In Japan now, gave talk on violence out and in: the explosive erotics of Dada and  Surrealism, mostly showing images from both, including Japanese, and wonderful audience and group
about eroticism veiled and the dance of the surrealist encounter and all that, today am being taken to Kyoto, which I loved before, and tomorrow to Hamammatsu to talk in a professor's class, whose thesis I directed
then back to ny to teach my film class the next day
spoke in New London, Ct., on Robert Motherwell, on panel with the Dedalus Foundation representative and a master printmaker, with both of whom we had panels before
then at Penn, with friends I had known, like Eric Sellin, and the brilliant and beautiful and alltogether delightful Wendy Steiner
and this week I teach, well, share about Jean Cocteau and next week also, then Derek Jarman, and Caravaggio via Glenn Gould and Bernhard's The Loser
so they are both dessert
off to Kyoto now

Passwords and Being Open

Every time

What a nice way to start:  I must have written that at least a month ago, to say some angry thing about losing, finding, relosing passwords, then dashlane, one of those things

and now, months later, in freezing new york, about to go to chicago (more Modern Art Cookbook talks, always fun because you have absolutely no idea who might turn up and it is so deeply non-literary, and I loved the review in the TLS speaking of my grandmother, and will send the one that just came out in Artnews to Julian Merrow-Smith, since his beautiful rougets decorates the top of it) and I loved the idea of doing a Literary Foods book, but perhaps that is not where my heart lies

and someone suggested Surrealism in a Hurry, thanks to George McClintock, what fun that would be, and am enjoying a proposed biography of Georges Malkine (surrealist, friend of Desnos, of Artaud, and a greatly unusual painter and writer and film actor), can work on that in Paris, where I go next week to join in a jury on a brilliant and staggeringly long iimportant, I think, thesis on Max Ernst and how his war experience impacted his work

it is a good moment not being bogged down in one thing you know you have to rush on getting through, just a translation of a scientist poet I love, Lorand Gaspar, doing it for ContraMundum, such a great press, with Rainer Hanshe, for whom I  translated Gherasim Luca, and this will be with Nancy Kline, with whom I did a Rene Char

am doing another Pierre Reverdy, this time with Black Widow Books, who did the Char and a Tristan Tzara and a Robert Desnos, and an Eluard, in fact, just about everyone I ever wanted to translaate!
Thanks to Joe Phillips!

it all feels open and possible, which is probably why I left open that only begun thing at the top of this, called "every time"-- so many things are "every time" and they are never dull
Had breakfast with Matthew this morning, now that is never dull, and spoke with Hilary, who is about to run 5 kilometers in the snow in a rabbit costume at the end of which you get soup and hot chocolate -- she is perfectly suited to Northampton and it to her which is a compliment to both

slithering!

such fun, writing about art shows: so I went BACK to the Morgan to see the Drawing Surrealism AGAIN, and it yielded this:

http://hyperallergic.com/65991/slithering-toward-us-drawing-surrealism-at-the-morgan/

and I love Hyperallergic weekend, and especially SLITHERING

coming, a thought about the Proust show also at the Morgan, for the same website, hyperallergic weekend, but also I should point out that, under the editorship of the very very intelligent Harold Augenbraum, who knows LOTS about Proust, from way back, his (yes, Marcel's) poems have been translated by lots of us translator poet types, out with Penguin this very month, we could slither along into them soon....

drawing surrealism

At the Morgan, Drawing surrealism is plentiful and fun. Here's a review...

Drawing Surrealism at the Morgan

Mary Ann Caws

How much more powerful to say “drawing surrealism” than something like “surrealist drawings.” It gets the action into the art, which is, often, exactly where it is. Unweighted by color, untrammeled by, oh you know, something like the history of painting and how the surrealists (in whatever grouping you choose to deal or not deal with them) dealt with that  history. Very often, not at all.

Edith Remmington; now there’s one of the surrealist women (so many of them, so interesting in their lives and works and everything else) has this slithering snake advancing toward a jetty with an immense chain moving out along it.” Chains and coils and serpentine lines. These drawings set your mind to snaking.

Some of the drawings call out for narration, and what a delight not to have to supply one!

I very much enjoyed the untitled Miro charcoal and graphite pencil drawing with the ladder and the cascade of drops: this is the kind of work that might make you think it was asking for a narration, but leaves, provoked by its non-spelled out drama, spaces for the imagination.

