| Kay Sage | ||
| Birth Date: June 25, 1898 |
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| Death Date: January 8, 1963 Artist Gallery |
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| Kay Sage was born in 1898 and raised in New York where her father was a state senator. Her parents divorced, and she traveled extensively in Europe with her mother and attended the prestigious Bearley and Foxcroft Schools in England.
At the age of 25, she went to Italy to recover from a love affair with an older man and began teaching herself to paint. She was married for 10 years to an Italian prince that ended in divorce. She resumed her painting career in Paris, where she met the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, who she later married. The couple moved to Woodbury, Connecticut in 1941 however they kept in touch with their Paris friends, helping many of them escape during World War II.
Sage drew on Tanguy’s forms and formats in many ways. She developed a personal set of objects to populate her landscape. Beyond rock outcroppings, whose contents of minerals literally veins their exteriors, Sage erected complex structures that mimicked buildings, towers, roadways, ramps and even toy railroad tracks. She focused on multilayered walls, alternately smooth and irregular shapes which grew like crystals from the environment. Twisting lengths of drapery often cling to these objects or energetically pop out of crannies or gather themselves into an incredible mass standing stiffly in the landscape. Although she is described as a Surrealist painter, she relied on more realistic imagery.
In 1955 her husband died, and she became depressed and totally reclusive. Four years later, she attempted suicide and succeeded in 1963 by shooting herself in the heart.
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