Art: Repatriated Surrealist

In Italy 15 years ago, brown-haired, blue-eyed Katherine Sage, of the rich Russell Sage family, married long-faced Italian Prince Ranieri di San Faustino. Her marriage lasted five years, her taste for Europe considerably longer: she stayed there, devoted all her time to painting. Close friend of Writer Andre Breton, Giorgio de Chirico and other members of the surrealist school, she soon put her subconscious on canvas.

When looming World War II closed the Paris gallery in which she had planned to give her first one-woman exhibition, Artist Sage returned to the U. S., settled down in a Manhattan studio, raised funds to import her French friends and their works. She succeeded in putting on shows for her protege Yves Tanguy and Abstractionist Jean Helion before World War II interfered. Last week, at Manhattan's Pierre

Matisse Galleries, she finally managed to put on a show of her own paintings.

Manhattanites found Kay Sage's bleak, flat-colored canvases an agreeable change from run-of-the-maelstrom surrealist art. In spite of such titles as Beyond the Wind, The World Is Blue, My Room Has Two Doors, her pictures were not calculated to scare anybody into conniption fits or nightmares. Some of them, such as Danger, Construction Ahead (see cut), were even decorative. Though a psychoanalyst might have had an interesting quarter of an hour's detective work, to the layman Artist Sage's subconscious showed all signs of being at peace with itself.