Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
(1910–1983)
Place activeMilwaukee, Wisconsin, United States
Place bornMarinette, Wisconsin, United States
BiographyAs we enter the jungle we find the vegetation very close around herein. We chop our way through by moving things like that. . . . This native that just passed me is blonde and probably doesn’t belong to the jungle. She’s got some metal piece in her hair. . . . She might be a queen passing by here. —Eugene Von Bruenchenhein Eugene Von Bruenchenhein described himself on a kitchen plaque as a “Freelance Artist—Poet and Sculptor—Inovator—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and architect—Philosopher.” He gave the prevalence of the ceremonial and of enactments in his artmaking. Energetic and interdisciplinary, his practice included bodily actions, poetry writing, and an extensive correspondence with corporations and political officials, proposing his inventions, structural improvements, and social changes. Von Bruenchenhein had an unconventional painting technique: he preferred the immediacy of marks made with his fingers, sticks, fragments of cloth, and combs; he clipped bundles of hair belonging to his wife and muse, Marie (born Eveline Kalke), to make a set of paintbrushes; and he created a shiny, overall finish with egg whites. He collected thousands of poultry bones to assemble jewel-like towers a few feet high. On his reel-to-reel recorder, he taped his sharp voice reading poetry and commenting on current events, as well as his favorite music from his shortwave radio.
In photography, Von Bruenchenhein experimented with double-exposures and montage printing. Something fastidious emerges from his playful and theatrical images, suggesting carefully planned sessions with Marie. These scenes, though inspired by the calendar girl and pinup genre, do not demean her; on the contrary, they seem to revere her. Wallpaper, drapes, and costumes used in these exotic displays offer a sophisticated interplay of patterns, mostly floral. Plants are a recurrent motif in his oeuvre; they could reference the florist job he took right after high school, but they are also reminiscent of his persistent fascination with natural science, the cosmos, and microscopic worlds.
The excessive nature of his projects is perceptible in the significant inventory of headpieces and crowns he produced. Some of them are made from coffee cans, adorned with golden-bulb Christmas ornaments, but most are molded from clay (which he retrieved from construction sites), embellished with manually engraved foliate-shapes, and painted in gold, silver, and other bold colors. Aesthetically precious and practically unwearable due to their fragility, they somehow indicate a perpetual coronation exercise. This parallels the artist’s belief in his own elevated status after he discovered that the Von in his name is attributed to people of royal descent, and that the word eugenes means “well-born” in Greek. He would use the term Genii to describe his creative alter ego. On one of his tapes, he recites: “The world outside won’t rise to the highest without constructive minds to form tomorrow’s advanced creation.”
Adapted from Valérie Rousseau, “Eugene Von Bruenchenhein” in Valérie Rousseau (ed.), When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2015).