The Davis Museum announces Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, a touring exhibition to explore the dynamic exchange of ideas that shaped the astonishing landscapes of these Surrealist artists. On view from October 19, 2011 through January 15, 2012 in the Bronfman & Chandler Galleries, “Double Solitaire” takes visitors on a stimulating journey through the subconscious. Opening Celebration: Wednesday, October 19, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Yves Tanguy, The Hunted Sky (Le Ciel traqué), 1951. Oil on canvas. The Menil Collection, Gift of Francois and Susan de Menil, 91-106
“The Davis is honored to present this fascinating exhibition, bringing together many of the finest examples of Sage and Tanguy’s work for the first time,” said Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis. Fischman added, “We’re particularly thrilled to lend our own Sage work, her 1947 On the First of March Crows Begin to Search, to the traveling exhibition. The painting was a bequest by the artist to the Davis and the first Surrealist work to enter the museum’s collections.”
Sage and Tanguy were inseparable throughout their 15-year marriage, sharing adjoining studios in Woodbury, Connecticut and communicating only in French until Tanguy’s untimely death in 1955. Both artists sought to create paintings that the French poet André Breton called “peinture-poésie,” a style influenced by poetry and dream-like imagery.
Despite this, they did not want to be considered a “team of painters” and refused to exhibit together. With the condition that they be placed in separate galleries, a 1954 exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, was the closest their works ever came to being shown together. Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy integrates, for the first time and in one space, the paintings they created during their years together.
Featuring approximately 25 paintings by each artist, dating from 1937 to 1958, as well as selected ephemera, this groundbreaking exhibition provides unprecedented access to the couple’s intertwined artistic and personal lives.
The exhibition demonstrates how the art of Tanguy, one of the original French Surrealists, and that of Sage, one of the first American Surrealists, developed and changed, and where each artist was inspired by the other’s vision.
