Kay Sage lived an interesting and emotionally varied life. She was born in Albany, New York, to State Senator Henry Manning Sage and Anne Wheeler Ward Sage. At the age of two, following her parents’ divorce, Kay and her mother embarked on a years‑long journey around the United States and Europe, rarely spending more than one year in any one place. At the age of 20, she moved to Rome to study art, where, in 1925, she met Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, with whom she immediately fell in love and subsequently married. During the decade of her marriage, she evidently did not produce any paintings. The appeal of life as a princess eventually waned, and Sage and the Prince divorced.

Sage moved to Paris in 1937, where she met Tanguy and the surrealists, and quickly joined their group. At the onset of World War II, Sage and Tanguy fled Europe for America, and while on a trip west to California they married in Nevada in 1940. The following year they moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, where they both enjoyed productive careers as artists and collectors. Tanguy died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1955, throwing Sage into a depression that lasted until the end of her life. Her vision began to fail in 1958 and, following an unsuccessful double cataract operation, she ceased painting. She found an outlet for her creativity by producing mixed-media constructions, a group of which she showed at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, New York, in 1961. Sage occupied much of her time by working to compile the catalogue raisonné of Tanguy’s work, a project which she never completed. After a failed attempt at suicide in 1959, she ultimately succeeded in taking her own life in 1963.

Despite her modesty and reticence, Sage’s work was widely shown and collected in her lifetime. She had her first solo show at the prestigious Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in 1940. Sage exhibited in the important “First Papers of Surrealism” exhibit organized by André Breton and held at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in New York in 1942, and at Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of This Century” gallery in 1943. Between 1943 and 1947, she exhibited at the highly influential Julien Levy Gallery, New York, the beating heart of Surrealism in America, and from 1950 until her death she was represented by the Catherine Viviano Gallery, which mounted several solo shows of Sage’s work over the course of a decade. Sage also exhibited at the annual exhibitions of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Sage had an international following, with much of her work finding its way to French collections. In 1955, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum all purchased works by Sage for their permanent collections.