Kay Sage

I Saw Three Cities 1944

Katherine Linn Sage (1898 June 25 - 1963 January 8), usually known as Kay Sage, was a Surrealist artist and poet. She was born in Albany, New York the second daughter of a prosperous upper middle class family. Much of her youth she spent traveling around Europe with her mother, a free spirit whose ample means allowed her to indulge an unquenchable wanderlust.

Sage settled down in Rapallo, Italy, to pursue art studies in Romein the early 1920s. In 1924 she met Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, an Italian nobleman who became her first husband. But the life of the idle rich did not satisfy her; after ten years in the social circuit she would later call "a stagnant swamp," she separated from her husband and began to pursue her artistic ambitions in earnest.

Sage gravitated to Paris and became associated with the Surrealist movement. Around 1937 she was introduced to fellow painter Yves Tanguy by her friend Heinz Henghes and began a long-term relationship with him.

At the outbreak of World War II, Sage moved back to the United States and arranged for several of her French fellow artists to take refuge in America, including Tanguy, who would soon become her second husband.

Sage and Tanguy were married in Reno, Nevada on 17 August, 1940. After the war, the couple bought an old farmhouse in Woodbury, Connecticut and converted it into an artists' studio. They would spend the rest of their lives painting there.

When Tanguy died in 1955, Sage was deeply affected. She painted less and less, her once witty poetry turned wry and cynical, and she became a virtual recluse. What little energy she could summon was spent mostly on defending Tanguy's work against the critics.

A first suicide attempt in 1959 failed. The second one succeeded, on January 8, 1963, three days after Tanguy's birthday. Her ashes were scattered on the coast of Brittany, together with those of her husband.

The Fourteen Daggers, 1942

Perhaps inevitably, critics have had a tendency to place Sage's paintings in the shadow of those of her husband Yves Tanguy. It is true that Sage's paintings, like those of her husband, show large, surreal landscapes, but the strange shapes that wander her worlds are as reminiscent of de Chirico as they are of Tanguy. A comparison of, say, Sage's Tomorrow is Never, with its draped figures rising from the mist encased by scaffolding, with Tanguy's Multiplication des Arcs, with its milling crowds of pebbles oozing around glittering, jagged blocks of light, shows two very alien, but very different universes—as different from each other as they are from our own....

Selected list of works

1938 A Little Later
1939 My Room Has Two Doors
1939 This Morning
1940 Danger, Construction Ahead
1942 Margin of Silence
1942 The Fourteen Daggers
1944 From Another Approach
1944 I Saw Three Cities

Le Passage, 1956

1944 In the 3rd Sleep
1944 The Upper Side of the Sky
1947 Ring of Iron, Ring of Wool
1949 The Instant
1950 The Morning Myth
1950 Small Portrait
1951 Men Working
1951 Tomorrow for Example
1951 Unusual Thursday
1952 On the Contrary
1953 Third Paragraph
1954 No Passing
1955 Tomorrow is Never
1956 Le Passage

Lists of Works Undated

Summer

External link

Two Sage paintngs.

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