In 1954 Dušan and Helena Marek relocated from Sydney to New Guinea. They spent almost five years there, settling first in Port Moresby and later moving to Rabaul. This period of Dušan Marek’s life has often been described as unfruitful, unproductive. It is said that he made little work there, and that the work brought with him was largely destroyed by humidity and heat. He would later recall: ‘In New Guinea I didn’t do any painting at all … the colours were too good, everything was too pretty, too strong and powerful. I didn’t find myself in a position of being able to paint at all’.[i]

New Guinea, however, did not represent a cessation. Dušan wrote poetry, made drawings, photographs, relief prints, jewellery and films. In a sense, New Guinea drove him closer to a more orthodox surrealist methodology, a movement that embraced a multitude of art forms, that ‘committed like no other to the exchange between the verbal and the visual’ and which, in its Czech precursor, poetism, sought an art to correspond with all of the senses.[ii], [iii] Yet Dušan’s distance from the centres of European surrealism – Paris and Prague – sometimes forced his work away from surrealism’s fundamental impulses. This piece considers art made by Dušan in New Guinea – a small but faceted body of work that evolved within a nexus of Europe and Oceania, cultural fantasy, lived reality, received idea and an individual philosophy that gained steadily in momentum and feeling.

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Several writers have endeavoured to link Dušan’s desire to go to New Guinea with Le monde au temps des surrealistes (The world at the time of the surrealists). First published in June 1929 in the Belgian journal Variétés, this map reimagined the world’s geography, diminishing and enlarging nations according to the perceived significance of their art. The earth, transformed, now stretched around a vast Pacific basin, within which New Guinea was embedded as a ‘precious stone’.[iv]

It is likely but not certain that Dušan was familiar with this map. Regardless, it confirms surrealism’s deep interest in Oceania. Describing its art as both ‘primordial’ and ‘celestial’, André Breton wrote that ‘the development of Surrealism at the outset is inseparable from the power to seduce and fascinate that Oceanic art possessed in our eyes’.[v] He and others, including Louis Aragon, Wolfgang Paalen and Max Ernst, collected art from New Guinea and elsewhere in the region, mounting exhibitions of these objects such as the 1926 Tableaux de Man Ray et Objets des Iles, held at the Galerie Surréaliste in Paris, and displaying their own work among them (a practice Dušan would emulate).[vi], [vii] Few, however, would ever travel to the region itself. Although Breton and his circle espoused anti-colonial rhetoric – theirs was an art that had grown in response to war and its deadly technologies and was correspondingly willing to diminish Europe in its maps and cultural life – Oceania in their hands was not a concrete place but one on which ‘poetic imaginings’ and exploitative fantasies of purity and ‘primitivism’ were inscribed.[viii]

Dušan referred to New Guinea as ‘Nirvana’, a description that mirrored the view of the French philosopher Sarane Alexandrian when he wrote that the surrealist ‘fascination with Oceanic art derived from a nostalgia for a “lost” world’ and “the possibility of a life in paradise”’.[ix], [x] But the Mareks did not find a vanished world or frontier on their arrival. New Guinea was a place with long histories, colonial interests; it was a recent theatre of world war, and of indigenous and émigré communities that sparred over language and culture. Dušan’s first films are witness to these schisms: scenes of cars, copra boats, opulent pool parties and verdant jungle loop and jerk awkwardly, even surreally, although perhaps not in a way that Breton would have ever conceived.[xi]

The best known of Dušan’s New Guinea works, an animated film called Nightmare, also known as The Magician, 1956, sees a strange man arrive at a private hotel. A sense of unease mounts as a string of peculiar events unfold. While Arthur Cantrill has observed the film’s connection to the tradition of Czech puppetry, it is equally (although superficially) informed by New Guinean art – the faces of the puppets are broad, robustly carved, and painted in bright colours with designs of hooks and spirals.

