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Lot Essay
One of few female Surrealist artists of her generation, Sage arrived in Paris in 1937, having sold her jewelry in order to rent an apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis. One year later she exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants, where the unsettling tension of her works attracted André Breton's attention. He was startled to find out that the sharp and methodically constructed paintings were the work of a woman. In 1938, through her friend and German sculptor Heinz Henghes, Sage met Yves Tanguy, whom she married in 1940. The couple escaped from Paris after the onset of World War II, and settled in Connecticut.
Festa was painted in 1947, a pivotal year in the artist’s career, when she began exploring the enigmatic scaffolding structures that would characterize her paintings from then on. In the present work, Sage evokes an eerie sense of abandonment and desolation through her dramatic use of draped, biomorphic, and architectural forms set against a vast horizon. A piece of drapery pierced with a staff hovers above the scene, a guardian—neither alive or dead, man nor woman—whose fluid drapery and sinuous curves recall those of the ancient Greek statue, Nike of Samothrace. In the right foreground a cone is knocked over in front of a covered door, on the beginning of a long, steep path which leads to an edifice in the background. A sense of isolation pervades, suggesting that this surreal place was once filled with life but later abandoned, the anthropomorphized drapery the sole remaining witness to a past civilization. When compared with later works such as Tomorrow is Never (fig. 1)—now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—Festa appears as an important, decisive step towards the artist's mature style. The architectural style of the painting, evocative of the subconscious landscapes cherished by the Surrealists, is central to Sage's art.
Sage would continue to develop her work as both a surrealist artist and poet, with exhibitions in America, notably via the dealers Pierre Matisse and Julien Levy in New York, and including a joint show with Tanguy at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford in 1954. Her life ended tragically with her suicide in 1963, following which Pierre Matisse undertook her instructions to distribute the remaining paintings of her estate among institutions across America. For this reason, while her works are well represented in collections such as The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, remarkably few examples of her works have appeared on the public market.
Festa was painted in 1947, a pivotal year in the artist’s career, when she began exploring the enigmatic scaffolding structures that would characterize her paintings from then on. In the present work, Sage evokes an eerie sense of abandonment and desolation through her dramatic use of draped, biomorphic, and architectural forms set against a vast horizon. A piece of drapery pierced with a staff hovers above the scene, a guardian—neither alive or dead, man nor woman—whose fluid drapery and sinuous curves recall those of the ancient Greek statue, Nike of Samothrace. In the right foreground a cone is knocked over in front of a covered door, on the beginning of a long, steep path which leads to an edifice in the background. A sense of isolation pervades, suggesting that this surreal place was once filled with life but later abandoned, the anthropomorphized drapery the sole remaining witness to a past civilization. When compared with later works such as Tomorrow is Never (fig. 1)—now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—Festa appears as an important, decisive step towards the artist's mature style. The architectural style of the painting, evocative of the subconscious landscapes cherished by the Surrealists, is central to Sage's art.
Sage would continue to develop her work as both a surrealist artist and poet, with exhibitions in America, notably via the dealers Pierre Matisse and Julien Levy in New York, and including a joint show with Tanguy at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford in 1954. Her life ended tragically with her suicide in 1963, following which Pierre Matisse undertook her instructions to distribute the remaining paintings of her estate among institutions across America. For this reason, while her works are well represented in collections such as The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, remarkably few examples of her works have appeared on the public market.