Too Soon for Thunder
Artist
Kay Sage
(American, 1898 - 1963)
Date1943
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 28 1/16 x 36 inches (71.28 x 91.44 cm)
Framed: 29 1/8 x 37 1/8 x 1 3/4 inches (73.98 x 94.3 x 4.45 cm)
Framed: 29 1/8 x 37 1/8 x 1 3/4 inches (73.98 x 94.3 x 4.45 cm)
Credit LineBequest of the artist
Object number64-36
SignedSigned and dated lower left: Kay Sage ’43
On View
On viewGallery Location
- 129
Collections
DescriptionForeground, in front of short-walled enclosure, side wall terminating lower right; standing gray form overlaid with thick, irregular, white reticulation and swathed in orange drapery; beyond wall, left, upthrust construction, brown, left, white, right, of infolding planes, beside taller pyramidal structure, right, several pyramid and prism forms; empty sky shading to gray, top, from cerulean; shadow of unseen pointed form on wall front and top, left.Gallery LabelKay Sage, an American, was associated with the Surrealist movement, which explored the expression of an alternative reality through the unconscious mind and dream imagery.
Too Soon for Thunder is a desolate landscape, filled with enigmatic, architectural motifs and draped, skeletal phantoms. Of a similar image Sage explained, "It's a sort of showing what's inside-things half mechanical, half alive. The mountain itself can represent almost anything—a human, life, the world, any fundamental thing…I do know that while I'm painting, I feel as though I am living in the place."
Too Soon for Thunder is a desolate landscape, filled with enigmatic, architectural motifs and draped, skeletal phantoms. Of a similar image Sage explained, "It's a sort of showing what's inside-things half mechanical, half alive. The mountain itself can represent almost anything—a human, life, the world, any fundamental thing…I do know that while I'm painting, I feel as though I am living in the place."
New Accessions USA, exh. cat. (Colorado Springs: Colorado Springs
Fine Arts Center, 1966), unpaginated; NAMA 1973, 254; Donna
Bachmann, “Hidden Treasures by Women at the Nelson,” Forum,
Summer 1983, 16; Judith D. Suther, A House of Her Own: Kay
Sage, Solitary Surrealist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1997), 107–8, 110 (as Too Late for Thunder), pl.; Jonathan Stuhlman, “Kay Sage’s Influence on Yves Tanguy’s Art of the 1940s,”
M.A. thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1998, vi, 24,
46–47, 54, 99; NAMA 1993a, 222; Hsiu-Li Kuo, “The Solitary
Notations,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wollongong, Australia, 2004,
36, [134], fi g. 16.
Fine Arts Center, 1966), unpaginated; NAMA 1973, 254; Donna
Bachmann, “Hidden Treasures by Women at the Nelson,” Forum,
Summer 1983, 16; Judith D. Suther, A House of Her Own: Kay
Sage, Solitary Surrealist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1997), 107–8, 110 (as Too Late for Thunder), pl.; Jonathan Stuhlman, “Kay Sage’s Influence on Yves Tanguy’s Art of the 1940s,”
M.A. thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1998, vi, 24,
46–47, 54, 99; NAMA 1993a, 222; Hsiu-Li Kuo, “The Solitary
Notations,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wollongong, Australia, 2004,
36, [134], fi g. 16.
Copyright© Estate of Kay Sage / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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