Routines, dreams and the darkness
"Kay Sage - Tomorrow is Never 1955" by ahisgett is licensed with CC BY 2.0.
Daily routines have helped me a lot during all those endless days. Routines were always for me a mechanism for thinking without interruption while doing necessary errands. Now it is more like a mechanism for survival for the days that it feels unbearable to get out of bed. Besides the basics, I have added morning meditation before my first coffee, watering the kitchen plants and read a small excerpt from a smooth book —at the moment it is Patty Smith’s Devotion that starts with a wonderful journal about how she wrote it— before starting writing. Apart from my running I added afternoon yoga (that is utterly cathartic) and reading literature before going to sleep. All those things, that day by day became indispensable for my calm, give me the sense of an order. Not that order was ever such an important ideal for me —I was always the entropy type— however, through the pandemic situation I somehow built the need to reassure that I am still standing or rather that I am still moving, in flux, and this daily routine order creates this impression. I know everything is not ok but at least I’m not stuck.
The last couple of days I am having many, strange and unquiet dreams. It is not anything concrete. Rather the feeling of an unknown or demonic force or a sense of impending danger crawling all around me and my friends or family in the dream scenario. I am not sure why it is happening. Maybe it is because of the current dark ambience and the deep humanitarian crisis in Greece’s sociopolitical landscape, the actual Brexit in here or my constant studying and thinking about patriarchy, it could be because of the permanent fear that the virus created, the dread of the continuous environmental catastrophe, the desperate need for meeting with loved ones, or the anxiety of the aftermaths. Or maybe it is just because we currently read with my son The Lord of the Rings that approaches the fundamental darkness in such a way that can always be interpreted according to the contemporary. And we live in dark times.
In any case, I always found dreams —even the most frightful— exciting and inspiring and that is why I was always attracted by the surrealists.
Women surrealists are another lost chapter of the history of art. There are plenty and formidable women artists that practised (invisibly) surrealism and I am not talking about Frida Kahlo and Dorothea Tanning only.
Kay Sage was a very unquiet personality. She had a restless mind and a life on the move. However, her paintings inspire an awful stillness. An insufferable inertia.
Kay Sage is one of the women surrealists, perhaps one of the most known ones and yet not famous. She had a fabulous life and a tragic death, she helped numerous artists during WW2 and had a spectacular collection of artworks that she later offered to several institutions. She was a very rich woman, daughter of an ambassador and married to a prince before discovering what she really wanted to do. She loved a lot and was loved equally but suffered great pain. She was also or above all a great artist and poet.
Well yes, Sage was a royal and this helped her a lot in moving around and connecting with important people and maybe cost her her place in the movement. She had been a friend of Ezra Pound and Flora Whitney before her fatal meeting with the arrogant surrealists.
Kay Sage’s life story carries something glorious, dramatic and mythical.
"Men Working, Oil on canvas by Kay Sage, Joslyn Art Museum" by ali eminov is licensed with CC BY-NC 2.0.
She was intelligent and introvert. Not a friendly type. She met Yves Tanguy and the Surrealists in 1938. She was in her 40s, attractive, wealthy and independent, probably frightful for them. Breton, who had first admired her work believing it was made by a man, never accepted her as one of them —it was because of her class he declared. Was it? Tanguy however, felt like he was always waiting for her. And so did she. They fell in love with each other passionately, married in 1940 and lived together until the end.
Sage surged Tanguy’s mysterious mind and art, the enigmatic sceneries of his thought with admiration and willingness to stand beside him. Her most productive years were the ones around their encounter and much later, the ones around her death. Tanguy was her strange attractor, a force fatal and creative at the same time. Her restless spirit fluttering around him like a moth to a flame; but she was a flame too and this spellbound was mutual.
He was devoted but intolerable. He insulted and humiliated her in front of their friends. He drunk a lot. She suffered silently as loved him madly. There are testimonies about his violence towards her, about his absurd behaviour and her silent bearing.
Even her, a woman so independent and unstoppable regarding her passions and dispositions coulnd’t escape internalized patriarchal impositions. She had divorced the prince —because her creativity was damned during their marriage—, but could not leave Tanguy although he treated her like that. He was the love of her life and probably a major inspiration. I could assume that all this intensity he was creating between them was twistedly inspirational and addictive. For both of them.
After his death in 1955, there was no tomorrow for her. The first time she tried to kill herself she failed.
The second time she shot herself in the heart.
In her suicide note, she wrote: "The first painting by Yves that I saw, before I knew him, was called 'I'm Waiting for You.' I've come. Now he's waiting for me again - I'm on my way."
"I Have No Shadow, 1940" by C-Monster is licensed with CC BY-NC 2.0.
Kay Sage before her tragic suicide had been devoted to keeping Yves Tanguy’s legacy. She wrote his catalogue raisonné and she kept painting until she almost lost her vision. It was then when she started writing poetry, a poetry mush alike her painting. Sad, absurd and quiet.
She was a brave woman, devoted to art, who helped her artist friends saving numerous of them by supporting them go to the USA during the WW2.
Her paintings are poetic and blue. Like sceneries for Becket plays or dystopian science fiction. Everything seems still and lethargic, a walk through a post-apocalyptic landscape or a bad premonition. There are mysterious scaffoldings and peculiar buildings, an allure toward architectural paradoxes. Placid anxiety. There are peaceful seas and creepy shipwrecks, lunar sceneries and obscure humanoid shapes, everything in plain light. The darkness is not obvious. Looking at them is like having a disturbing dream, it’s deeper than pure melancholy or gloomy apathy, rather an indiscernible sense of vulnerability and risk.
It is interesting this change of subject in her work after her meeting with the surrealists and Tanguy, especially the late ones. There is certainly an influence by the vast Tanguy’s landscapes — I could guess that actually there is an artistic interaction. But there is also a kind of despair that wasn’t there before. Of course, there was a great war around that time, too much destruction and fear that couldn’t leave her intact.
I look at their pictures. She has sad beautiful eyes, a sharp depth, he has the eyes of a madman, bright and catastrophic.
I look again at her paintings. There is no evidence of risk but something in your heart warns you about the coming of the darkness.
Like looking at a breach forming in Antarctica’s ice, an intolerable beauty and a compact dread.