Among my personal old favorites, the Masson Battle of Fishes of 1926 – this was the first of his sand paintings I ever encountered, and the traces of Blood on the Sand (La Goutte de Sang of 1927) brought into the encounter all sorts of desert films, Ava Gardner pleading about something or other, someone drawing a rapid gun. But I had not seen the Drop of Blood work just above it, so powerful and so rarely seen, since it belongs in a private collection.

About ownership: De Chirico’s very grand drawing of The Poet and the Philosopher in 1913, that made its way into the Minotaure, that glossy magazine of the 30’s,  was owned by André Breton, and Paul Eluard, and finally by Roland Penrose, the English surrealist, once married to Lee Miller, that brilliant and beautiful photographer. Understated, this very lovely drawing.

On the opposite side of understatement, the overdrawing or superposition of  faces in Picabia’s Olga brings back to every surrealist reader those superpositions in  Breton’s Nadja and elsewhere: overstatement, as in the surrealist shout of the manifestos and over-the-top position papers

                                                  

 So much, indeed, of surrealism seems overstatement that this large but subtly conceived exhibition seems just the right touch, slithering toward us.

Should someone ask: so what does the idea of, the practice of surrealist drawing repose on? 

 You could do worse than to answer: try Giacometti’s Surrealist Table: just be sure the

female figure stands there to hold it all together and up:

these days...

Today I noticed for the first time that in the NYPL, overhead in the first room of the Rose Reading Room – the one just full of   computers now – where are the catalogues we used to consult? now in the South Reading room…the overhead fresco is dark clouds. In the North and South Rooms, the clouds are white and pink == so many tourists today, all taking pictures…

e, am just reading Reverdy translations – some really literal ones by Martin Bell, unusable for the most part, for they tend to say:”one”, as in “one looks”… turns me off entirely.

But  super ones by Rosanna Warren, with a  poem “The Old Cubist, “ about Reverdy, which gets just the spirit – austere, impersonal, anonymous, no one specified and no self wandering around. A sad imagination, if you like, but a brilliant one.

And then I went into the art and architecture reading room to read Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy, about Joseph Cornell’s boxes… some magnificent titles and perceptions.. he mentions ”Monsieur pascal and so I dutifully noted that.. will there ever come a point when my Pascal won’t be dutiful but working with passion??

The reading of the Montale translations the other night: Jonathan Galassi with his, and Rosanna reading William Arrowsmith’s translations – when they compared their translations of Dora Marcus, THANKS to Joel Cohen for requesting that, it was right at the top of my happiness quotient: which one emphasized the sinking and which the unremembering… both reminded me of the Williams Icarus ending, with all the present participles: --ing, ing, ing…

Why is translation so overpoweringly seductive??? Rosanna has written so much about this, and is now writing the Max Jacob bio… something about the radiance of her reading..

So Mimi Braun asked me “what anxiety” about representation… as in the film course I will be giving when I come back from my sabbatical. How good to have literal questions you have to answer…

‘

I am anxious, that won’t do… how to convey the person who writes or paints, how do we choose and answer these things?

Anxiety takes a back seat to excitement: we heard 2 Gustav Holst operas last night, one comic, from 1930, and one TRANSLATED from THE SANSKRIT, from 1908_ incredibly moving – a wife, beloved by and loving her husband, saves him from death -- and at the end, the singing continues while the orchestra is plunged in darkness. REMARKABLE.

Then we went to hear The American String Quartet, doing some Haydyn (yes) and some Dvorak (yes) and then a grand Beethoven, by which time I had agreed with my husband that we have to sit WAY BACK to have it all cohere!

On my way to Paris, to speak for 30 minutes in French about a thesis, very very long and very grand, about Surrealist exhibitions on this side of the Atlantic… SO much I didn’t know, and probably won’t remember…but first, an oral exam, and my final class of this semester, and on and on, and then on.

swimming with friends

So, even though I get up in the night, excited to write whatever I am writing,  now a catalogue for an exhibit of Surrealism: New World, to be held in San Francisco, I sometimes --  read: frequently but not always -- get up EARLY, as in between 7 and 8, to swim in an aquacize class with friends. It helps to see the same faces, none of which are remarkably youngish, which also helps. Not that the mind sticks to the exercises, it rather runs about, nothing being extra-strenuous in the exercise mode.