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Soon after their arrival in Port Moresby Dušan and Helena Marek held Surrealistic exhibition – a collection of some ninety works, most of which had been brought with them from Sydney. Given its scale and context (it was mounted in the Red Cross hall), the exhibition must have been a remarkable sight to behold and yet it passed with little comment. Only a brief newspaper advertisement appeared in the days before its opening: ‘DUSAN MAREK Art Exhibition – Sunday & Monday afternoon’.[xii] No critique or press photographs followed. In lieu of extant documentation, its most illuminating trace is a small drawing reproduced on the thin grey sheet of the exhibition listing.[xiii] This drawing depicts a body, seemingly a woman’s, with coiling seashells in place of breasts.

Dušan’s interest in the sea, and in what he perceived to be the mystical, physiological and evolutionary connections between it and humankind, are among the most unique and compelling aspects of his practice. While water was a familiar motif of the surrealists – a ‘favourite symbol of the unconscious, the mother of all that lives’ – few artists explored it as a phenomenon beyond ready allegory.[xiv] The surrealist painter Yves Tanguy may have walked along the beach ‘noting the tiny marine forms, studying the seaweed and the rocks’ and yet these forms were the genesis not the content of his art and that of many of his contemporaries.[xv] For Czech artists affiliated with the avant-garde Devětsil group, landlocked and hundreds of miles from sea, the ocean was most often an imagined phenomenon. In the visual poems of the group’s co-founder Karel Teige, which sought sensorial correspondences between mind, body, word and image, ocean views were potent inclusions, given their strong association with travel and freedom.[xvi] By comparison, Dušan’s interest in the sea edged ever closer towards an embodiment of that which Romain Rolland called ‘oceanic feeling’ – an awareness of ‘being one with the world as a whole’ and ‘a sensation of eternity’, or to that which Geoffrey Grigson in 1948 would call a ‘wide sea embracing unity and humanity’. [xvii], [xviii]

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Dušan’s significance in the context of Australian avant-garde and experimental film has been noted, although it is in New Guinea that most of his earliest work transpired.[xix] A collection of films catalogued as ‘home movies’ held in the National Film and Sound Archive are less straightforward recordings than collections of ideas and working images, in which the sea occurs and recurs as rhythm and principal motif. In one film, Helena runs into the sea at dusk, her arms open in a gesture of embrace. Subsequently, a shadow figure (perhaps Helena again) walks along a beach, before being absorbed into darkening sea and sky. In a particularly evocative sequence, Dušan moves repeatedly from sea to shore as if engaging in an arcane exchange, the meaning of which is sensed but not grasped. Another film captures men and boys on rafts, and despite the nature of the handheld camera, which wobbles and errantly shivers, Dušan takes care to capture the Rorschach forms that loom below the men, as if through the sea they were not reflected but enlarged.

Certainly, these films evidence an artist’s eye. Among their most distinctive features is the way the camera moves, slowly panning up and down and using diagonal perspectives to encompass the broadest possible views. It is worth noting in this context that in Czech Poetism cinema was credited with a ‘refinement of vision’. Here, Dušan continually works to expand the eye of the camera as a means to intensify perception.[xx]

A series of drawings in the National Gallery of Australia collection extend this last filmic sequence.[xxi] Upward-moving pans are replaced by high aerial views. Reflections are no longer wedded to bodies but have lives of their own – they dance, writhe and metamorphose. Water is not only pictured but employed as a collaborator, poured carefully onto paper to burr and bloom the lines. Unlike the English Surrealists Paul Nash and Eileen Agar, who deemed the selection of sea-worn stones and driftwood acts of their own artistic creation, Dušan’s relation to the sea was one of meaningful exchange, since he evidently worked on the drawings prior to and after the intervention of water.[xxii] Their titles are revealing – Rodina, which from Dušan’s native Czech translates to ‘family’, is a clear indication that he saw the sea as a point of origin, a body to which he related.

