Tommorow is Never

Kay Sage

Kay Sage, Tomorrow is Never (1955)

[TW: Suicide]

The weather is gloomy, much like my mood, and I’ve been thinking of Kay Sage's work, notably her 1955 painting Tomorrow is Never.

American-born Sage (25 June 1898 – 8 January 1963) - who became princess of San Faustino through her decade-long marriage to the Italian Prince Ranieri Bourbon del Monte Santa Maria, Prince of San Faustino in 1925 - is best known for her architectural, grand-scale Surrealism featuring walls and structures, often in a state of crumbling decay or ruin. Sage became fascinated by the work of Giorgio de Chirico (she bought de Chirico's painting, La Surprise kept it all her life) soon after moving to Paris, where she became an active member of the Surrealist group, describing herself as one with the movement. Judith Suther, one of Sage’s biographers, wrote,

I call Kay Sage a Surrealist because her painting resonates with the unsettling paradoxes and hallucinatory qualities prized by André Breton and his group. . . . More fundamentally, I call Sage a Surrealist because her allegiance to the Surrealist identity lies at the heart of her self-image as an artist.

While we tend to associate Sage as a visual artist, she also wrote poetry and prose: five volumes of mostly French poetry, including Faut dire c'qui est (September 1959), four short plays, and an unpublished autobiography, China Eggs (Eggs often appear in Sage’s work - a newsletter for another day).

Sage’s paintings have an ominous mood depicted via a grey and slate palate, often appearing cold to the touch or in a location that could be chilly, misty, or deserted. The only time Sage ever commented on how best to interpret her work was in 1950; speaking to Time Magazine about her 1949 painting The Instant, then on show at the time at New York’s Catherine Viviano Gallery, Sage described the painting as “a sort of showing of what's inside - things half mechanical, half alive.” Compared to the magical worlds of Remedios Varo, whose work was brimming with the vitality of the cosmos, Sage’s work verges on the industrial and is almost mechanical. While Varo’s work can also be machine-like - the influence of her engineer father - their internal worlds and work on the canvas are very different.

Following a five-month hiatus following the death of her husband, the French Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, Sage painted Tomorrow is Never. The couple had married on 17 August 1940, and while the marriage was frequently tempestuous, Sage was bereft at losing her partner. In a letter to Tanguy’s friend Jehan Mayoux, Sage wrote: “Yves was my only friend who understood everything.” As the Met describes, the work is significant for combining many of the motifs that appeared in the latter part of Sage’s career, “architectural scaffolding, latticework structures, and draped figures, to evoke feelings of entrapment and dislocation.” The painting is one of Sage’s final large-scale works.

You sense the sadness in Sage’s work - not only grief but a life compounded by health problems, including depression and, in her later years, cataracts, with operations for the latter being only partially successful. Sage became more reclusive after Tanguy’s death and turned to collage as a means to make art while her eyesight was failing. In an August 1961 entry in her journal, Sage wrote: “I have said all that I have to say. There is nothing left for me to do but scream.” She sadly took her life less than two years later, on 8 January 1963.

Sage’s art is famously steely, mechanical, and industrial; the structures conceal what is happening underneath and inside, much like the artist’s internal world. The only time you see a human outline - but never a face - is in her self-portrait Le Passage (1956). Sage’s life ended tragically, and there is sadness in her work, sometimes described as disturbing or even upsetting. However, returning to the earlier quote - “a sort of showing of what's inside - things half mechanical, half alive” - I look at Sage’s art and choose to see and feel her worlds as alive.

Kay Sage, Le Passage (1956)