My friend Jane Isay, just back from Georgia and Armenia, just saw the First Shoe, in a cave, in an expedition led by Ian Tattersall, if I have the name right. It sounded stupendous, and set me up mentally, I  hoped, and still hope,  for what I would like to be a day's writing -- no chance, have to design my seminar in Letters and Lives for next semester at the CUNY Graduate Center, have to go to Staples to renew my yellow cartridge on the printer (grrrrr: no one told me they expired! people, yes, all around me, but cartridges???) and perhaps to my Women Writing Women's Lives biography group to hear about, oh you know, twitter and facebook and linkedwhatever it is and so on, so how is it one makes uninterrupted time for writing?

Everything: what to do? Next?

So when you want to go to about 251 THINGS now on in New York, like the  exhibit of French drawings at the Morgan, near where I teach at the CUNY Graduate Center, but you also want to, have to, need to go with your husband out to Westchester to hear the Westchester Performers chamber music concert (lots of Sundays, really just 5 a semester -- I think of semesters since I am still teaching), AND you have to, want to, need to prepare your seminar for the week, and you long to, want to, need to write the catalogue for a San Francisco exhibition of Surrealism: New World, in a hurry hurry hurry, WHAT do you Choose to do first?

Well, what you don't do is straighten up your closet and figure out what you really enjoy wearing...Such good excuses not to do things, when, in fact, you want to do everything. Can anyone help anyone (me) decide what to do first, what to not do (how do you not split that infinitive? Remember what used to matter, and now everything matters so much. )

sage-tanguy visite en francais

Kay Sage: Une Note sur ses Tableaux Autobiographiques

Mary Ann Caws

Dans son chapitre å propos de Kay Sage et Yves Tanguy dans une très utile compilation d’essais sur les couples créateurs, Judith Suther – qui est responsible de l’édition de China Eggs/Les Oeufs de Porcelaine, l’autobiographie de Kay Sage (avant qu’elle ne rencontre Yves) -- remarque combien Sage se mettait et se sentait toujours aux deuxième plan par rapport à son mari, le peintre breton. 1  Toujours la deuxième, toujours décidément inférieure à son mari dans ses peintures – voilà comment elle se montre, du début de leur rapport jusqu’à sa mort à elle, en janvier 1963,  bien après sa mort à lui, en janvier 1955. Dès leur rencontre, elle a fait tout ce qui était en son pouvoir pour avancer sa carrière à lui. C’est bien Sage qui a payé le passage de Yves Tanguy à New York, aussi bien que ceux des Breton et d’autres, c’est bien elle qui a trouvé, fourni, payé le premier mois de l’appartement de Jacqueline et André Breton, qui l’ont – comme tout le groupe surréaliste – détestée. (Hélas, on voit cela dans les lettres des deux, surtout dans celles de Jacqueline Lamba…que dire des sentiments personnels de quelqu’un? Le mieux, c’est que d’en dire très peu. Et donc, j’en dis très peu. )

“La Princesse,” ils l’ont appelée à cause de son premier marriage, avec un prince italien de la petite noblesse. Titre qui n’était pas à plaire, de toute façon, aux goûts révolutionnaires du groupe. Américaine, bien qu’avoir grandi en Italie, riche par son père, de tempérament plutôt froid, elle avait tout pour leur déplaire. Et Yves Tanguy avait tout pour plaire: grand rieur, grand buveur, de tempérament délicieusement chaleureux.

Et, le fait est que Kay Sage avait enlevé leur Yves. Et lui, son mari, n’a jamais loué ses tableaux à elle, en étant un peu (ou très jaloux de son talent à elle.) “ I take more interest in his than he does in mine – naturally.” 2 (!!!) Que dire??? Naturellement, pour moi, c’est ce mot: “naturally” qui frappe… Alors, comme ça, c’est naturel que son mari ne s’intéresse pas à son travail? Ah.

Ceci dit, et d’autant plus remarquable, la force, oui, la force extreme, des tableaux de Kay Sage, m’a entièrement boulversée de nouveau, dans l’exposition si bien organisée, en partie par Stephen Robeson Miller – qui lui prepare une biographie de Kay Sage – exposition dont les citations ici-bas en anglais, sont tirées. Avant cette visite, j’avais connu, et reconnu de loin,  les tableaux de Kay Sage, mais juste quelques uns. Je sentais leurs figures enveloppées de tissu toujours plié, toujours pâle, même blanc…et une ambiance avec toujours quelque chose de légèrement sinistre, comme si on n’allait jamais savoir comment pénétrer la scène – certainement pas la comprendre. Elle non plus, sans doute. Et comme elle a refusé d’en parler, nous n’avons que ses quelques paroles entendues dans la conversation triple avec Julien Levy, dans cette exposition. Ah, dit-elle, pour moi la route s’étend interminablement, comme la voie Appia. J’ai toujours cette route infinie dans ma mémoire.