While these works propel the sea beyond a surrealist symbol – and force it from a littoral zone, one favoured by James Gleeson and others as an emblematic meeting place of the rational and irrational – they retain the surrealist affinity for dream.[xxiii] Evoking Teige’s ‘nether world flow of dreams … the fantastic vegetation in the treacherous and black ocean’, it is tempting to think that the faint tracery of a little boat in one drawing is Dušan himself, sailing through visions that rise up like waves.[xxiv]

He would write:

                        Foaming

                        bursting

                        spilling

                        not even God understands it

                        white foam

                        singing a sad song

                        foaming

                        not even God understands it [xxv]

On occasions during his time in New Guinea, Dušan worked on copra boats to earn a living, and Helena recalled him often being away at sea for days at a time.[xxvi] While work of this nature is believed to have limited his artistic output, it is arguably because of it that he arrived at these drawings. Within the sea, Dušan found a passage to eternity, an entity older than the earth itself.

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While Dušan read widely (Donaldson notes that books purchased from Mary Martin and Notanda bookstores were taken to New Guinea, although their titles are now unknown), he would rarely correspond with other artists.[xxvii] But an envelope kept in his papers attests to a communication with the Czech-born, Paris-based surrealist Marie Cerminova, better known as Toyen. Although their letters have been lost, it is instructive to consider the development of Dušan’s work in relation to Toyen’s – she a leading figure of the Devětsil, influential in Paris, part of Breton’s circle, and who, like Dušan, was a lifelong surrealist. Describing her work as ‘sovereignly enigmatic’, the Czech art historian František Šmejkal referred to her drawings as having ‘acted as an important catalyst of artistic transmutations’, the line of which formed ‘phantom-like shapes of great suggestive power’, and whose numerous forays into poetry (most notably with Jindřich Heisler) are mirrored in Dušan’s work of this time.[xxviii]

Dušan was an intriguing writer, as evidenced by his journals and letters, but it was in New Guinea that he made his most substantial efforts as a poet. His Jelajou, comprising six poems, each with facing relief prints, is a hand-printed volume dedicated to his parents. A further eight poems were recently found among the artist’s papers, and a posthumously made impression of an additional untitled work is now held in the National Gallery of Australia art archive. Perhaps more poems were written at this time but as yet they have not been found.

The poems compiled under the title Jelajou appear to exist in only one impression. For the most part, those selected for the book are finer, stronger and of greater clarity and economy of expression than those omitted. In this way, there is a sense that the artist strove to pare back word and expression to something approaching charged outline or element. Dušan’s interest in elementality – or sparsity as a poetical aesthetic – is echoed in his use of earthly elements as motifs, and in haptic plays of texture and sensation. (In the poem ‘There’ll be a parade soon’, which falls between two verses that employ stone as leitmotif, he writes: ‘blow winds, blow very hard, blow away the fragrances / of the finest perfumes ...’) So too, the relation of word to image in Jelajou is emphasised by their both being printed in dark inks, which give a forceful visuality and connectivity that urges tandem reading. In this manner, Dušan pushes towards a type of visual poetry that is concurrent with the development of concrete poetry in Europe and South America. In all, his poems are an enigmatic and compelling body of work that warrant closer consideration than is possible in this piece.

Contextualising Dušan’s poetry is a curious challenge. It lacks the persistent lyricism of much French Symbolist and Surrealist poetry, although it corresponds in some sense with Breton’s conception of the ‘lyric’, a position that insisted ‘doubly on freedom and on the “dazzling revenge” of human imagination against what had previously been considered the limits of the human mind’.[xxix] Art historian Derek Sayer observed that the calligrams of the French Symbolist poet Apollinaire had a significant influence on Czech surrealism, while in her account of Czech avant-garde poetry Esther Levinger wrote that ‘since Apollinaire rejected literary décor and communicative content, his poems were quick and short. They were not pronounced from one strophe to the next but read at a glance, perceived in their entirety all at once …’ [xxx], [xxxi] In his Note on poetry, the dada and surrealist writer Tristan Tzara denounced simile and analogy, describing them as ‘literary tools’ that ‘no longer satisfy us’, while for Karel Teige, modern poetry allowed the liberation of the word from representational structure and became to the poet ‘a substance … the word alone must be real … it must be real as a brick or piece of marble’. [xxxii], [xxxiii]

