In this week’s Artist Spotlight, I’ll be covering Katherine Sage, an American surrealist artist who experienced success in the 20th century with her unique approach to surrealist paintings. Sage was born to wealthy parents in Albany, New York in 1889. Unfortunately, her parents divorced, forcing her to move with her mother to San Francisco. It was at this point in her life that she gained exposure to art, as her mother would often take her abroad to Europe on trips together. She eventually attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. where she received her formal art education. After attending art school, she moved to the birthplace of the surrealist movement: Paris, France. The movement was started by the French writer and poet André Breton, who argued in his original piece Manifesto of Surrealism that we need to free our minds from the creative suppression of logic and reason. Arguably a controversial piece, it still helped define the movement that gave us artists like Dalí, Picasso, Ernst, and Sage.
While in France, Sage met her husband Yves Tanguy, another artist involved in the surrealist movement. They moved to New York together at the beginning of World War II, where Sage would continue to develop her portfolio and showcase her work. Having married, Sage and Tanguy moved to Connecticut; shortly after, Tanguy suffered a fatal stroke. After her husband’s tragic death, Sage would begin to live a reclusive lifestyle. However, Sage did not give up painting, letting her emotions leak into her later work. I believe that the contrast between the artworks Sage created before and after her husband’s death is drastic, and is an interesting depiction of how emotion plays an important role in influencing the psychological freedom associated with the surrealist movement. I will be comparing two pieces in this article: Margin of Silence and South to South-Westerly Winds Tomorrow. Margin of Silence was painted in 1942, well before Tanguy passed away, while South to South-Westerly Winds Tomorrow was painted in 1957, two years after his passing.
Margin of Silence is similar to many of Sage’s paintings from the 1940s and 1950s, where she seems to experiment with a fabric motif or some free-flowing substance that takes its own shape. What appears to be a purple-hued mountain range consists of this fabric-like substance, pierced by a more distinctly solid sharpened peak. Spherical shapes with no particular purpose are embedded into the base. It is visually unclear as to what Sage is trying to communicate. I am a big fan of the color; it is bland and washed, consequently evoking very little emotion. I also enjoy what Sage did with the background; darkness descends from the top of the painting and lightens towards the bottom. This makes me question whether the image is vertically inverted. I constantly ask myself, “Am I looking at this right?” Its purpose is impossible to interpret. South to South-Westerly Winds Tomorrow, on the other hand, is actually quite basic. Three windows are simply stacked on a background of a sky. Nothing more, nothing less. I think the simplicity of this piece is very indicative of how Sage felt at this time. The emptiness of the canvas could be correlated to the emptiness she likely felt without Tanguy. The windows are unobstructed and transparent. It seems that for Sage, there is no other reality. In essence, the pain she is feeling is caging her imagination, preventing her from digging deeper into the definition of surrealism through her paintings.
