Kay Sage

Kay Sage (born June 25, 1898, Watervliet, near Albany, New York, U.S.—died January 8, 1963, Woodbury, Connecticut) was an American Surrealist painter and poet known for her austere and architectural style.

As a girl, Sage moved from school to school, allegedly spending not more than three years in any one institution. She traveled overseas often with her mother, who had separated from Sage’s father in 1900 (divorced 1907–08). During those years, though her schooling and family life were unstable, she honed her proficiency in several languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. She also painted and drew often and was a prolific poet. She first took formal art classes at the Corcoran School of Art (now called Corcoran School of the Arts and Design) in Washington, D.C., in 1919–20. After World War I she moved to Rome and studied at the British School as well as the Free School of Fine Arts. She married Prince Ranieri di San Faustino in 1925, and the couple lived in Rome and Rapallo. During their 10-year marriage, Sage rarely painted, instead filling her time with the social obligations of a princess. A chance meeting with German avant-garde sculptor Heinz Henghes and the encouragement of poet Ezra Pound reawakened Sage’s interest in making art. Soon after, in 1936, under the name K. di San Faustino, she exhibited with Henghes at Galleria del Milione in Milan. Those works, most of which are now lost, were geometric and abstract, with a focus on distance and perspective. Sage’s works in the late 1930s were heavily influenced by Giorgio de Chirico, who would remain a lifelong reference for her. After about 10 years, Sage chose to end her marriage to the prince, and in 1937 she moved to Paris.

In 1938 Sage exhibited six oil paintings at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris. Her work was noticed and admired by André Breton and Yves Tanguy, who thought that the painter was surely a man. Sage was equally enamoured with Tanguy’s paintings. Soon Sage and Tanguy began a romantic relationship that would last the rest of their lives. At the outbreak of World War II, she returned to the United States and settled in New York City, and she had her first solo exhibition, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1940. Tanguy arrived in New York that year, and the couple married. A year later they moved to Woodbury, Connecticut. The years from 1941 until Tanguy’s death in 1955 were extremely fulfilling and productive for Sage. She actively developed a signature style. Her compositions possessed a sleekness that betrayed no brushwork, and their content was characterized by stiff architectural objects and suggestions of figures against bleak landscapes or wastelands.

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Despite their move to Connecticut, the couple remained closely connected to the New York art scene and their circle of friends. In 1943 Sage was included in the “Exhibition by 31 Women” at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. To distinguish herself from her husband and attempt to move out of his shadow, Sage often refused to exhibit with Tanguy; she broke that rule in 1954 when both artists showcased their work at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. She was pleased when critics noted the differences between their work as well as the similarities.

Tanguy’s sudden death in 1955 was followed soon after by Sage’s development of cataracts, causing her to retreat from society and sink into depression. Her misery is evident in the last self-portrait she painted, Le Passage (1956), which shows the artist from the back, sitting on sharp, angular rocks, looking out into a barren landscape. Her growing blindness made her fear that she would not be able to paint again, a fear reflected in her work of that time, such as The Answer Is No (1958), whose subject is numerous blank canvasses and empty easels. Because she could not paint as she used to, she also wrote poetry during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her poems contained grim imagery like that of her visual art. In 1959 she attempted to commit suicide. The following year she was encouraged to go on by a retrospective exhibition of her work held at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York. She also worked diligently to catalog Tanguy’s works, which resulted in the publication of his catalogue raisonné in 1963. In the last years of her life, she created assemblages made from stones, wire, glass, wicker, and other objects. Despite that resurgence in creativity, she remained depressed, and in 1963 she killed herself.

After her death, the Museum of Modern Art received 100 works of art from Sage’s personal collection—work by Tanguy, Breton, Alexander Calder, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, André Masson, and others—and the largest unrestricted purchase fund it had ever received. Sage wrote the beginnings of a memoir. Signed “1955” at the bottom of the manuscript, she presumably stopped writing when Tanguy died. She also published four volumes of poetry after his death, three of them in French and one, The More I Wonder (1957), in English. She was the subject of many exhibitions, some solo and some with Tanguy, in museums throughout the United States from the late 20th century into the 21st.