Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy

11 February - 13 May 2012

Mint Museum Uptown

Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy features approximately fifty works of art by Tanguy (1900-1955), one of the original members of the French Surrealist movement, and Sage (1898-1963) his wife , an American artist who joined the Surrealists in the late 1930s. This is the first major exhibition of Tanguy’s art organized by an American museum since 1955 and the first of Sage’s since 1977.  Driven by new scholarship and a new approach to understanding the haunting dreamscapes painted by both artists, this nationally-touring exhibition will illuminate, for the first time, the dynamic interchange of ideas that informed their work and examine the formal relationships between the remarkable paintings that they created during the 15 years that they lived and worked together in this country. More than three dozen public and private collections have lent works to the show. Integrated into the installation will be a selection of ephemera relating to Sage’s and Tanguy’s lives, notably two previously unseen photographs by Irving Penn, a newly-discovered interview with the two artists, and photographs of the couple and their home in Connecticut. Double Solitaire opened at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York, in June and will be on view at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College before opening in Charlotte. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated 104-page scholarly catalogue, featuring essays by exhibition curators Jonathan Stuhlman and Stephen Robeson Miller.       -Jonathan Stuhlman, Curator of American Art, The Mint Museum.

Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy is one part of Surrealism and Beyond and runs concurrently with Seeing the World Within: Charles Seliger in the 1940s and Gordon Onslow Ford: Voyager and Visionary.

• New York Times Review of Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy.
• Review of the exhibition at the Davis Museum, Wellesley College.   
• Exhibition review from Arts Editor. 

Exhibition Preview with co-curators Stephen Robeson Miller, art historian and Sage expert, and Jonathan Stuhlman, Curator of American Art for The Mint Museum.

About the Artists 

Yves Tanguy

• Artist's biography from the Guggenheim Museum.

• Tanguy at MoMA. 

 Kay Sage

• About the artist. 
• Sage's papers from the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institute. Includes information on her unpublished memoir China Eggs.
• Short biography and examples of work from the Weinstein Gallery. 

Selected Print Resources Available at The Mint Museum Library

• Hubert, Renée Riese. Magnifying Mirrors : Women, Surrealism, & Partnership. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
• Rubin, William Stanley. Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968.
• Stuhlman, Jonathan. Double Solitaire: the Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy. Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art; Charlotte, NC: The Mint Museum, 2011. 
• This catalogue for the exhibition is available in The Mint Museum Shops. 
• Tanguy, Yves. Tanguy, Calder : Between Surrealism and Abstraction. New York: L & M Arts, 2010. 

For additional print resources, search MARCO, the Mint Art Research Catalog Online. 

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Created by Sarah Earle, Library Intern with revisions by Megan Westmoreland, Library Intern and Danielle Mathieson, Library Volunteer.