Revision of the Surrealist Movement in the 1940s and 1950s - The Artist Kay Sage (1898-1963) and the "American Dream"

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sigrid Ruby
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 431161416

The overarching goal of the project is to achieve a more differentiated picture of the Surrealist movement, its aesthetics and semantics, social practices and exhibition strategies in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. This shall be accomplished through a comprehensive analysis of a previously marginalized artistic position (Kay Sage), by reflecting the conditions and dynamics of transatlantic exchange and by searching for a possibly idiosyncratic survival of Surrealism and its dream constructs in the United States, beyond Modernism as embodied by Abstract Expressionism that dominates the art historiography of the epoch to date. The project thus fits into the research agenda of a "Global Surrealism", the aim of which is to outline both common and unifying qualities of Surrealism, as well as genuine cultural-historical and local qualities. It is also a contribution to the pluralization of artistic modernism and its narratives through the development and visualization of supposedly marginal or subaltern positions, especially of women, as it is currently being promoted both in academia and in exhibition practice. Within the framework of and for this overarching research perspective, the art historical development and contextualization of the work of Kay Sage (1898-1969) - an American Surrealist - takes place, whose position "between the worlds" (Europe and America, visual arts and literature, artist and artist's wife, figuration and abstraction) makes her particularly interesting, also in an exemplary sense. The aim is, on the one hand to explore the genuinely Surrealist features of Sage's works, which have so far received little attention, and, on the other, to explore her different roles in the social fabric of Surrealism as well as stations in her life and career. Using the concrete example of her artistic workand personal career, we will be able to show and analyze which shifts or widenings of perspective result from this, which aesthetic and epistemic enrichment the research on Surrealism derives from it, and whether it will be possible to see other artistic positions that have been neglected so far as well. The third goal is the systematic analysis of artistic dream images in the cultural-historical context of the United States in the 1940s/50s, based on and inspired by the work of Sage and drawing on other artistic positions. The artists of post-war surrealism - inspired by the surrealists exiled from Europe and relevant texts (by S. Freud and C.G. Jung, among others), but also by art-historical models and historiographical narratives of 'America' - pushed forward the work on dreams and thus also the examination of a collective unconscious. Their contribution to a possibly specifically American dream culture will be explored for the first time.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants