After settling in the Minnesota frontier town of New Ulm in 1879, German-Bohemian Anton Gag established himself as an artist and begat a family business. His oldest daughter and protégé, Wanda, made her reputation in New York as a printermaker and children’s author and book illustrator. Her younger sister Flavia was a prolific writer, illustrator, and painter.
The lives and works of Anton Gag and his daughters Wanda and Flavia are all of a piece. Each had strong feelings before nature and always—even if diverted for a time by the cultural life of cities—returned to the beauty of the countryside. Each struggled with distressing feelings of not being understood. Each was driven to create, even in the face of extreme poverty and illness. Nature, for Anton, Wanda, and Flavia, was the lodestar.
Rich in visual records—paintings, drawings, and photographs, The Gag Family: German-Bohemian Artists in America explores and celebrates one family’s remarkable cultural journey from Bohemia to the American Midwest to New York and beyond. Using family diaries, letters, and memoirs, it traces the influences of European family traditions on the art of these three exceptionally enterprising artists and places them in the context of American art.
About the Author: Julie LEnfant was born in Louisiana and holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Louisiana State University and a Ph.D in art history from the University of Minnesota. She has written about various artists and writers, including Dora Maar, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf. Her previous books are The Dancers of Sycamore Street (1983), a novel, and William Rossettis Art Criticism: The Search for Truth in Victorian Art (1999). She is an associate professor of art history at the College of Visual Arts, St. Paul, Minnesota.