Yves, nous l’entendons qui rit. Ah, le fromage, un déastre, dit-il. Mais du moins nous avions du fromage… Kay Sage ne parlera pas du repas, plutôt de la colline juste par-delà la fenêtre. Vers le soir, cela acquiert un pli, et ressemble à du carton-pâte contre les nuages…Elle a aussi la mer toujours en esprit. Une chose qui se déroule à l’infini – quand vous pensez aux toiles de Tanguy, avec leurs espaces infinis et les petits objets vers le bas du cadre, vous sentez quelque chose de presque joyeux. Mais les toiles de Kay Sage me semblent en general dépourvues d’émotion – plus strictes, plus sévères que celles de Tanguy. Les signes suggérés par les figures enveloppées, qui ont l’air de pointer quelque chose, les constructions architecturales  --- avec ces tours qui penchent parfois vers le centre de la toile (voir Bounded on the West by the Land Under the Sea de 1946) que l’un des organisateurs de l’exposition, ce meme et très connaisseur Stephen Robeson Miller, choisit comme un point tournant – et ces lames de bois qui se présentent partout, et qui se substituent à la chair  du visage dans un “Small Portrait” de 1950, ou nous ne voyons que des cheveux roux et des morceaux de bois, tout cela nous convainct de son point de vue délibérément sans sentiment.

Sauf en ce qui concerne son mari. Cela ne cesse pas de nous étonner, après avoir vu ses tableaux à elle:

          

         After I knew Yves, everything was obliterated that was not Yves. I can say no more than to say I do not believe there has ever been such a total and devastating love and understanding as there was between us. 3

Après avoir subi deux operations sur ses yeux pour les cataracts, elle est devenue aveugle dans un oeil et a vu mal avec l’autre…. Et puis, Yves n’est plus là, et en janvier 1963, elle se tire une balle dans la poitrine et en meurt, ayant laissé ce mot dévastateur:

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.4

Les cendres du corps d’Yves Tanguy furent jetés dans la baie de Douarnenez…. De Kay Sage, nous retenons son autobiographie, China Eggs, ces tableaux d’une force indécible, et sa hantise des oeufs. Et nous nous souvenons qu’ils ont trouvé après sa mort, sur une petite étagère juste au-dessus de son lit, un bol contenant une série de petits oeufs en porcelaire, de la sorte qu’on utilize pour persuader aux poules de pondre…Le fait que cette autobiographie, écrite après la mort de son mari,  s’arrête court avant sa rencontre avec Tanguy témoigne de sa difficulté de parler de leur vie ensemble.

Je voudrais très simplement commenter quelques unes de ses toiles. Dans une des toutes premières, Monolith de 1937, une pierre s’érige grande et de couleur presque noire, avec des incisions blanches – mystérieuse comme un Chirico (à qui elle est souvent comparée) – et puis, de plus en plus, les figures et les objets sont drapes dans un tissu memorable. De plus en plus, il y a des tours qui s’inclinent ou non – mais on pourrait tracer la lignée de ces pierres érigées et qui bloquent la vue jusqu’à la dernière toile dans toute sa négativité, où l’on ne voit que des tableaux vides et formant barrière à la vue, à l’entrée: NON, elle edit de toute sa voix de femme. Celle qui a refuse toutes les “interviews,” toute remarque sur son propre travail, se refuse à tout, à tous, à elle-même.

Que de références: “The World is Blue” – ah,”le monde est bleu comme une orange,”  disait Paul Eluard –premier vers de son poème de 1929, un vers que citait Julia Kristeva bien après tous les deux:

       La terre est bleue comme une orange

       Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas

       Ils ne vous donnent plus à chanter

       Au tour des baisers de s’entendre

        Les fous et les amours

…

        Tu as toutes les joies solaires

        Tout le soleil sur la terre

        Sut les chemins de ta beauté. 5

Dans cette toile,  on voit ces pierres – absolument de la forme des oeufs. Evidemment, les critiques ont eu – et ont toujours – tendance à citer Chirico comme influence sur ces plans inclines, et sur ses oeufs…

J’ai beaucoup aimé son White Silence de 1941, qu’elle a donné à Breton, qui l’a utilisé dans un poème-objet qu’elle a gardé au-dessus de sa cheminée à Roxbury. Cela me rappelle le signe pour une augmentation de volume, dans son trajet de petit en grand, et le même signe en plus petit au-dessus en forme comme l’écho. Autre silence:  Margin of Silence de 1942– combine autobiographique. Je pense à l’aveugement de Sage – tout cela pointe vers l’avenir, comme l’oiseau dans le tableau après la mort d’Yves.

