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拍品專文
One of the leading female Surrealists, American born Kay Sage is renowned for her enigmatic landscapes, which often feature expansive terrains suffused in a muted light and filled with draped objects and angular architectural structures that lie just beyond the realm of identification. Painted in 1958 at the Connecticut home she shared with her husband, the surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, Red Is Not a Bright Color in the Dark dates from a prolific period of production in Sage’s late career, during which her work was met with increasing critical acclaim, exhibited in New York galleries including those of Peggy Guggenheim, Catherine Viviano and Pierre Matisse. The present work was acquired by the financier and collector of rare books, Franklin H. Kissner in 1960, and has remained in his family ever since.
Before she entered the Surrealist circle in the late 1930s, Sage had been known as the Principessa di San Faustino: the wife of an Italian prince with whom she lived in a Roman palazzo. The couple had married in 1925, but, a decade later, Sage had become tired of the stifling, cosseted existence of the European aristocrat and yearned for a different life. A fortuitous meeting in 1935 with fellow American poet Ezra Pound, who introduced her to the German sculptor, Heinz Henghes, led her to take up painting again, having ceased her art studies when she married. Following her participation in an exhibition at the Galleria del Milione in Milan in 1936, and under Henghes’ encouragement, Sage abruptly left Italy and embarked on a new life in Paris.
Living initially from the sale of her jewelry, Sage began painting in earnest. A seminal moment was her visit in early 1938 to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts. It was here that she fell under the spell of Giorgio de Chirico in particular. Later that year Sage exhibited six works at the Salon des Surindépendants, and it was on this occasion that she noticed Yves Tanguy, her future husband, who, captivated by her work, encouraged André Breton to visit too.
When the war broke out, Tanguy left his wife and fled to New York with Sage, who, thanks to her American citizenship, helped him and a number of other Surrealists escape war torn Europe. A year later, the couple travelled around the west of America and after obtaining divorces from their estranged spouses, were married in Reno, Nevada in 1940. From this point on, they split their time between Manhattan and a large farmhouse in Woodbury, Connecticut, where they would move permanently six years later. With neighbors including Alexander Calder, André Masson, Arshile Gorky and David Hare, Sage and Tanguy both enjoyed a deeply contented and highly productive phase of their lives in Connecticut. Together with Tanguy, the couple began a practice of working from each morning to the early afternoon in their separate studios, at which time they would round off the day with a review of each other's work and, what was for Tanguy, an almost obligatory series of martinis. Indeed, the new crystal clear, light and sharp definition of form that began to appear in Tanguy's art in the mid-1940s may in fact reflect the often sharply angular forms that characterize Sage's art of this period.
Following the unexpected death of Tanguy in 1955, Sage suffered tremendously. Her vision, which had become increasingly impaired, quickly deteriorated and she became partially blind. In fact, 1958 was the last year Sage ever painted in oil due to her loss of vision. Red Is Not a Bright Color in the Dark is a direct reference to her despairing situation: the single point of bright pigment in the painting, representing a light, perhaps symbolizes a glimpse of hope in the artist's increasingly dark reality. In the present work, mysterious draped objects lie beneath a sulfur-colored sky. A jetty on the right, punctuated by that single bright green light, juts into a vast landscape–perhaps undulating ridges of far off landmasses, or an ocean–stretching out beyond. The strange contrast between motionlessness and the lit green lamp heightens the unnerving atmosphere and adds to the sense of quiet isolation that pervades, suggesting that this surreal place was once filled with life but abandoned, the compositional elements the only remaining traces of a previously imagined existence.
Before she entered the Surrealist circle in the late 1930s, Sage had been known as the Principessa di San Faustino: the wife of an Italian prince with whom she lived in a Roman palazzo. The couple had married in 1925, but, a decade later, Sage had become tired of the stifling, cosseted existence of the European aristocrat and yearned for a different life. A fortuitous meeting in 1935 with fellow American poet Ezra Pound, who introduced her to the German sculptor, Heinz Henghes, led her to take up painting again, having ceased her art studies when she married. Following her participation in an exhibition at the Galleria del Milione in Milan in 1936, and under Henghes’ encouragement, Sage abruptly left Italy and embarked on a new life in Paris.
Living initially from the sale of her jewelry, Sage began painting in earnest. A seminal moment was her visit in early 1938 to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts. It was here that she fell under the spell of Giorgio de Chirico in particular. Later that year Sage exhibited six works at the Salon des Surindépendants, and it was on this occasion that she noticed Yves Tanguy, her future husband, who, captivated by her work, encouraged André Breton to visit too.
When the war broke out, Tanguy left his wife and fled to New York with Sage, who, thanks to her American citizenship, helped him and a number of other Surrealists escape war torn Europe. A year later, the couple travelled around the west of America and after obtaining divorces from their estranged spouses, were married in Reno, Nevada in 1940. From this point on, they split their time between Manhattan and a large farmhouse in Woodbury, Connecticut, where they would move permanently six years later. With neighbors including Alexander Calder, André Masson, Arshile Gorky and David Hare, Sage and Tanguy both enjoyed a deeply contented and highly productive phase of their lives in Connecticut. Together with Tanguy, the couple began a practice of working from each morning to the early afternoon in their separate studios, at which time they would round off the day with a review of each other's work and, what was for Tanguy, an almost obligatory series of martinis. Indeed, the new crystal clear, light and sharp definition of form that began to appear in Tanguy's art in the mid-1940s may in fact reflect the often sharply angular forms that characterize Sage's art of this period.
Following the unexpected death of Tanguy in 1955, Sage suffered tremendously. Her vision, which had become increasingly impaired, quickly deteriorated and she became partially blind. In fact, 1958 was the last year Sage ever painted in oil due to her loss of vision. Red Is Not a Bright Color in the Dark is a direct reference to her despairing situation: the single point of bright pigment in the painting, representing a light, perhaps symbolizes a glimpse of hope in the artist's increasingly dark reality. In the present work, mysterious draped objects lie beneath a sulfur-colored sky. A jetty on the right, punctuated by that single bright green light, juts into a vast landscape–perhaps undulating ridges of far off landmasses, or an ocean–stretching out beyond. The strange contrast between motionlessness and the lit green lamp heightens the unnerving atmosphere and adds to the sense of quiet isolation that pervades, suggesting that this surreal place was once filled with life but abandoned, the compositional elements the only remaining traces of a previously imagined existence.