at the Mattatuck Museum, February 23 – June 8, 2025
What a delightful surprise to experience a deep dive into the work of Connecticut artist, Kay Sage, featured in the new show at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury! Though I knew her to be the wife of Yves Tanguy (of whom I was a fan), and had seen individual pieces of hers at The Matt, I had not seen enough of her work until this weekend to realize how great she was. Lucky for us, she bequeathed much of her work to this museum, where she had been an active member when she lived in Woodbury, including serving on the exhibition committee.
Sage’s work is paired with everyone’s great favorite—Georgia O’Keefe’s. Seeing images of the two as young women, along with early works, was revelatory. It was another reminder that artists generally start out in the traditional manner, learning to draw and paint objects, still lifes, portraits and landscapes. My particular interest peaks when I see an artist leave the conventional path and take their technical skills into the unknown, inventing individual ways to break with traditions.
It is not much of a leap to recognize the simplified backdrop cloth of O’Keefe’s early painting of fruit in this show as being a hint of the style her future work would become. Years later similar smooth, minimal curvings would represent New Mexico hills as if they were a tumble of chenille bedspreads or reclining nudes. It was telling to also see her daring choice in 1908 to depict a dead rabbit as a darkly brooding masterpiece. Here was a young artist ready to move on! The signage next to this work quoted her as saying, “Who wants to spend their life painting rabbits and copper bowls?” Precisely my feeling when I left my first loves of drawing and lithographic printmaking. One gets bored eventually with simply depicting in an expected way something else that already exists.
Would that I had seen Kay Sage’s twenty-four part series, The Minutes, when I was still a young artist-teacher in my early 20s and drew the way she did! The concept of taking an image through a sequence of entanglements and situations would have been incredibly inspiring to me then. Instead, I followed O’Keefe’s example and left Connecticut for the open, seemingly wild and exotic Land of Enchantment, where my life bloomed over the next eighteen years.
I immersed myself in O’Keefe’s life and work, reading everything I could about her through the years, and particularly being inspired during my Feminist Art explorations in the second wave of the Women’s Movement. Seeing any work of hers now brings back some kind of personal memory. Inspired by this show to learn more about Kay Sage, and seeing in a label that she was also “a prolific writer”, I immediately ordered some books from my favorite used book source, Biblio.com, and look forward to receiving them.
My seminal undergraduate mentor, the extraordinary artist, Anna Held Audette, introduced me to the work of Hyman Bloom, whose style had a great influence on me during the 70s. She also opened the door to collage by encouraging me to tear up my large figure drawings and enlarged studies of flowers, recompose them as abstractions, then draw back into them with pastel and charcoal. I will be forever grateful for these parting gifts from Anna to my future work before I graduated college and immediately began teaching. [One of my drawings won first prize in the Connecticut Women Artists 1978 Juried Exhibition at New Haven’s (then) John Slade Ely House, where I had a solo show the following year before leaving for New Mexico.]
Thanks to the Mattatuck I happily add Kay Sage to my fond memories of the works of Dorothea Carrington, Remedios Varo, Meret Oppenheim, Niki de Saint Phalle, Marisol, Hollis Sigler and Arshille Gorky (and so, so many artists whose works I have admired over the decades). I left this show traveling through streets I have walked and driven upon through aspects of my entire life, bittersweet memories at every turn, feeling a complex form of gratitude for having grown up where and when I did, even though I had ultimately felt the need to flee this home in order to discover a new place in which to grow into the self I chose to be.
It is gratifying to see how strong an institution the Mattatuck Museum has become over all these years. It is a gem that evolved as if it existed in a larger city. It has grown in collaboration with the people of a town that contains untold numbers of invisible historic layers within and behind it, and has seemed to have died and recovered multiple times, like so many formerly booming factory towns in New England. That the programming of The Matt completely embraces the present, critically interprets and re-presents the past, and offers relevant cultural experiences for every person who walks through its doors is an important and extraordinary success. Now that I live within driving distance, it makes me want to keep coming back!
© February, 2025 Janet Maher, All Rights Reserved; Circlegardenstudio.com, author of Waterbury Irish.
Trusting the Process: Getting There From Here 
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