Each of these observations is relevant to the poems of Dušan Marek, although it is perhaps to Teige’s point that his work most keenly connects. In Dušan’s hands, words are a material to be used as paint or ink, with the poems themselves behaving much like his paintings, especially. Although the words maintain their literal and indexical meanings, the images formed are circular and self-reflexive. Take ‘In a stone embrace (in the arms of stone)’:

                        Stone hands protruding into a street

                        From a stone street

                        Two stone hands silent

                        Poor beggar mute

                        Only echoes

                        No mother, no lover,

                        When longing to be embraced

                        Silent are two stone hands

The poem ends where it begins. In the intervening space the qualities of silence echo in other forms – muteness, solitude, poverty – a compounding of silence across a sensorial expanse.

The ways in which earthly element and human form coalesce appear to be an attempt to apprehend a felt or formative communication. This endeavour persists in ‘A moment of eternity’, which joins stone and clay with the actions of walking and kissing:

            Dry stone

            White clay

            Hot heaven under the sky

            Dry footprints of moist people

            Dry footprints of bare feet

            Cracked lips

            A kiss of the hard earth

            And where the living footprints end

            There is no heaven under the sky

This archaic communion between earth and human is, in Dušan’s typically circular fashion, then joined with eternity. In Dreamverse, a collection of his posthumously published writings, the Czech poet Jindřich Štyrský wrote: ‘History is nothing if not the remarkable dissipation of truth in time. This is why the names of poets are always connected to ruins and shadows … Todays and tomorrows are not a poet’s concern, time is’.[xxxiv] Dušan’s evident interest in time – its circularity, complexities, curvatures, the points of reference onto which it is or is not hinged – was an aspect of his work that he would go on to explore more deeply after his time in New Guinea.

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Years later, when Dušan was terminally ill, he turned his mind to New Guinea once more. In Rabaul revisited, 1993, he looks over the bay, a view familiar from his first films made some forty years earlier. Rendered in deep blues and whites, the traceries of two airplanes recall the little boat of his sea drawings that presaged search and sight. The work itself is contained, mysterious. It holds an energy that swells beneath the forms it envisions and which intermittently bursts from the stylised flowers in its foreground. It is a painting that recalls Rosseau and others, but, mostly, finally, it is just his own.[xxxv]

With thanks to Brendan Casey, Cheri Donaldson, Elle Freak and Crispin Howarth.

[i] Dušan Marek in Cheri Donaldson, ‘In pursuit of the marvellous: exploring the role of memory in the surrealism of Czech émigré Dušan Marek (1926–1993)’, PhD thesis, University of South Australia, Adelaide, 2018, p. 20.

[ii] Krzysztof Fijalkowski, ‘Typographic tango: the journal Néon was a unique graphic expression of surrealism’, Eye Magazine, Summer 2008, http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/typographic-tango, accessed 20 December 2020.

[iii] Esther Levinger, ‘Czech avant-garde art: poetry for the five senses’, The Art Bulletin, September 1999, vol. 81, no. 3, p. 513. Levinger gives a thorough account of Czech Poetism in this article.

[iv] Denis Hollier, ‘Surrealism and its discontents’, Papers of surrealism, issue 7, 2007, p. 6, https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/63517391/surrealism_issue_7.pdf, accessed 20 December 2020.

[v] André Breton quoted in Elizabeth Cowling, ‘An other culture’, in Dawn Ades, Dada and surrealism reviewed, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, 1978, pp. 463–4.

