YVES TANGUY and KAY SAGE
Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) came from the town of Locronan on the Brittany coast, home to prehistoric rock formations
that would come to shape his geologic approach to the Surrealist landscape. He attended school with Pierre Matisse, the
painter’s son, but his real entrée into the art world came later, after World War I, when he met André Breton in Paris. Kay Sage (1898-1963) came from a wealthy upstate New York family but had a European upbringing, traveling the
continent with her divorced mother. She came to Surrealism in the mid-1930s after a decade-long marriage to an
Italian nobleman that had frustrated her artistic ambitions. She was taken with Tanguy’s work from the moment
she saw it, at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London; the painting that most captivated her, she later
recalled, was proleptically titled “I Am Waiting for You.” Two years later, at a Paris Salon, Tanguy saw Sage’s work and was just as impressed. As he later recalled, “Kay Sage
— man or woman? I didn’t know. I just knew the paintings were very good.” A mutual friend finessed an introduction,
and the two became an item.
It certainly isn’t a conventional marriage, even when it’s just the two of them. Sage’s paintings look
stereotypically masculine, with their torpedo-shaped towers and architectonic scaffolds, in contrast to Tanguy’s
petite and curvaceous “personages.”
Sage and Tanguy were inseparable throughout their 15-year marriage, sharing a studio in Woodbury, Connecticut
and communicating only in French until Tanguy's untimely death in 1955. Both artists sought to create paintings that
the French poet André Breton called “peinture-poésie,” a style influenced by poetry and dream-like imagery.
TANGUY
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KAY SAGE
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