Week #1, Unbearable Lightness I

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Surrealist Keyhole People and Red Circle), 1950, watercolor on paper, 11 ¾” x 9”.

As we start of 2026, already with a barrage of unexpected and unwanted news, it seems timely to share some weird and wonderful surrealist work from the early 1950s by Dusti Bongé. From her Keyhole People series, each of these pieces exhibits a certain enigmatic mood, confronting us with what can probably best be described as an awareness of “the unbearable lightness of being.”

In these next few examples, the figures, with the typical attenuated proportions of Dusti’s Keyhole People, are in each case surrounded by a loose patterning of stipples and paint splatter that lend a festive mood to their languid presence.

In this first work, there are two ochre-colored main forms, which in turn each seems to meld together two distinctly outlined rectilinear elements, one golden and one copper toned.  Together they result in slightly angular, bony Keyhole figures. Against the quiet blue backdrop, on which they cast dark shadows, their colors seem luminous. They also each have an unusual white rectangle cutting across their torsos filled with an unintelligible script.

To the lower right appears a much smaller, giraffe -proportioned, and zebra-striped, creature performing a balancing act on a bright red ball. A pet perhaps? It too casts its own black shadow. Meanwhile, the central figure has its head literally up in the clouds. They are all surrounded with a liberal sprinkling of white stipples, which being white, almost appear like snowflakes. The stipples complete the work by both accenting and yet reducing the darkness of the shadows.