$1M+ painting headed to Charlotte’s Mint

A Surrealist painting sold for more than $1.2 million Thursday night – 10 times its presale estimate – and is now headed to Charlotte’s Mint Museum, purchased with money from a donor the museum was not prepared to immediately announce.

The work, “Ring of Iron, Ring of Wood,” was done in 1947 by Kay Sage. Noteworthy not only as a woman and an American in an artistic movement crowded by neither, she’s also recognized for innovation: Art historian Whitney Chadwick has said Sage’s work possessed a “purified form and a sense of motionlessness and impending doom found nowhere else in Surrealism.”

Thursday night, as the Christie’s auction house worked through a selection of Impressionist and modern art, the Wall Street Journal’s art market reporter tweeted: “Kay Sage, the long-overlooked surrealist because she’s a she, gets a nice boost” from the sale, while the New York Observer numbered the piece among several surprises.

Jonathan Stuhlman, the Mint’s senior curator of American, modern and contemporary art, is quite familiar with Sage: He’s co-author of a book about her and spouse Yves Tanguy (dubbed “the Surrealist It couple” by the New York Times) and mounted a 2012 Mint exhibition that was the first to highlight the couple’s influence on each other. (The two had fled Europe as World War II began, moving to Connecticut, but always kept separate work spaces and refused to exhibit together. He died in 1955; she committed suicide eight years later.)

Bidding jumped from an opening $50,000 to $700,000 “in 30 seconds,” said Stuhlman, who watched Christie’s live stream while on the phone with the Mint’s representative. He suspects the painting, which he’d tried unsuccessfully to borrow for the 2012 show, is “the last major example of her work on this scale that will come to the marketplace.”

French writer André Breton, who defined Surrealism as expressing “the actual functioning of thought ... in the absence of any control,” reportedly saw Sage’s work and refused to believe the artist was a woman. Stuhlman said the purchase “fits with our priorities”: building the Mint’s collection of modern American art and acquiring the work of more under-represented artists.

The 2012 exhibition was part of the first exhibition of Surrealist art for the Mint and the first major one in the Southeast.

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 6:30 PM with the headline "$1M+ painting headed to Charlotte’s Mint."