Eugene Von Bruenchenhein

1910 - 1983

Early in 1954, news of nuclear testing awakened in Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, who was then employed in a Milwaukee bakery, an overwhelming awareness of the potential for a holocaust.  The vision of destruction demanded tools of expression only painting could provide, and for most of the next three decades, Von Bruenchenhein detailed a vast and luminous imaginative universe, one that included such creatures as might appear under a microscope along with cataclysmic events in the cosmos.  Manipulating the paint with his fingers with brushes he made from his wife’s hair, and with other objects, Von Bruenchenhein created a pulsating, organic art. Few artists better illustrate the drive to create than Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. For most of his adult life, he lived in a visionary world that only his wife shared.  Von Bruenchenhein’s paintings were part of a monumental artistic output that included sculptures made of chicken bones, masks made of concrete, poetry, prose, and thousands of experimental photographs, most of them erotic made in collaboration with his wife, Marie, whom he married in 1943.  This trove, discovered in the artist’s modest Milwaukee home after his death, had its origins as early as 1930, when Von Bruenchenhein began to write poetry.  He also pursued an interest in horticulture and worked for a florist for a time.  He drew heavily on images from this experience in his later paintings.  After Von Bruenchenhein’s death, friends, concerned about his wife’s finances, contacted the Kohler Arts Center to see if his work had value. The first exhibition of his work was mounted there a few months after his death.  ³