PUBLISHER
The Katonah Museum of Art/The Mint Museum

BOOK FORMAT
Flexi, 8 x 11 in. / 104 pgs / 69 color / 19 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 8/31/2011
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2011 p. 70

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780983194217 TRADE
List Price: $40.00 CDN $50.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Katonah, NY
Katonah Museum of Art, 06/05/11-09/18/11

West Palm Beach, FL
Norton Museum of Art, 11/19/11-01/22/12

Charlotte, NC
Mint Museum Uptown at Levine Center for the Arts, 02/11/12-05/13/12

BROWSE THE 2022 SPRING CATALOG

Preview our SPRING 2022 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.

THE KATONAH MUSEUM OF ART/THE MINT MUSEUM

Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy

Text by Stephen Robeson Miller, Jonathan Stuhlman.

Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage were two of Surrealism's leading painters, who together elaborated de Chirico's world of isolate and obdurate forms into eerie landscapes sparsely populated with biomorphic life forms. Here, for the first time, the work of this dynamic couple is explored in depth. An essay by Stephen Robeson Miller examines the intersection of Sage's and Tanguy's biographies with their work, accurately recounting for the first time Sage's conversion to Surrealism. A second essay by Jonathan Stuhlman traces the ways in which Sage's art influenced Tanguy's. These essays are accompanied by color plates containing several previously unreproduced works and photographs.

Featured image, Yves Tanguy's Multiplication of the Arcs, 1954, is reproduced from Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy. One of Tanguy's largest and latest paintings, Multiplication of the Arcs is considered by many scholars to be Tanguy’s final masterpiece.

STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

For assistance locating a copy, please see our list of recommended out of print specialists

FROM THE BOOK

"As Tanguy acclimated to his new life and surroundings in the early 1940s, first in New York City and then in the Connecticut countryside, he drew inspiration not only from the kind of forms that populated Sage's paintings but also from the way in which she used them in her haunting compositions. During this period, taking his cue from Sage's work, he began to ease his forms forward, towards the bottom edge of the canvas, bringing them closer to each other (and the viewer) and increasing their scale. By 1944, they had been pushed so far forward that their lower extremities were cut off, implying that they and the viewer inhabit the same space. While this was a subtle but effective means of advancing the Surrealist agenda of uniting the worlds of dreams and reality, a second effect of this forward movement was that the larger scale of these forms, coupled with their increasing density, effectively blocked visual and conceptual entry into the space within the painting, creating a tension between access and denial."

Jonathan Stuhlman, excerpted from Double Solitaire: Kay Sage's Influence on Yves Tanguy in Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy.

OF RELATED INTEREST