Catherine Cercie
Kay Sage, (1898–1963) was an American-born Italian surrealist painter and poet.
Sage was born in New York and immigrated to Europe with his parents as a child. He spent his childhood between Rome and Paris. At the age of 25, she meets an Italian prince who naively believes that this prince is another self in the world and falls madly in love. They married two years ago and have been living in picturesque Naples.
For ten years after her marriage, Kay Sage worked with her husband as a model couple in high society. But Sage is tired of the noise and horses around her, and she sees through the hypocrisy and pedantry of high society. In her autobiography she described high society as a "dirty swamp".
1934 was a turning point for Sage, when her father and sister died of tuberculosis. That same year, Sage left the prince and began settling in Paris as an artist. She and the prince never saw each other again.
Most of Sage's works can see the skyline in the distance, and the buildings that stand in the wilderness always remind me of unfinished buildings, in the ruins of the ever-eroding walls. The grayness of color and the ominous atmosphere of uneasiness always shrouded Sage's work. Although the artist himself never explains or comments on his paintings, we can also feel Sage's inner loneliness and longing for distant places in her paintings. The desert-like wilderness and the helpless buildings are like dreams.