Kay Sage was an American artist and poet of the mid-twentieth century who represented Surrealism. She was known for the canvases depicting phantasmagoric views made in an architectural style.
Background
Kay Sage, born as Katherine Linn Sage, came to the world on June 25, 1898, in Albany, New York, United States. She was a second daughter of Henry Manning Sage, a businessman and a state senator, and Anne Wheeler Ward, a daughter of a physician. The wealthy family earned money from the timber industry. Kay’s elder sister was named Anne Erskine.
Sage’s parents lived separately most of the time and from about 1900 Anne Wheeler left her husband and the older daughter in order to travel around Europe with Kay. The official divorce came in 1908 but Henry continued to support his ex-wife and their daughters.
Anne Wheeler and Kay Sage settled down in Rapallo, Italy where the young girl spent the most part of her childhood. From time to time, Kay made short visits to her father in Albany. More attached to her mother, she often wrote long letters to her father.
Living in Italy, the daughter and her mother visited many other cities. While traveling, Kay learned French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese from the governesses who looked after her. The girl developed a love for the bohemian lifestyle of her mother.
From an early age, Kay Sage revealed her passion for drawing and writing poetry. She never showed her papers to anyone.
Education
Widely traveling with her mother around Europe, Kay Sage often changed schools. In addition to many European institutions, she did her formal training at the American institutions. From 1911 to 1914, she studied at the Brearley School in New York City. While the First World War broke out in Europe, she entered Foxcroft School in Virginia. It was there she developed a long friendship with heiress Flora Payne Whitney who later took an active part at the foundation of the Whitney Museum of American Art along with her mother, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
Then, Kay made a decision to pursue her artistic training at the Corcoran Art School (currently Corcoran School of the Arts and Design) in Washington D.C. which she entered in 1919. A year later, Kay Sage rejoined her mother in Rome.
While in the capital of Italy, the young girl took private art classes. She attended the British Academy of Arts and the Scuola Libera delle Belle Arti (Free School of Fine Arts) as well. She also accompanied the members of so-called Twenty-Five of the Roman Countryside group on their regular painting sessions.
In spite of all the training mentioned above, Kay Sage considered herself as an autodidact painter.
The start of Kay Sage’s career can be counted from the post of government censor she held from 1917 to 1918 at the United States Government Censorship Office in New York City.
As to an artistic career, she had her first solo show at the Galleria del Milione in Milan, Italy in 1936. Under the surname of her ex-husband, Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, alongside the sculptures of her friend, a German sculptor Heinz Henghes, Katherine presented to the public her six early abstract canvases based on geometry and focused on distance and perspective.
A year after, the young artist left Italy and came to Paris where she changed her name to Kay Sage and began to adopt the principles of surrealism. She was personally introduced to the movement by Henghes at the Salon des Surindependants of 1938 where she exhibited some of her paintings made in the style. From the beginning, she was never totally accepted in the circle as an upper-class bourgeois woman.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Sage came back to the United States. In order to help other surrealists flee from the conflict, she established the Society for the Preservation of European Culture with the support of the American Ambassador and the French Minister of Education. In June of 1940, she had a debut solo-exhibition in New York City, at the gallery of Pierre Matisse as her husband Tanguy did the same year in December. The next year, the couple relocated to Woodbury, Connecticut. Two important exhibitions followed during the decade, the First Papers of Surrealism show by Andre Breton in 1942 and Exhibition by 31 Women held at the Art of This Century Gallery of Peggy Guggenheim the following year.
These period between 1940 and the middle of the 1950s became the most prolific for the artist. She was sought after by art dealers, exhibited regularly at famous art places, including the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and received many awards. However, she was often considered as the wife of the artist Yves Tanguy, not as an independent painter.
After the war, Sage didn't have to help her colleagues anymore, so she concentrated more on painting activity rather than on charity. In 1947, she was offered her next personal exhibition at the gallery of Julien Levy in New York City. Then, she began the collaboration with another gallerist Catherine Viviano who would represent the artist by a series of solo shows at her gallery starting with the show in 1950. In the middle of the new decade, Sage had a common show with her husband Tanguy at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut. However, the works of the two were demonstrated in different rooms.
After the death of Tanguy a year later, Kay Sage suffered a serious depression and decreased her painting activity. She spent the last period of her life far from society. The last projects she worked on were the catalogue raisonné of Tanguy’s works and her poetry collections, including ‘Demain, Monsieur Silber’ (Tomorrow, Mr. Silber) of 1957 and ‘Faut dire ce qui est’ (Must say who is) of 1959.
The last retrospective of her work while alive was held at the Viviano Gallery three years before her death.
Quotations:
"I have said all that I have to say. There is nothing left for me to do but scream."
"I am, primarily, a painter. I paint serious pictures. When I am not quite so serious or in a different mood, I write down certain impressions, observations, and sudden, apparently imperative thoughts that come to me. There is absolutely no conflict between these two forms of expression, nor do they have any connection. They simply replace each other. I have always painted and I have always written but never at the same time."
Personality
According to the surroundings, Kay Sage was a distant, private and hard to un-code person. Sometimes, she even carried herself as an arrogant woman.
She never commented or explained her canvases being as contradictory as she was.
Sage possessed an important art collection the significant part of which she donated to various public institutions at the end of her life in order to encourage the further development of surrealism and modern art.
Physical Characteristics:
The depression Kay Sage suffered after the death of her second husband, Yves Tanguy, led to a cataract. The failed surgery worsened the illness and made the artist partially blinded by the end of her life.
Quotes from others about the person
"Consider Kay Sage (1898-1963) the anti-Thomas Kinkade. She was America’s great painter of menace, dread, and the post-apocalyptic future. Her trademark was 'the sulphurous light before a thunderstorm,' observed biographer Régine Tessier. Like a thunderstorm, Sage’s art could be depressing and exhilarating. A true contrarian might nominate Sage as the best of all the Western Hemisphere surrealists." William Poundstone, American author
"I call Kay Sage a Surrealist because her painting resonates with the unsettling paradoxes and hallucinatory qualities prized by André Breton and his group. . . . More fundamentally, I call Sage a Surrealist because her allegiance to the Surrealist identity lies at the heart of her self-image as an artist." Judith Suther, one of the artist's biographers
Interests
Artists
Giorgio de Chirico
Connections
Kay Sage was married twice.
Her first husband was an Italian aristocrat Prince Ranieri di San Faustino on March 30, 1925. The first few years of the marriage were happy, and gradually Kay became more and more tired of her noble status and of the social obligations she had to fulfill as the wife of the Prince. By 1935, she realized that she would like to continue her artistic way and divorced with Ranieri.
Sage met her second husband, the artist Yves Tanguy at the Salon des Surindependants three years later. Yves and Kay quickly fall in love and married on August 17, 1940, in Reno, Nevada.
Yves and Kay were inseparable partners and followed each other almost everywhere, in life and at work. From the other side, their relationships were strange. Tanguy who loved to drink often humbled his wife in a company of friends. Sage kept silence and created even more paintings.
They lived together till the death of Tanguy in 1955 from a cerebral hemorrhage.