Week #14 Conservation II

Circus before and after conservation.

Circus, 1942, oil on canvas, 17 ½” x 21 ¾”. Conserved.

We’re shining a light on the wonder that is art conservation again this week. 

Here we have one of Dusti Bongé’s earliest circus paintings. I’ve mentioned before that Dusti really loved the circus for all its colors, characters, and spectacle. Eventually her Circus Series works became more and more surrealist. This painting seems to provide an early hint at those, although it still has some basis in actual observations, which she had sketched in one of her many sketchbooks.

Dusti especially liked the utter “cacophony” of the circus being set up, before any shows would take place. The disparate tableaux of tents, poles, caravans, flags, animal cages, chariot wheels, elephants, performers and sundry characters, fueled her artistic imagination. Here, we see many of those colorful circus elements come together in odd configurations and at unexpected angles adding to the general confusion of the whole. I mean, just look at the nude gigantic lady in the back of the colorful caravan with the big red bow. Is she perhaps a sideshow “hootchie-kootchie” performer?

This painting has an interesting recent history. After having been catalogued with all the other Dusti Bongé artwork, the painting was accidentally misplaced for almost a decade. The most likely reason was that the canvas had been removed from its stretcher, and thus it was not stored with all her other paintings. Instead, the unstretched canvas was rolled up and stored with some other artworks (by Arch Bongé).

Rediscovered in 2019, the Foundation immediately arranged for the work to be conserved and re-stretched. Being over 80 years old, it had suffered the usual wear and tear, accumulated dirt and abrasions. In addition, although artists have been known to take their canvases off the stretcher for shipping or storing, it is not exactly considered a practice that promotes the longevity of the work.

But now its fantastical spectacle looks fantastic.