[vi] Anthony White, ‘Terra Incognita: surrealism and the Pacific region’, Papers of Surrealism, issue 6, 2007, p. 2, https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/63517390/surrealism_issue_6.pdf, accessed 20 December 2020.

[vii] An image of Dušan and Helena Marek’s family home shows the artist’s paintings displayed alongside his collection of New Guinea art and objects.

[viii] White, p. 2.

[ix] Dušan Marek in Donaldson, p. 193.

[x] Sarane Alexandrian, Surrealist art, translated by Gordon Clough, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970, p. 23.

[xi] Copra is the dried kernel or fruit of the coconut palm and was once one of New Guinea’s principal agricultural commodities.

[xii] South Pacific Post, 4 August 1954, p. 21.

[xiii] An impression of this exhibition listing was gifted by Stephen Mould to the National Gallery of Australia in 2018; see accession number 2018.619.

[xiv] Carl Jung, Collected works 9.1. The archetypes and the collective unconscious, edited and translated by Gerhard Adler & R.F.C. Hull, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1981, paragraph 298.

[xv] Eileen Agar, ‘Am I a surrealist?’, in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Surrealist painters and poets: an anthology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001, p. 3.

[xvi] Levinger, p. 515.

[xvii] Robert Roberts ‘Emotions in the Christian tradition’, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion-Christian-tradition/, accessed 20 December 2020.

[xviii] Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Authentic and false in the new romanticism’, Horizon, March 1948, p. 213.

[xix] Arthur Cantrill, The films of Dušan Marek: an appreciation, https://www.sydney.edu.au/museums/images/content/exhibitions-events/dusan-marek/The-Films-of-Dusan-Marek.pdf, accessed 20 December 2020.

[xx] Levinger, p. 514.

[xxi] This group of drawings was gifted by Helena Marek to the National Gallery of Australia in 1995; see accession numbers 95.359; 95.361; 95.362; 95.363; 95.374; 95.373.

[xxii] Ian Walker, ‘The “comic sublime”: Eileen Agar at Ploumanac’h’, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/04/the-comic-sublime-eileen-agar-at-ploumanach, accessed 20 December 2020.

[xxiii] James Gleeson interviewed by Christopher Chapman, in Surrealism: revolution by night, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1993, p. 305.

[xxiv] Karel Teige in Levinger, p. 515.

[xxv] Dušan Marek, ‘Untitled poem’, translated by Elena Gartner, 20 August 2013. A posthumous impression of this work made by Dianne Longley and Olga Sankey is held in the National Gallery of Australia art archive. To date, Elena Gartner has made all the original translations of known poems by Dušan Marek. These are yet to be published in full.

[xxvi] Helena Marek interview with Jan Thurling, 5 December 2000, Eden Hills, South Australia, Oral History, State Library of South Australia, transcribed by Felicity Morgan, August 2020.

[xxvii] Donaldson, p. 195.

[xxviii] Frantisek Šmejkal, Surrealist drawings, translated by Till Gottheine, Octopus Books, London, 1974, pp. 37–8.

[xxix] André Breton, Mad love, translated by Mary Ann Caws, University of Nebraska Press, Nebraska, 1987, p. xi (translator’s introduction).

[xxx] Derek Sayer, Prague: capital of the twentieth century: a surrealist history, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2013, p. 61.

[xxxi] Levinger, p. 516–17.

[xxxii] Tristan Tzara, ‘Note on poetry’, in Caws (ed.), pp. 413–14.

[xxxiii] Teige in Levinger, p. 514.

[xxxiv] Jindřich Štyrský, Dreamverse, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2018, p. 208.

[xxxv] Cheri Donaldson, ‘Deep and defiant: Dušan and Voitre Marek, two European émigré artists in post-war (South) Australia’, MA thesis, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 2007, p. 90.