Kay Sage: Other answers

In Other answers, 1945, a piece of cloth is caught in a swift wind, suspended across a taut wire. It flaps above a group of objects shrouded in a similar material, placed before a gently undulating landscape or sea vista. At left, wooden or steel scaffolding stands sparse and tall, casting ominous shadows across a foreground expanse of earth or sand. The sky is darkening, and the whole composition seems brooding, threatening, filled with unnerving and eerie potential. A classic painting by Kay Sage, Other answers (brought into the NGV Collection with funds donated by the John William Fawcett Bequest) exemplifies the essence of Sage’s Surrealist practice, which critic Salomon Grimberg has described as representing ‘foreboding states of mind suspended in a deafening silence’.¹Salomon Grimberg, ‘Review of Kay Sage: Catalogue Raisonné by Stephen Robeson Miller’, Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 40, no. 2, 2019, p. 48.

Sage always resisted requests to decipher the meaning of her complex paintings. As she wrote in her poem ‘Your Move’ in 1961:

there is no reason why
anything should mean more
than its own statement
two and two
do not necessarily make four²Quoted in Elisabeth F. Sherman, ‘Kay Sage’s Your Move and/as Autobiography’, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011, p. 128.

Born into wealth and privilege, Sage decided as a teenager that art was her calling, and in her early twenties she studied both landscape and figurative art with respected teachers in Rome, becoming highly proficient at both genres.

Her career was interrupted in 1925 by her marriage to the Italian American Prince Ranieri of San Faustino, and a decade of peripatetic travel and aristocratic indulgence followed before she decided to end her marriage and return to art.

In 1936, during a stay in Paris, Sage met the Swiss artist and occultist Kurt Seligmann by chance in a hotel. Seligmann showed her one of his modernist paintings, which was a light-bulb moment in Sage’s development as an artist. In late 1937 she relocated permanently to Paris. There, in the opening months of 1938, she visited the great International Surrealist Exhibition repeatedly. Held in the Galerie Beaux-Arts at 140 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, this enormous show displayed some 229 works of art by sixty artists representing fourteen countries.

Sage was most struck here by the eight paintings exhibited by Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian artist who was hailed by the Parisian Surrealists as a precursor to their own practice. She introduced herself to André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, and was soon to fatefully meet one of his favourite artists.

Peggy Guggenheim is said to have first connected Sage and the painter Yves Tanguy in the autumn of 1938 in the hopes that Sage might buy one of Tanguy’s paintings. The French artist had engaged in a passionate affair with Guggenheim earlier that year, and it had led to the collapse of his marriage to artist Jeannette Ducrocq. It was love at first sight for Sage and Tanguy, with perhaps no consideration of the implications this relationship might have for the former. As Sage’s biographer Judith Suther put it:

It is hard to say whether Sage knew that her personal ties with Tanguy would put her in a triple artistic bind: bound already to be judged as both a woman artist and an experimenter producing ‘incomprehensible’ paintings, she would also [now] become ‘the lesser Tanguy’.³Judith Suther, A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist, University of Nebraska Press, 1997, p. 71.

Margaret Barr, the wife of Alfred Barr, who was then director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, somewhat acerbically described Sage’s significance for the Surrealists in 1939:

These Surrealists, Tanguy, Matta and everyone included, were penniless. Most exciting, admirably excitable, but all of them BROKE, and Sage had the advantage of having some money and a natural generosity. For the Surrealists, she was a matter of convenience.⁴ Quoted in Suther, p. 74.

Breton, however, absolutely loathed Sage. Jealous of her influence over Tanguy, whom he regarded as one of his protégés, Breton constantly denigrated her to the painter who was soon to become her husband. Sage remained magnanimous, helping fund Breton and his family’s escape to New York following the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940. She and Tanguy left Paris themselves in late 1939, shortly after France and England declared war on Germany.

Throughout the Second World War, Sage was to help other Surrealists escape from Paris to the safety of the United States. Few were grateful, as the Surrealist ‘men’s club’ could not see past her previous life as a princess. The generally positive reception her work received from American art critics at this time did nothing to increase her popularity among the male painters. As Alfred Frankenstein put it in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1941:

Firm design and powerful architecture holds [Sage’s] pictures together, and the hooded forms that move through them enact their enigma in a curiously poignant and affecting fashion. For this surrealism, one feels, unlike much that passes under that name, is motivated by deep sincerity and profound feeling, and it is certainly realized with exceptional skill.⁵ Albert Frankenstein, untitled art notice, San Francisco Chronicle, 23 March 1941.

In addition to being slighted for being a woman artist and marginalised as Tanguy’s wife ‘who also paints’, Sage’s ‘real crime’, for her Surrealist colleagues – ‘the crime that made her first unwelcome and then invisible’, as Suther has put it – ‘was being a good painter … No one quite knew what a Surrealist was, but everyone except the Surrealist men was sure that Sage was one.’⁶Suther, p. 103.

The lack of figures in Sage’s art could perhaps reflect her increasing isolation within the circle of exiled Surrealist artists then inhabiting New York, who clearly resented her financial independence and, particularly in the case of Breton, were envious of her talent.

This hostility and indifference surely contributed to Sage and Tanguy’s decision to leave New York in 1941 and relocate to the small town of Woodbury in Connecticut. Here the couple worked side by side in adjoining studios for the next decade and more, both artists enjoying a new burst of energy in their painting, away from the stresses of servicing the needs of their exiled colleagues in Manhattan (although Tanguy’s alcoholism and increasing jealousy of Sage’s achievements brought constant clouds to their relationship). It was in Woodbury that Other answers was created in 1945, the same year that the Art Institute of Chicago named Sage the winner of the Watson F. Blair Purchase Prize for her painting In the third sleep. This was the first major public recognition of her emerging talent as an artist.

Sage died in 1963 and, following instructions in her will, the ashes of both her and Tanguy (who died in 1955) were scattered in the water off the coast of Tanguy’s native Brittany in 1964.

Dr Ted Gott is NGV Senior Curator, International Art.

This article first appeared in the May-June 2025 issue of NGV Magazine.

Notes