Kay Sage depicted a large, two-pronged structure resembling drapery, which rises straight up into the air from a ramp or dock that recedes into the distance at right and is punctuated by geometric and curvilinear forms. The striking canvas suggests the mystifying environs of a dreamscape, reflecting Sage’s fascination with the unconscious. In the mid-1930s, the artist lived in Paris and worked alongside French Surrealists, including Yves Tanguy, whom she married in 1940 after moving to New York at the outbreak of World War II. Painted in 1944, In the Third Sleep attests to her continued investigation of the otherworldly.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Friends of American Art Collection; Watson F. Blair Prize Fund
Reference Number
1945.198
Extended information about this artwork
Frederick A. Sweet, The Fifty-Sixth Annual American Exhibition of Paintings, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1945), n.p., cat. 126, pl. XI (ill.).
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, New Accessions USA, exh. cat. (Colorado Springs: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1946), cat. 9.
Lake Forest College, A Century of American Painting: Masterpieces Loaned by the Art Institute of Chicago, exh. cat. (Lake Forest, IL: Lake Forest College, 1957), cat. 31.
Judith Suther, A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), (ill.).
Lynn Gamwell, ed., Dreams 1900–2000: Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 274 (ill.).
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), 286–88, cat. 141 (ill.).
New York, Julian Levy Gallery, Paintings by Kay Sage, Oct. 3–31, 1944, no. 1.
Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.
