A Finger on the Drum

1940

Kay Sage

Associated Names
Kay Sage

Painter, American, 1898 - 1963

A charcoal-gray, pointed, tower-like form wrapped with cords or vines rises to our left against a barren desert in this horizontal painting. Light falls from our left onto the sharply pointed tip of the tower. A deep, jagged shadow cast from a formation outside of our view to our left falls across the oatmeal-brown desert floor. Two rounded white forms, perhaps stones, lie near the lower right corner, and cast ink-black shadows on the ground. The horizon comes just over a third of the way up the composition. Along the horizon, two clusters of buildings and low hills are painted with tones of hazy indigo blue and tan. The sky above is ice blue, and a veil-like cloud stretches from the horizon to our left of center up into the right corner. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “Kay Sage 40.”
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On View

East Building Upper Level, Gallery E415

Artwork overview

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Collection of the artist [1898-1963], Woodbury, Connecticut; her estate; bequest 10 October 1963 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1941

  • Kay Sage: Paintings, San Francisco Museum of Art, 18 March - 6 April 1941.

  • Kay Sage: Paintings, Tone Price Galleries, Los Angeles, 1941, no. 3.

  • Kay Sage: Paintings, Tone Price Galleries, Los Angeles, 3-29 February 1941, no. 3.

  • Kay Sage, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1941.

1979

  • Women Artists in Washington Collections, University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, 18 January - 25 February 1979, no. 66, repro.

1982

  • Solitude: Inner Visions in American Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, 25 September - 30 December 1982, no. 32, repro.

Bibliography

1982

  • Miller, Stephen Robeson. "The Art of Kay Sage." M.A. Thesis, Boston University, 1982: no. 30, in the Stephen Robeson Miller research material on Kay Sage, 1898-1983; Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., microfilm reel no. 2888,

1997

  • Suther, Judith D. A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist. Lincoln and London, 1997: repro.

2011

  • Cash, Sarah, ed. Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Washington, 2011: 325, repro.

  • Miller, Stephen Robeson, and Jonathan Stuhlman. Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy. Katonah, New York, 2011: fig. 6.

2018

  • Miller, Stephen Robeson. Kay Sage, Catalogue Raisonné. Munich, London, and New York, 2018: no. P.1940.13, 132, repro. 133.

Inscriptions

lower right: Kay Sage 40

Wikidata ID

Q46635410

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