150825384Eugene Von Bruenchenhein19101983In words that he inscribed on a tile in his kitchen, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein made clear the breadth of his artistic ambition: “Freelance Artist—Poet and Sculptor—Inovator—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and Architect—Philosopher.” Tirelessly inventive, he sculpted foliate vessels and crowns out of clay excavated from construction sites and built miniaturized towers and thrones from chicken and turkey bones painted metallic colors. The artistic kingdom created within his home in a Milwaukee suburb was shared with his muse and collaborator, Marie—who posed in a range of personas as a pinup, a goddess, and a starlet in thousands of photographs. He sometimes used brushes made from her hair for his paintings, in which he grappled with cosmic and planetary forces in psychedelic abstract patterns that engulfed mushroom clouds, fantastic creatures, botanical forms, and sci-fi cities. These concerns about nature, love, and war were also expressed in his poetry, which he taped on a reel-to-reel recorder; in one spoken-word piece, he stated, “Look to the present youth who seek their own little world today.” Edward Eugene Von Bruenchenhein was born in Marinette, Wisconsin, in 1910. His family later moved to Milwaukee, where he spent most of his life. His passion for art and nature was nurtured by his stepmother, Elizabeth Mosely, who painted still lifes and had an interest in metaphysics. Into the late 1950s, he held various jobs, including as a florist and baker. In 1943, he married Eveline Kalke, whom he nicknamed Marie. At their West Allis, Wisconsin, home, there were no lines between life and art, from the bathroom that served as a darkroom, to the stove in the living room where ceramics were fired, to the exterior of the house, painted blue, pink, and yellow. They lived meagerly, scraping by on Von Bruenchenhein’s social security checks, yet he had a boundless capacity to innovate with materials. A wallpaper sample book became a surface for his intricate drawings, and he employed sticks and combs to manipulate the intense colors in his apocalyptic paintings, influenced by the 1950s hydrogen bomb tests. Von Bruenchenhein tried unsuccessfully to exhibit his art in Milwaukee galleries, and his work remained known only to family and a handful of friends. After he died, in 1983, his friend Daniel Nycz contacted Russell Bowman, the director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, who connected with Ruth Kohler of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. The Kohler Arts Center subsequently catalogued, conserved, and acquired much of Von Bruenchenhein’s work. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). EugeneVon Bruenchenheinhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2950/fullEugene Von Bruenchenhein worked as a florist and a baker before devoting the last forty years of his life to making art. The son of a sign painter and the stepson of a Sunday painter who believed in reincarnation, Von Bruenchenhein was exposed to creative trades and nonconformist ideas from an early age. It was a fortunate foundation for an artist who eventually found voice in a wide range of expressions: photography, painting, ceramics, sculpture, and poetry. He was idiosyncratic in his techniques, choosing to fingerpaint with oils, fire clay pieces in his kitchen oven, and construct intricate objects from leftover chicken and turkey bones. "Create and be recognized" commanded a sign the artist hung in his basement studio, and he attempted just that; his home was transformed over four decades by his unrelenting outpouring of expression. Von Bruenchenhein's most compelling works are his photographs: self-portraits, double-exposures, and thousands of portraits of his wife, Marie. His devotion to his artmaking was superseded only by his obsession with Marie, whom he called “the queen of my existence.” Emulating mid-century pin-ups, Von Bruenchenhein captured his wife in various stages of dress and undress, adorning his subject with vampish costumes and idiosyncratic accessories against floral draped backdrops. In the photos, Marie assumes poses and expressions that  display the range of female sexuality—innocent and virginal, seductive and sexy. Sometimes, when she confronts the camera lens (and her husband), she even appears a little bit bored. It is not at all clear, in fact, if Marie is a willing or unwilling collaborator in the creation of these images. The artist’s world was not fully understood nor appreciated until after his death, but he had not chosen to remain unknown—he had tried, unsuccessfully, to attract the attention of clients, galleries, and museums. Nonetheless, he certainly valued his artwork and held himself in high esteem: a hand-tinted photographic self-portrait bears the bold inscription "Time produced non better."Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983) was one of the most complex and multifaceted American self-taught artists. Born in Marinette, Wisconsin, he was from an early age self-identified as an artist. Over a 50-year period, between the late 1930s until his death in 1983, Von Bruenchenhein produced expansive bodies of work in poetry, photography, ceramics, sculpture, painting, and drawing.<i>As 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.</i> —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.), <i>When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego</i> (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2015).500125732n87887998(1910–1983)MilwaukeeMarinetteMilwaukeeMarinetteMilwaukeeMarinetteEugene Von BruenchenheinEugene von Bruenchenheim