Surrealist Women: Kay Sage

Le Passage-Kay Sage  1956

Although her work is unmistakably Surrealist in style and content, was married to the Surrealist Yves Tanguy and she always considered herself a Surrealist, Kay Sage occupies a marginal position within the history of the movement. However Sage’s disquieting vision of a hastily abandoned future set in a largely depopulated world, where the vast horizons exude a tangible atmosphere of menace and doom, places her firmly in the fore-front of New World surrealists.

This neglect maybe because of Sage’s, by most accounts, difficult personality. Born into a wealthy and powerful New York family, she grew up mainly in France and Italy and her first marriage was to an idle, dissolute Italian nobleman. In 1935 she decided to become a independent artist and left her husband, obtaining a divorce through Papal decree. In 1938 she visited the International Surrealist Exhibit at Galerie Beaux-Arts and was so struck by a work by Di Chirico, La Surprise, that she brought the painting which was to remain in her possession until her death. Sage also saw and adored a Tanguy , ‘I’m Waiting For You’. She changed her style from semi-abstraction to the surreal. In one of her first solo exhibitions Tanguy was so moved that he decided to seek Sage out. A meeting was arranged where they were immediately taken with one another. They certainly shared artistic affinities; their respective dream worlds are among the strangest envisioned by any of the Surrealists. The other members of the Surrealist group were not so taken with Sage however. They disliked her haughty and imperious manner and the relationship caused a rift between Tanguy and Breton, who had formerly been close.

With the outbreak of WWII Sage moved back to the States and arranged for Tanguy to join her. They were married in Reno in 1940. They settled in Woodbury, Connecticut where they would remain until their deaths. The relationship was an intense and troubled one. Sage’s solitary and forbidding character discouraged the many artists who visited Woodbury from returning, not helped at all by their explosive drunken arguments at parties. Regardless of any difficulties experienced Sage was devastated by Tanguy early death, caused by a stroke, in 1955. She almost completely stopped painting, the above work Le Passage being one of the few notable exceptions, also notable in that a recognizable human figure, believed to be a self-portrait, is depicted. Instead she made small sculptures made out of wire and bullets, an eerie premonition of her suicide in 1963 when she shot herself in the heart. Her poignant suicide note reads “The first painting by Yves that I saw, before I knew him, was called ‘I’m Waiting for You.’ I’ve come. Now he’s waiting for me again — I’m on my way.”