Ganso was born on April 14, 1895 in Halberstadt, Germany, the youngest child in a large working-class family. His father, Wilhelm Ganso, had been a French soldier. Captured and imprisoned in Germany during the Franco-Prussian War, he remained in the Harz Mountains after his release, married a German girl, Johanna Niemand, and died in 1896, when Emil was just a year old.
As a boy, Ganso liked to draw with colored crayons, but the family was too poor to allow him to develop this interest, and he was apprenticed to a pastry cook and confectioner. His only formal training came during two months of free study in the life class of the National Academy School. He also learned from meeting other artists and probably was a frequent visitor to museums and galleries, since he rapidly gained a command of drawing techniques.
A chance meeting with a man who had visited the United States gave Ganso the idea of emigrating there. In 1912 he signed on as a journeyman pastry cook with a ship's crew and jumped ship after landing in Hoboken, New Jersey. Only seventeen, penniless, knowing no English, he found a job in a bakery and began to learn the language. After a year he visited New York City and its museums, and soon moved to Manhattan. Working in a bakery by night, by day he began to draw and paint. Ganso's first prints were linoleum cuts and woodcuts. From the library he borrowed a book on etching and improvised the special equipment needed to print intaglio plates. Ganso continued to support himself by working as a baker for more than ten years. During this period he acquired proficiency in pastel and oils as well as in the printmaking media of woodcut, etching, and lithography. In 1926 he took a collection of his work to the gallery of Erhard Weyhe, who gave him his first one-man show in that year and agreed to pay him an annual retainer. One of his paintings was shown at an exhibition of independent artists at the Waldorf, and his work appeared at the Whitney Studio Gallery. With such support, Ganso was able to give up baking and move into his own studio at 900 Sixth Avenue. Early critics praised Ganso's naive and direct point of view. Soon after his first exhibit, however, he formed a friendship with Jules Pascin, an artist noted both for his sensuous figure studies and for his flamboyance and wit; Pascin exercised an important influence on Ganso, both as an artist and as a person. As Ganso's own art matured, this influence diminished, but he retained a preference for the nude and the still life as basic subjects. Later on, when he had taken a summer studio in the artists' colony at Woodstock, New York, he added landscape to his repertory. He was always a prodigious worker. In the decade 1931-1941, besides his paintings and watercolors, he produced (and printed himself) more than fifty wood engravings, more than a hundred etchings and aquatints, and some one hundred lithographs. A Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1933 enabled him to travel to Europe to study graphic processes, especially lithography, as well as pigments and painting methods. In 1939 Ganso was appointed artist-in-residence at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, and in September 1940 he began teaching at the University of Iowa, at Iowa City. He was an inspired teacher. His mastery of materials and techniques was thorough, and he had the ability to communicate the stages through which he passed in his work to achieve an effect. His background left him not at all doctrinaire or snobbish about art; he was, moreover, a gifted raconteur. Ganso died of a coronary thrombosis in 1941 at his home in Iowa City at the age of forty-six; his wife, Fanny, survived him. His remains were cremated.