Des references aux jeux joués par les surrealists: les petites tuiles en bas de Near the Five Corners de 1943,  tableau dans lequel la petite figure sur le pont exerce une grippe sur l’observateur, comme le font partout ces objets et figures envelopes… que de mystères. Je pense particulièrement à la narration de I saw Three Cities de 1944 – que je regardais longtemps dans la Galerie d’Art à l’Université de Princeton. Il y a à la droite du tableau, une forme voilée qui a l’air de signaler quelque chose au loin…Toutes ces toiles, toutes, toutes, son autobiographiques –Midnight Streets, par exemple, de 1944, paraît rappeler, selon Miller,  un feu qui l’avait réveillée dans elle était petite, en Italie, cette sorte de rappel, d’accord, mais il est vrai que partout j’avais senti ces toiles comme des auto-portraits de cette femme qui parlait peu d’elle – que dans ses tableaux.

En ce qui concerne ses toutes dernières toiles, nous sommes pris par trois entre elles.  A Bird in the Room, peinte après la mort de Tanguy, 1955, signale la vielle superstition que si jamais un oiseau entre dans la maison, cela prévoit la mort d’un habitant de la maison. Et en fait, cela s’est passé quelques jours avant la mort d’Yves. Le tableau, dans des couleurs sombres – noir, pourpre foncé – montre un portail vide, qui ne mène nulle part, avec autour des figures voûtées et drapées, qui semblent se cramponner au cadre  de tous les côtés. Sombre, triste, vide de tout sauf la détresse. Voilà que l’émotion noie toute la scène.

Le Passage, de 1956, montre une femme vue de dos, assise sur de grands fragments de pierres, seule, seule, et qui n edit rien, qui refuse toute communication.  La dernière toile, avec le titre absolu: The Answer is No, de 1958, nous bloque la vue et l’entrée. Solitude éternelle. Rien qu’une série de toiles vides, retournées, où il n’y a que l’absence.

A mon avis, Kay Sage, miraculeusement fidèle à la mémoire de son peintre mari, montre une inoubliable force architecturale, philosophique si vous voulez. Comme Apollinaire mérite le titre de Prince des poètes – titre décerné meme sur la statue en son honneur de Picasso, avec le visage bien connu de Dora Maar -- Kay Sage mérite, à mon avis,  le titre cette fois-ci glorieux de Princesse de la peinture.  

---

1 Significant Others: Creativity & Intimate Partnership, ed. Whitney Chadwick & Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993, pp. 136-153) Kay Sage, China Eggs/Les Oeufs de Porcelaine. Charlotte and Seattle, Starbooks and Editions de l’Etoile. Bilingual Editions. Traduction française de Elisabeth Manuel, 1996.

2 Julien Levy, “Tanguy, Connecticut, Sage,” Art News 15 September 1954, p. 27. Quoted in above,p. 250.

3  Dans l’exposition nommée, à Katonah, New York.

4 Loc. cit.

5 Dans la Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, ed. Mary Ann Caws, p. 176. New Haven, 2004, de L’Amour la poésie@Editions Gallimard, 1929.

Kay Sage/Yves Tanguy exhibition

KAY SAGE

At the Katonah Art Gallery these days is a perfectly remarkable exhibition of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, her second husband – the surrealist painter from Brittany. In no way was I prepared for this kind of feast – I have always admired, massively admired, the painting of Kay Sage, have really enjoyed her book of a memoir, China Eggs, and have felt she needed far more publicity. Thank goodness, Stephen Robeson Miller, responsible in large part for this exhibition, and its catalogue, is preparing a biography of Sage, and I look forward to it.

