Serene Surrealist

The olive-colored world that Kay Sage confines to canvas is wide, wet, uninhabited and untroubled. Her private cloudland, on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, might depress some people but would hardly disturb anybody. Surrealist though her paintings were, they had no more wallop than a wisp of smoke.

In settling for weirdness without wallop, Painter Sage parted the twin gods of modern art. Her current reputation as one of the country's most talented dream-scapists proved it could be done.

Art in the Barn. Christened Katherine Sage about a half-century ago, Kay left Albany for Italy when she was only three. In the '20s she married and divorced an Italian prince, later learned with Poet Andre Breton and Painter Yves Tanguy to ride the surrealist tide. In 1939 she returned to the U.S., closely followed by Tanguy, to whom she was married a year later. Today the two artists live in a pale yellow farmhouse near Woodbury, Conn, and paint in the barn.

Tanguy's half of the barn is as neat as an operating room. In it he does pictures of deserts strewn with bones, buttons, needles, nuggets, varicolored eggs and an occasional cactus--all impeccably painted. One such canvas hung in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week. Its dramatic title, Mama, Papa Is Wounded!, bore no discernible relation to the objects represented.

Kay's studio is as messy as Tanguy's is clean. "We both dislike terribly the idea of being a team of painters," she says. "For that reason we refuse to exhibit together and never look at each other's work until it's finished. Naturally, I admire his work more than anything, but I try very hard not to be influenced."

Whether or not influence could account for it, Mr. and Mrs. Tanguy did share a predilection for subdued colors, vast spaces and striking titles. One of the most impressive pictures in Kay's show was a wall as elaborately constructed as a Chinese puzzle. Festooned with torn cloths, it looked like a window-cleaner's dream of Radio City. Kay's title for it was Three Thousand Miles to the Point of Beginning.

Arteries in the Mountain. Kay's The Instant was more ambitious: a picture of a mountain sliced down the center and partially draped with napkins. The cross section showed a mass of wires, entrails, arteries and porcelain eyes supported on a haphazard wooden scaffolding. "I can't tell you what it would mean to most people," Kay says, "but I do know what it means to me. It's a sort of showing what's inside--things half mechanical, half alive. The mountain itself can represent almost anything--a human being, life, the world, any fundamental thing."

Where on earth does she get such ideas for pictures? Kay can't say: "I suppose I start with some sort of composition. I see it in a way in advance, but very often it changes as I go along. I do know that while I'm painting I feel as though I were living in the place."

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