March 6, 2025
By Troy McMullen
By the time she moved to Woodbury in 1941, the artist Kay Sage had already established herself as a prominent Surrealist painter.
An art movement that began in Europe after World War I, Surrealism sought to express the unconscious mind. Sage gained notice in Europe and the U.S. for employing subdued colors and diffused light to create landscape images as a metaphor for the mind.
Yet her arrival to the Northwest Corner of Connecticut—settling into a 19th-century farmhouse on Old Town Farm Road after living in Paris and New York—proved to be the most productive period of her career. It coincided with a surge of new works, as well as five volumes of poetry.
There were also artistic breakthroughs.
Woodbury is where Sage began experimenting with bolder and more intense colors, and the use of drapery in paintings like Too Soon for Thunder, which features a desolate landscape filled with architectural motifs. She introduced tightly controlled brushstrokes to further separate herself from the work of her husband, the French artist Yves Tanguy, whose paintings displayed a recognizable style of nonrepresentational Surrealism. And she began working with collage, which garnered acclaim for the way she assembled abstract shapes cut from magazines, drawings, and watercolors.
Woodbury also supplied Sage with a bustling milieu of artists that aided her creative output.
Artists Alexander Calder and Arshile Gorky were Litchfield County neighbors and frequent visitors to the Sage home, as was Roberto Matta. André Breton, known as the father of Surrealism, made regular trips to Woodbury from New York to mingle with the growing number of transplanted Parisian artists who transformed Connecticut into a Surrealist capital-in-exile.
Sage’s cousin, sculptor David Hare, also lived nearby in Roxbury, and was a regular at the Sage residence—a wood-framed home filled with original Surrealist art, mid-century furnishings, and a barn that housed separate studios for Sage and Tanguy.
“The influx of artists into Woodbury really formed an atmosphere of creative energy in the town,” says Karen Reddington-Hughes, Woodbury’s first selectman and the owner of Abrash Gallery on Main Street. She says Woodbury appealed to New York artists who craved the rural countryside but couldn’t afford the more affluent Fairfield County. “So, when Calder and Gorky began arriving in the late 1930s and early ’40s, they attracted other creatives who felt very comfortable living and working here.”
Some of Sage’s creative output during her Woodbury years is currently on display at the Mattatuck Museum. “Modern Women: Georgia O’Keeffe and Kay Sage” runs until June 15, and includes works from a collection of more than 400 items gifted to the museum through Sage’s estate.
It’s the largest holdings of Sage art and ephemera of any institution, says Keffie Feldman, Mattatuck’s chief curator. The trove goes well beyond paintings and drawings to include collages, constructions, prints, and personal artifacts.
“The exhibition really tries to capture the full breadth and scope of Sage’s work,” says Feldman. mattmuseum.org/exhibition/modern-women
