Kay Sage

Catherine Viviano Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the artist in 1960)

Hugh J. Chisholm, Jr., Hillsborough, California (acquired in 1960 and until at least 1965)

Byron Gallery, New York (acquired circa 1981)

Acquired from the above in 1981 by the present owner

New York, Catherine Viviano Gallery, Kay Sage: Exhibition of Paintings—Collages—Drawings, 1958, no. 2 (dated 1957)

Lincoln, Nebraska Art Association, Sixty-Eighth Annual Exhibition, 1958, no. 115

Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The 26th Biennial Exhibition, 1959, no. 157

Art Institute of Chicago, 63rd American Exhibition: Paintings, Sculpture, 1959-60, no. 102, illustrated

The Newark Museum of Art, 1960

New York, Catherine Viviano Gallery, Kay Sage Retrospective, 1960, no. 51, n.p., illustrated

San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, The San Francisco Collector, 1965, no. 20, p. 26, illustrated (dated 1956)

Howard Devree, “Exotic Notes: Amazing Old West African Sculpture—Four Contemporary Painters,” The New York Times, 2 November 1958, p. XI3, illustrated (dated 1957)

The Art Quarterly, vol. XXII, no. 4, Winter 1959, p. 402, illustrated 

John W. Aldridge, “What Became of Our Postwar Hopes?: A Critic Appraises the Records Made by the Young Writers of the Forties,” The New York Times Book Review, 29 July 1962, p. 162, illustrated

Stephen Robeson Miller, “The Surrealist Imagery of Kay Sage,” Art International, vol. XXVI, no. 4, September-October 1983, fig. 30, p. 44, illustrated

Renée Riese Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, & Partnership, Lincoln, 1994, pl. 3, illustrated in color; pp. vii and 179-81 

Judith D. Suther, A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist, Lincoln, 1997, p. 143

Williams College Museum of Art, ed., American Dreams: American Art in the Williams College Museum of Art, New York, 2001, p. 186

Stephen Robeson Miller; Jessie Sentivan, ed., Kay Sage: Catalogue raisonné, Munich, London and New York, 2018, no. P.1957.5, p. 312; p. 313, illustrated in color

Painted between 1956 and 1957, Detour is one of the finest examples from Kay Sage’s late great oeuvre. These haunting and enigmatic works, with their severe yet strangely familiar architectural structures, were made after the loss of Sage’s beloved husband, Yves Tanguy, who had died suddenly in 1955. Reminiscent of the mysterious expanses of her earlier paintings, Sage’s last series are marked by an increased sense of loneliness and alienation making them among the most powerful in her body of work. Painted between 1955 and 1958 and including her two masterpieces Tomorrow is Never of 1955 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and The Answer is No of 1958, (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), these pictures represent the culmination of Sage’s artistic career. Today, they are widely recognised to be her “best-known work... [their] predominant hues of grays, ochres and beiges reflect[ing] her anguished state of mind” (Victoria Noel Johnson in Exh. Cat., New York, Helly Nahmad Gallery, Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy: Ring of Iron, Ring of Wool, 2023, p. 62).

Fearing a loss of vision in the 1950s, Sage was unwilling to create work that did not live up to her exacting standards of precision and power. It was in 1958, amidst an existential crisis, that she abandoned painting for good. That year, and again in 1960, Sage’s friend, Catherine Viviano, organised a showing of her most recent paintings at two now-landmark exhibitions in her gallery in New York in the hope of wooing the artist back to her craft. With its celestial progression of imposing, modernist arches stretching out across the sky, Detour was one of the leading works shown at both exhibitions. The present painting is the first that Sage completed after working on Le Passage of 1956—widely regarded today as her chef-d'oeuvre.

Seemingly epitomizing Sage’s lonely vision of the world without her husband and Surrealist counterpart, this proxy-self portrait of an unknown woman is both one of Sage’s best known yet least characteristic works. The scene is centered around a half-clothed figure seen from behind, staring out unto a vast expanse geometric form at once sea- and desert-like in appearance. Sage hadn’t included such a human form in her work since her pre-Surrealist days in Italy in the 1930s. Since her early works, Sage had come to rely almost completely upon architectural elements and motifs to create powerful landscapes of the mind. “Le Passage,” she wrote to a friend, is “a strange painting that I'm doing for my pleasure—which doesn't get me anywhere for the fall shows. Too bad, I can't help it” (Kay Sage, “Letter to Germain Duhamel,” quoted in Judith D. Suther, A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist, Lincoln, 1997, pp. 197-98). Painted immediately afterwards, Detour is, by contrast, precisely the kind of painting Sage had in mind for what would later prove to be her last exhibition of new work in oil.

Detour epitomizes the strange, haunting expanses and mystique of her late visions as one of the most austere and minimalist yet mesmerising of all her works. It is a picture in which, as Renée Riese Hubert has written, “the wide open space, the unrecognizable spatial setting, featured in [such paintings as] Tomorrow Is Never and This Is Another Day has [now] disappeared, for the entire world has been reduced to a single architectural construct...[Detour] proposes, as its title suggests,] proposes an additional kind of misplacement by delaying, perhaps forever, a return to the main road—to the mainstream of art” (Renée Riese Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership, Lincoln, 1994, pp. 179-80).

Despite the seemingly limitless potential of the open expanse of sky and the architecture’s weightless quality, Sage’s biographer Judith D. Suther has seen in Detour a profound sense of finality, describing the painting as an “entryway to [the] display of artistic negation” found in many of Sage’s late oils. “In this picture,” she writes, “a set of receding doorways, bisected by foreshortened train track-like runners at floor level, leads out into space, high up. There is no horizon line and no suggestion of an anchor point or destination. The heavy portals, with no visible support and no egress except straight ahead into nothingness, appear to mark a terminus. The mood set by this painting is darkly admonitory—all who enter here, abandon hope, it seems to warn” (Judith D. Suther, ibid., p. 198).

Yet, Detour also exemplifies Sage’s ability to serve as a mirror for the viewer’s own perceptions and predispositions: the work reflects not only its own formal rigor but also the emotional and psychological states projected onto it. Observers encounter in its austere portals either a sense of foreboding or the thrill of poetic enigma—one perceives, ultimately, what one brings to the experience.

“When asked about one of her works,” Solomon Adler writes, Sage "famously said that she knew ‘nothing of [its] origin except that I painted it.’ There was, however, a certain observation that she readily made: ‘I do know that while I’m painting I feel as though I were living in the place’” (Solomon Adler, “Kay Sage, Midnight Street, 1944,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, accessed online).