The entire thing is a delight, from the recording of their double interview, well, triple, with Julien Levy – you hear Yves saying how the cheese was a disastrous failure, and how totally unimportant geography is to his work, and you hear Kay talking about how wonderful it is in the quietness of Roxbury, Connecticut, to look out of the window just towards a hill, that acquires a ridge, lookiing like a “piece of cardboard against the sky. “ She keeps remembering the sea, having grown up along the Mediterranean and otherwise, she would never have had the feeling of distance, or the feeling of the sun. Always, she says, she has the sea iin her mind, along with a road going away, like the Appian way, a long road into the distance.

Yves Tanguy points out that beyond this hill is another, still more beautiful since we cannot see it – how deeply surrealist of him! – how it makes him long to do sculptures, just the opposite of all the objects he makes. Always, he says, his subject is vertical before him. Always an open window onto a landscape: how perfect, then, for both of them.

The incredible strength of Kay Sage’s paintings is what has always intrigued me, and stayed with me. From the first drapings of vertical stones (like Monolith of 1937) and posts – that draping revealing a reddish column inside itself in a later painting – to the architectural constructions: those towers! – of her later work (leaning to the left from the right side of Bounded on the West by the Land Under the Sea of 1946,, there is not one painting about which I feel hesitant. The early influence of de Chirico, with the plane tipping towards you and the two stones and a half – I kept thinking, how not? of her China Eggs – never really dies away, but this particular painting fascinated me. It is entitled The World is Blue, and of course that brought to my mind the first line in Paul Eluard’s poem, “the world is blue like an orange…”. Others of her paintings I love are White Silence of 1941, which she gave to André Breton, who kept it with him, and wrote a poem-object for it – the horizontal sweep of the lower figure, like a n increase of volume toward the right, and its echo above, these get to you. And later, there is a Margin of Silence ; I think of Sage’s going blind in one eye, and feel all that like something prescient.

To be sure, there are tiles, like a chess game, in Near the Five Corners, and the tiny figure on the bridge exerts a hold on you, as do the cloth-wrapped personages all over, especially in I saw Three Cities, at which I used to look hard in the Princeton Art Gallery.

Since I have a particular interest in surrealist portraits and self-portraits, I was gripped by the Small Portrait of 1950, in which you see just a face, oval- shaped, with her characteristic slats of wood, and some wrapped forms around, for the shoulders, above which some red hair…you scarcely wonder who this is, you simple marvel at the way you can always recognize a Kay Sage painting.

And then there is the narrative. It was Kay who, having married an Italian prince (so the Surrealists called her “The Princess”) supplied the wherewithal to bring many of the surrealist painters and poets over from Marseille during the war, including André Breton, his wife Jacqueline Lamba the painter, and their small daughter, Aube., as well as providing them funds to live on for their getting settled in New York. When she and Yves were in Connecticut, they were close friends with all the other painters around – many pictures document their get-togethers. Tales abound of Yves, barefooted and very proud of his small feet, intoxicated, and happy….

Perhaps the most moving documents of all are her suicide notes after Yves’s cerebral hemorrhage of January 15, 1955, just a few months after the close of their double exhibition (in separate rooms) at the Wadsworth Gallery, under the auspices of Chick Goodwin, in Hartford. Kay writes to their mutual friend Heinz Henghes, who introduced them in the beginning:

After I knew Yves, everything was obliterated that was not Yves. I can say no more than to say I do not believe there has ever been such a total and devastating love and understanding as there was between us.

After two cataract operations, in 1959 and 1960, she remained blind in one eye and was losing the sight in the other. Before shooting herself in her locked room, on Jnanuary 8, 1963, she left a suicide note:

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.

Yves’s ashes were scattered in the Bay of Douarnenez., in the Brittany he so loved.

I want to comment on the last two paintings by Kay – after these, she did collages only, no more paintings. The first, soon after Yves’s death, is called A Bird in the Room, and it is one of the darkest paintings I have ever seen. Dark purple, an empty portal sideways and leading nowhere, and on the sides, small wrapped figures as if huddled, as if clinging to the outside frame. It turns out that the coup were both superstitious, and if a bird flew into the house, this presaged a death of someone in the family. This had happened a short while before Yves’s death….And the final painting, one of the most desolate paintings ever, called The Answer is No, of 1958, is her final oil. As far as you can see – and this is a totally uninviting painting, no way of getting in, should you wish to, there are a countless number, seemingly, of blank canvasses, stretching out towards infinity. No, it is obviously all over. What an end, so magisterially planned. There remain, at the moment, nothing else I can say to or about Kay Sage, a great painter.