’s death only redoubled her resolve. Except for a year of teaching, she spent the next fifteen years juggling classes and money-making projects until her siblings were sufficiently settled. By 1923 she felt free to focus on herself. She was 30 years old and living in New York when she began her habit of lighting out for the countryside part of every year to explore her originality. “I like to go in hiding,” she wrote, “for the purpose of greater freedom and concentration in my work.”
Filled with nostalgia on a return visit to New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1929, Gág lovingly sketched her Grandma’s very proper parlor.
Her subjects were passionate paeans to nature, eerily intense meditations on rickety objects, or homey interiors like Grandma’s Parlor (1930)—sketched on a visit to her grandparents’ Minnesota farm in 1929. Newly flush from the success of her children’s book Millions of Cats (1928), she traveled from Minneapolis to New Ulm by taxi. The print shows Gág’s telltale distortions, energized forms, and a folk-like quality rooted in her German-Bohemian upbringing. Also on display is the zinc plate Gág drew on to make this print. (It sits near another attention-getter: one of Gág’s Bohemian blouses.)
Gág at one of her beloved rural retreats.
Where Gág looked inward and found private meaning in humble surroundings, Olds looked outward. Born into comfortable circumstances in Minneapolis in 1896, she nevertheless found her subjects in the hardships of the Great Depression. She made lithographs of those struggling in Omaha, then in 1935 joined the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project in New York, a government program that provided jobs to unemployed artists. Not eligible for relief herself (she wasn’t poor enough), she was hired to share her graphic skills and technical expertise with other artists.
The work dovetailed with Olds’s dream of putting original art in the hands of ordinary people. As a founding member of the FAP’s Silk Screen Unit, she helped transform screenprinting—a simple, low-cost process for making color posters and signage—into a medium that was expressive enough for fine artists yet cheap enough for the average citizen to afford.
Olds’s more picturesque subjects—like lighthouses—were calculated to appeal to a mass audience. Many prints in the exhibition, however, reflect her social concerns. Like other liberal artists active in the 1930s, she thought art could change society.
With her WPA print “Miners,” Olds was conveying her support for racial justice and unionization.
To help support miners and steel workers fighting for unionization, for example, Olds traveled to Pennsylvania to document their lives. (The wary miners made her join their union before they would let her sketch; she promptly got certified.) Her concern for racial justice is evident in the diverse faces in Merry-Go-Round (1940), Miners (1937), and the potently feminist Burlesque (1939). A favorite target was the middle class, shown having conniptions over classical nudity in the parody Adoration of the Masters (1941). The several horse images in the show are the only hint that Olds herself was a product of the middle class: Growing up in Minneapolis, she was an accomplished horsewoman who could be seen trotting around Lake of the Isles.
Another print with hoped-for popular appeal, “The Lone Ranger” hints at Olds’s days as a champion equestrian at the Minnesota State Fair.
The spinning wheels and steel mills in “The Rabblerouser and the Homebody” helped usher in new, modern subjects for American art in the early 1900s. In these choices, Olds and Gág were following the dictum of Robert Henri, the influential realist painter who taught them both at the Art Students League in New York. He urged his students to portray the life they experienced around them. To travel this road, Olds decided against the “prearranged schedule for domesticity” expected of her. The equally independent Gág married her longtime partner Earle Humphreys just three years before she died of lung cancer at 53.
“Burlesque” was so racy, Olds had it printed privately, outside the WPA.
Finally, we might ask, did these two Minnesotans ever meet? There’s every chance they did in March 1939, on the 24th floor of the Empire State Building, when both sat on the jury to select art for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.