Photo By Gail
Created in 1954, No Passing reflects artist Kay Sage’s mature style — a stark, architectural surrealism built from scaffolding-like structures, draped forms, and wide, empty expanses that feel both constructed and abandoned. The composition suggests barriers, boundaries, and restriction, with vertical elements that resemble incomplete buildings or skeletal frameworks. Fabric-like shapes appear suspended or stretched across the space, as if something is being concealed or held in place. No Passing feels exactly like its title — a visual barrier, a place where movement stops and entry is denied
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Photo By Gail
Katherine “Kay” Sage (1898 – 1963) came from a wealthy American family. In 1937, she moved to Paris intending to establish herself as an artist. Inspired by Surrealism, she became friendly with Yves Tanguy, whom she married in 1940. Sage was very attracted by the work of Giorgio De Chirico and this influenced her early works. As with her husband, she was drawn to depicting remote landscapes with a far horizon devoid of human figures. Her paintings only rarely show human figures and these are usually wrapped or enveloped in cloth. Thus, we see the The Fourteen Daggers (1942) with two wrapped figures set in a De Chirico metaphysical space. Sage did fewer new paintings after Tanguy’s death in 1955, partly because of her depression and partly because of her decreasing eyesight due to cataracts. Sadly, she took her own life in 1963.
Photographed in The American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan.
Photo By Gail
One of the most prominent women associated with Surrealism in the United States, Kay Sage (1898 – 1963) made this work after a five-month hiatus from painting following the sudden death of her husband Yves Tanguy. Like many Surrealists, she utilized landscape imagery as a metaphor for the mind and psychological states of being. Rendered in somber gray tones, Tomorrow is Never (1955) combines motifs that appear often in the later stages of her career, including architectural scaffolding, latticework structures, and draped figures, to evoke feelings of entrapment and dislocation. The painting is one of Sage’s last large works before her suicide in 1963.
Tomorrow is Never is Part of the Permanent Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
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