Week #36, Curious Creatures I

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Two Keyhole People with Yellow and Green), c. 1950, mixed media on paper, 11 ½” x 8 ¾.

This month we will look at some of Dusti Bongé’s surrealist works again. Surrealism has been receiving a lot of renewed interest in recent years. In addition, this year happens to mark the 100^th anniversary of the official birth of the surrealist movement. In 1924, André Breton, French poet and critic, started the movement with his Surrealist Manifesto or Manifeste du Surréalisme.

Early on in her career Dusti found the freedom surrealism afforded a great outlet for her subconscious thoughts and dreams. Surrealism provided the bridge from representation to abstraction. Dusti produced her unique visions for over a decade before she took the artistic turn to complete abstract expressionism in her work.

From the mid 1940s through the early 1950s she created numerous small watercolor & ink works on paper populated with her unusual Keyhole People. We’ve talked about these creatures, with their odd, often attenuated forms, before. Although they do not physically resemble the human figure, they nonetheless evoke a familiar sense of humanity. But at times they seem more flora or fauna based, as in the ones we will be looking at in this set. 

In this piece, the parenthetical title suggests that there are two figures. However, it looks more like one figure in a landscape with a blooming cactus, specifically a saguaro, in the background. The main figure in the foreground has the familiar humanoid features, including being bipedal and having an additional appendage reminiscent of an arm. The ovoid body/head contains the telltale “keyholes” suggesting eyes. 

The yellow and green hues add to the sense that this may be a depiction of a figure in the desert, where the light is intense and green is sparse. Add to that the muted tan color of the figure and the cactus and you get a total sense of a warm, sandy, bright environment, one that Dusti was very familiar with given her travels in Mexico.