Katherine Linn Sage was born on June 25, 1898 to a well-respected Albany, New York family. Kay‘s father was a state senator, although Kay went abroad with her mother following her parents’ separation and spent most of her childhood in Europe. She studied art in Rome at the British Academy and the Scuola Libera delle Belle Arti, and while in Italy she married her first husband, Prince Ranieri di San Faustino.
Surrealism and Tanguy
Despite her continentally royal spouse and fairytale ending marriage, Sage was not satisfied with the relationship and was divorced by 1935. She made her way to Paris soon after and became involved with the Surrealists, at first on a primarily artistic basis and eventually as the lover of painter Yves Tanguy. Tanguy followed Sage back to America to escape the chaos of World War II and the couple married in 1940.
The Tanguys’ home in Woodbury, Connecticut was known as “Town Farm” and served as a studio for both artists. Working together in the converted barn area, they were nonetheless determined to maintain separate psyches; Time magazine noted in 1950 how Tanguy’s half of the studio was “neat as an operating room” while “Kay’s studio is as messy as Tanguy’s is clean.”
Like any intensely creative couple, Sage and Tanguy had their share of ups and downs. Also, as the unfortunately lesser-known wife of a more prominent artist, Sage’s work is often noted as being strongly influenced by Tanguy’s. There are surely parallels in style, but perhaps no more so than the influence of pre-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico on Tanguy himself or upon other Surrealist icons such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.
Many of Sage’s paintings reflect upon her classical training in Rome and her fine eye for structural and architectural detail. Her work tends to be muted and restrained in palette yet also features subtly powerful elements, like the smooth, gleaming blond hair of the woman in Sage’s 1956 The Passage. Other notable and seemingly existential Sage paintings include The Fourteen Daggers, In the Third Sleep, Tomorrow for Example and On the Contrary.
Sage’s Ultimate Passage
In 1955, Yves Tanguy died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Connecticut shortly after his 55th birthday. Sage was stunned and overwhelmed by the loss and never seemed to regain her personal equilibrium. In the aforementioned The Passage, Sage painted the numbness of her grief into this complex work, showing the bare back of a faceless woman staring into an arid landscape. As a widow, Sage became more detached from the outside world, while subsequent problems with her vision—a painter’s worst nightmare—made her even more withdrawn.
In her later years, Sage focused on her poetry and collage compositions, and she also donated various Tanguy and other Surrealist works to major museum collections. A 1961 letter from Sage to the Museum of Modern Art has her describing her visual status as “monocular,” though she hoped that was a temporary situation. Despite various treatments, however, Sage’s eyesight did not improve and she ultimately committed suicide in January of 1963 by shooting herself.
Legacy
Kay Sage’s work can be found in various American museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center, Connecticut’s Mattatuck Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Furthermore, Judith Suther’s biography devoted exclusively to Kay Sage (A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist) was published in 1997 by the University of Nebraska Press.
Sources
- The Surrealists: Art in Detail Series – Laura Thompson (Metro Books, 2008)
- Serene Surrealist – Time.com
- Kay Sage Papers – Smithsonian Archives of American Art
