Week #47, Portraits III

Untitled (Portrait of a Man), c. 1940, charcoal on paper, 12” x 9”, recto

Untitled (Portrait of a Man), c. 1940, charcoal on paper, 12” x 9”, verso

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This is a set of marvelously simple portraits. They are sketched back to back on a double sided sheet of paper, and it is clearly the same man en recto and en verso. Dusti Bongé likely spent not much more than a few minutes on each sketch.

During these early years of her career, Dusti sketched incessantly, whether it was her immediate surroundings in still lifes, her home town cityscapes, people (friends and strangers alike), and even the occasional circus animal. In each of these cases she laid down quick observations on paper, not with the aim of precise representation but rather with the aim of conveying her unique impression of the subject matter. In the case of the still lifes and cityscapes these impressions became increasingly cubist and in the case of the animals and humans they trended toward surrealism.

Here we have two quick studies of a man with a short mustache that looks like a bristly patch of hair above his lip, a long nose, a cleft chin, and an intriguing hairline, accented with (again) a bristly patch of hair. Unlike the previous portraits, this subject is looking straight at us. He also has a gentler presence than Mr. Richards.

If these two are not the same man, they sure are dead ringers for one another, which, as we know from the movies, never turns out well. Besides the minor proportional differences in the faces, the second one being slightly longer, the main difference between the two sketches is in the details of his shirt. Dusti, with just a few marks, chose to hint at the man’s shirt collar and tie In the first, while highlighting his shirt pocket in the second.