A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist

Abstract

A House of Her Own is the first full-length biography of the American Surrealist painter Kay Sage. Born in 1898 to wealthy American parents in upstate New York, Sage spent most of her childhood and young adult years in Italy and France. In 1937 she moved to Paris, where she became a member of the Surrealist group surrounding Andre Breton. She returned to the United States in 1940, settling in Woodbury, Connecticut. Her most productive years as an artist extended from roughly 1938 through the late 1950s, when her health began to deteriorate, and she withdrew gradually from social contact. She stopped working on her oil paintings in 1958, but continued to forge her increasingly nihilistic poems until she shot herself in the heart in January 1963. Along with her eloquent chronicle of Sage's life, Judith D. Suther presents subtle, revelatory views of Sage's artistic accomplishments. She takes us into the artist's elegant, dreamlike paintings, connecting them to Sage's complex inner life, and to the artistic and intellectual worlds in which she moved. Suther also shows how the raw language and iconoclastic themes of Sage's poetic works were related to Sage's lifelong revolt against social and artistic convention. Judith D. Suther is a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. She is the author of Raissa Maritain: Pilgrim, Poet, Exile.