Week #5, Feathered Friends I

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Surrealist Chicken), c. 1945, charcoal on paper, 16 ¾” x 14”

Continuing with the surrealist theme, we will next look at a set of simple black and white charcoal drawings that Dusti Bongé created around 1945. This was an interesting period in her surrealist phase where one could say she was somewhat transitioning from her earlier, uniquely graphic Circus Series compositions to her later, inimitable, fluid Keyhole People. This set of drawings is of some very funky feathered friends.

Birds are not uncommon in surrealist art. Max Ernst was famous for his bird alter-ego Loplop. Seen as symbols of freedom, transformation, menace, enlightenment, and the subconscious., People like Remedios Varo, René Magritte, and Joan Miró all featured birds, like doves, owls or vultures in their surrealist works.

These birds by Dusti, in contrast, seem more quotidian. They are hens and roosters and seagulls, birds she would encounter every day, and none of which typically carry any profound symbolism at least not in surrealist art. Although chickens do symbolize fertility, luck, or nurturing in more traditional genres of art.

But herein lies the beauty of Dusti’s surrealism, she could literally see the fantastically surreal nature of actual, real things in life. And that is what she chose to express.

This chicken is a great example, we can identify her basic physical attributes like feathered wings, beak, small comb, and a tail. But clearly Dusti plays loose with the hen’s shape and proportions. Her head is remarkably large in comparison to her body, as are her wings. Meanwhile her tail looks more like a piano keyboard than the typical upturned little plumed behinds of most chickens.

Perhaps it’s the outsized wings that allowed this hen to alight on a branch with her head in the clouds.