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In 1922

And today is the birthday of Kay Sage (Katherine Linn Sage; Albany, New York; June 25, 1898 – January 8, 1963 Woodbury, Connecticut); Surrealist artist and poet.  She was active between 1936-1963.  A member of the Golden Age and Post-War periods of surrealism, she is mostly recognized for her artistic works, which typically contain themes of an architectural nature.

Sage met a young Italian nobleman, Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, in Rome around 1923 and fell in love with him, believing at first, as she wrote to a friend in 1924, that he was “me in another form.”  They married on March 30, 1925.  For ten years the couple lived the idle life of upper-class Italians, which Sage later described as “a stagnant swamp.”  She looked back on that time as years that she simply “threw away to the crows. No reason, no purpose, nothing.”  Her husband was content with their lifestyle, but Sage was not: as she wrote in her autobiography, China Eggs, “Some sort of inner sense in me was reserving my potentialities for something better and more constructive.”  Sage left her husband in 1935 with plans to build an independent life as an artist.  They obtained a papal annulment of their marriage several years later.  Sage moved to Paris in March 1937.

Several stories are told about Sage’s meeting with her future husband, Surrealist artist Yves Tanguy.  One came from Greek poet Nicolas Calas, who recalled that he and Tanguy accompanied Surrealist leader André Breton to the Surindépendants exhibit and were impressed enough by Sage’s paintings to seek her out.  Tanguy at the time was married to Jeannette Ducroq, but they were separated, and he and Sage immediately fell in love.

Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, beginning World War II, and Sage sailed back to the United States a month later.  She immediately set up plans to help the Surrealists immigrate as well and establish themselves in the new country by means of art exhibitions—starting with Tanguy, who joined her in New York City in November.  Sage and Tanguy married on August 17, 1940, in Reno, Nevada, after he obtained a final divorce from duCroq.  In 1946 they purchased the farm and moved to Woodbury permanently.  They converted a barn on the farm into his-and-hers studios, separated by a partition with a door.  Their home was decorated with numerous pieces of Surrealist art and a variety of unusual objects, including a stuffed raven in a cage and an Eskimo mask.

Sage was devastated by Tanguy’s death.  “Yves was my only friend who understood everything,” she wrote to Jehan Mayoux, an old friend of Tanguy’s, about a month after Tanguy’s fatal stroke.  Sage barely did any new paintings after Tanguy died, partly because of her depression and partly because of her decreasing eyesight due to cataracts.  Instead, she devoted her time to two projects: preserving Tanguy’s reputation through retrospective shows and a complete catalogue of his work, and writing poetry, mostly in the slangy French she had learned in her youth and spoken with Tanguy.  With the help of longtime friend Marcel Duhamel—and her own subsidies to cover most of the printing costs—Sage arranged for a book of this poetry, Demain, Monsieur Silber, to be published in France in June 1957.

Sage wrote in a journal in August 1961, “I have said all that I have to say.  There is nothing left for me to do but scream.”  On January 8, 1963, she put a fatal bullet through her heart.  Following instructions in her will, Pierre Matisse buried urns containing Sage’s and Tanguy’s ashes in the water off the coast of Tanguy’s native Brittany in 1964.

Gallery

Le Passage 1956