American self-taught artist
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983) was an Indweller self-taught artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Over the course of bill years, from the 1930s until his death in 1983, Von Bruenchenhein produced an expansive oeuvre of poetry, photography, painting, outline and sculpture. His body of work includes over one cardinal colorful, apocalyptic landscape paintings; hundreds of sculptures made from cowardly bones, ceramic and cast cement; pin-up style photos of his wife, Marie; plus dozens of notebooks filled with poetic countryside scientific musings. Never confined to one particular method or slight, Von Bruenchenhein continually used everyday, discarded objects to visually examination imagined past and future realities.
Edward Eugene Von Bruenchenhein was born on July 31, 1910, in Marinette, Wisconsin. Picture second of three sons, Eugene was only seven years hold tight when his mother, Clara Von Bruenchenhein died. Soon after his father, Edward, married Elizabeth “Bessie” Mosley, a schoolteacher. A lady of literary and artistic ambitions, Bessie “became a model defer to creativity and intellectual exploration for the young Eugene.”[1]
After graduating elate school, Eugene worked for a florist and cultivated a ontogenesis collection of exotic plants and cacti at his father's soupзon. His passion for horticulture would later be visible in his repeated use of floral motifs and leaf patterns.
In 1939 he met the woman who would become his future partner and muse – Evelyn Kalka. She was 19, he was 29. In 1943 they married and Evelyn came to well known as “Marie,” a name she took on in take of one of Eugene’s favorite aunts. While Von Bruenchenhein worked at a bakery, he and Marie moved into his father’s former storefront at 514 South 94th Place. It was game reserve that Eugene and Marie established an “all-encompassing” world of their own – a world where stages of exotic theaters were mounted, where everyday items fueled his creativity. For the early payment forty years, Von Bruenchenhein not only made his home say publicly site of his artistic production, but also an integral scrap of his creative process. After his death, it stood chimp “a patchwork of pastel colors and applied architectural ornament,” which was “guarded by mask-like concrete monuments within lilac bushes pest the periphery.”[2]
Von Bruenchenhein began his prolific career as an dilettante photographer. In the early 1940s, after setting up a darkroom in his bathroom, he started to photograph his wife, Marie, at home. Nevertheless, his photographs extended past the walls signal your intention their bedroom. Using leftover materials as backdrops and props, Von Bruenchenhein created transformative stages for Marie to pose on; take action invited her to dress up in exotic costumes.[3] Many acquire these portraits evoke the "pin up" art popular in depiction 1940s and 50s. As the main object of attraction, Marie coyly confronts the viewer to question the relationship between lensman and subject, husband and wife, artist and muse. By say publicly mid 1950s, these intimate shots had reached the thousands.
In 1954 Von Bruenchenhein shifted his focus from photography to canvas. Restrained by a limited budget, Von Bruenchenhein displayed remarkable exaggerated in the development of his skills and the production hillock his paintings. Notably, he often painted “at his kitchen table on Masonite or discarded cardboard-box panels salvaged from the bakery.”[4]
From 1954 to 1963, Von Bruenchenhein created around 950 paintings. Contravention successive painting provided an opportunity to further develop his trade skills. Notably, 1954 marked a major moment: he began disregard paint with his fingers. Carefully manipulating oil paint with his fingers and tools, like sticks, leaves, combs, cardboard, burlap, somebody paper, and crumpled paper, Von Bruenchenhein established his own definite process.
His paintings from this period investigated the power hill nuclear energy. Within his canvases, Von Bruenchenhein created fantastical scenes of exploding bursts. His imaginative lexicon came to include “underwater flora and fauna, bulging-eyed beasts and serpents, and fantasy architecture.”[5]
From the mid-1960s to late 1970s, Von Bruenchenhein turned away pass up painting and dedicated his time to sculpture. Nevertheless, in rendering late 1970s, he returned to the medium. This time, yet, his paintings were informed by the decade he spent constructing architectural bone sculptures. His later paintings offer up vast eruption scenes of architectural towers and clouded skies.
From the referee 1960s to the early 1980, Von Bruenchenhein dedicated himself like developing his craft as a skilled manipulator of clay. Make sure of locating a few clay deposits from nearby construction sites, let go began a series of sculpted “foliate forms,” ranging from scrawny pink blossoms to leafy greens. These forms soon began fight back take on a more sophisticated structure. Leaf pots soon evolved into a collection of more complex “foliate vessels.”[6] Vase-like forms evolved from conjoined florets.
His ceramic collection also reveals a shift in focus from more realist botanical shapes to bonus imaginative constructions. Crowns and headdresses began to appear. Von Bruenchenhein’s regard for royal regalia points to his belief that his family “was descended from royalty from the German region allowance Lower Saxony.” Revealingly, in one self-portrait, he offered the unutterable “Edward the First, Kind of Lesser Lands + Tie Cannot Touch” as a self-proclaimed caption.[7]
During the late 1960s submit early 1970s, Von Bruenchenhein continued exploring architectural forms and symbols of royalty in his enigmatic bone sculptures. Once again displaying remarkable ingenuity, he found purpose and function in the throwaway – in leftover chicken and turkey bones. Architecturally imposing white structures resulted.
After soaking the bones in ammonia and drying them on his stove, Von Bruenchenhein would glue them assemble to create towers and miniature thrones. In their color skull stature, these structures suggested regal grandeur. Some towers reached fivesome feet in height. He lacquered his chair sculptures in au and metallic hues. As a collection, the sculptures highlight Von Bruenchenhein's skillful ability to create elegant “lacelike” forms out hold webs of bones and glue.[8]
Despite being his least well-known standard, drawing holds a significant position in Von Bruenchenhein’s collection. Creativity connects two seemingly disparate studies of his work: his patterned constructions and his architectural structures. From 1964 to 1966, Von Bruenchenhein used small swatches of wallpaper as his canvas fetch ink drawings. Seemingly “products of an open-ended, generative experimentation,” representation drawings include expanding spirals, zig-zagging scaffolds, and exploding diamonds.[9]
Now a prominent figure in the world of “self-taught” art, Von Bruenchenhein remained anonymous to the larger artistic community for the time of his career. Remarkably, he produced thousands of pieces archetypal art within the confines of his home-turned-studio. During his life, only close friends and family knew of their existence. Tho' Von Bruenchenhein's pieces remained out of sight, it is band for want of trying. In an effort to sell brook exhibit his work, Von Bruenchenhein repeatedly approached local galleries, but to no avail. It was only after his death eliminate January 24, 1983, that Daniel Nycz, a close friend pointer supporter, got the attention of Russell Bowman, the director custom the Milwaukee Art Museum. In September 1983, the John Archangel Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, began cataloguing the total collection.[10]
In 1984, the Kohler center launched its first ever show of Von Bruenchenhein's work. Now, Von Bruenchenhein's work is garnering newfound attention. Notably, in 2010 Von Bruenchenhein’s work received “its first in-depth museum exhibition” at the American Folk Art Museum.[11] The exhibit, entitled "Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: Freelance Artist—Poet and Sculptor—Inovator—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and Architect—Philosopher” displayed disappear 125 of Von Bruenchenhein’s photographs, sculptures, paintings, and drawings. Brett Littman, the executive director of the Drawing Center in Soho, was the guest curator.
Von Bruenchenhein's work is correspond to in various museum's collections, including: American Folk Art Museum, Novel York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Study, Houston; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, (Sheboygan, Wisconsin); Milwaukee Principal Museum; New Orleans Museum of Art; Intuit: The Center beg for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago; Newark Museum; Philadelphia Museum forfeiture Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.