Week #22, Black & White I

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Abstract Forms), c. 1950, Pen & ink on paper, 11 ¾” x 9”.

In contrast to the richly hued works of the Thinking in Color series, this month we look at some of Dusti Bongé’s works in simple black & white. During her earlier years, in the 1930s and 1940s, any works in black & white were primarily sketches and studies, rather than being deliberately monochrome.

But as Dusti pivoted into her increasingly abstract work in the early 1950s, black & white emerged as a very intentional aesthetic device in her compositions. And it became a recurring approach she would revisit every decade since then. What changed over the years was the material and methodological approach, ranging from ink washes to pen & ink drawings, to watercolors, to tempera, to spray paint.

This ink drawing is one of the first wave of black & white works from the early 1950s. Around this time Dusti created various rather surreal portraits with both their frontal and profile aspects intertwined. The resulting visages placed familiar facial elements in unfamiliar juxtapositions.

This work appears to be a next step, one that takes that double-aspect play into a realm of abstraction where the delineated forms we see no longer allude to any recognizable features. Instead, here, the configurations range from two dominating, partially arced, abstract outlines, to various smaller secondary free forms. As their contours interact, the shapes become folded into one another, creating a yin and yang interplay.

A remarkable thing to note is that this work looks like it may have been drawn with just two lines. An unwavering, heavier line creating the larger curved forms, and a flowing, thinner line dancing through them.