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Endnote Thomas M. Messer Sarah G. Austin – Sally to me – left us too early. Yet she bequeathed a unified and qualitatively substantial legacy made up of more than three hundred and fifty collages that have obvious distinction and are readable as the summation of an intense and informed striving. To those of us who knew her well, Sally was a lovable creature, full of contradictions; talented and capable in certain ways, as she was wanting in others. Aware and involved with art, indeed with all the arts, she showed marked aptitudes already in her teens and found ways to give them creative expression. Music came first but remained with her largely in a passive, recipient sense. She comprehended melodies and harmonies, rhythms and tonal structures and with the help of a remarkable memory came to know wide areas of musical literature, whether old or new, high or low. She gave expression to such a grasp by humming, singing and dancing uninhibitedly when she was in the mood. But it was ultimately in the visual arts that Sally’s capacities assumed full measure. In keeping with her temperament, this did not happen through academic training but rather through self-taught, witty application of whatever came into her hands, like photography and video. She experimented unselfconsciously, creating humorous play fragments for her own amusement and that of her friends. Let me recall a probably still extant film entitled “Where did the van go?” Sally created it as a spoof about a Van Gogh painting on exhibition and stolen, (luckily only in her fantasy), while as a youngster in the late 1950s she hung around the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. She was not of much use to our office, where she performed menial duties for little pay, but was impossible to let go because of her dear and rewarding presence. Once she transferred herself to New York City in the early 1960s, there was an intensification of her artistic commitment, marking the beginning of her fully professional phase. In the collage constructions that make up the essential part of her artistry, Sally Austin drew heavily upon the museum environments into which, from the beginning, she was fated to grow. The artist and his work, therefore, constituted her basic subject matter. She used citation and paraphrase, often relying upon artist self-portraits to translate their presence into the sensibilities of her own time. Technically, Sally created compositions that lived for the most part in small, square or rectangular Plexiglas-covered boxes. By relating these to each other, as she did in a few instances, the resulting composite surfaces reached imposing dimensions and a corresponding intensity. By way of example, Surrealism (Plate #8) is one of five capital works Sally created, measuring five feet square. The Surrealist movement, dear to her avant-garde father, would have special meaning for her. It reads like an anthology, presenting major personages from de Chirico, Miro and Ernst through Magritte, Tanguy and Dali. These artists appear, often repeatedly, in photographic portraits as well as through fragments of their reproduced works. Overlapping and intermingling, they embody something of the unconscious flow that is one of Surrealism’s conspicuous attributes. Surrealism and other large-scale works were created in the late 1970s when Sally Austin lived in an East-side apartment in Manhattan. But before and after, her production included smaller works that project the essential characteristics of their chosen subjects, while simultaneously reflecting much of herself. We are offered Mondrian (Plate #4), in which the Dutch Neo-Plasticist is shown seated against the kind of unqualified red background that was so often part of his compositions – a red that found its complements in other primaries, as well as in black and white – all part of Sally’s referential conception. Picasso is cut into concentric stripes that juxtapose a photograph of his robust middle-aged self with his own final self-portrait (Plate #13), so close to death at ninety-one. Duchamp, Matisse and many others among the demi-dieux are rendered in similarly perceptive ways that tell us a great deal about those depicted, give a summarizing notion of their stylistic affiliations and in the process reveal the sophisticated insights of Sally’s art. But with all of this, it took a conscious effort to think of Sally as an artist, even as her production mounted and became visibly authoritative, largely because she herself did not raise such claims. Art and play remained indivisible, and an appealing shyness, which was part of her make-up, prevented her from entering the art world with programmatic zest. Now, more than six years after her death, Sarah G. Austin’s accomplishments as an artist stand before us with more substance and expressive power than most of us who observed her seemingly undirected life and playful ways would have thought possible. Thomas M. Messer Director Emeritus, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
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