Eugene von Bruenchenhein (1910-1983), a simple baker from Milwaukee, believed that his birth during the year of the passage of Halley’s Comet was irrefutable proof that the gods had bestowed him with artistic genius. “I come from another world,” he would say.
He began producing a substantial body of paintings, sculptures (for which he used chicken bones) and photographs. In 1943 he married Eveline Kalke, ten years his junior. She became his inspiring muse and the subject, direct and indirect, of all his art. He renamed her Marie.
Photography then became his main medium. He made hundreds of portraits of Marie decked out with Christmas decorations, patterned fabric and copper crowns, in often-erotic poses, seated on a chair in front of a setting that had been cobbled together. Marie was goddess, then queen, film star, seducer and ingénue. Von Bruenchenhein developed his photographs in the basin of his bathroom, discovering the double exposure that gave his works a hint of Man Ray-style surrealism. He coloured other photographs by hand.
It was through them that his reknown spread beyond the circles of aficionados of Art Brut. They are prominently featured at the current Venice Biennale and recently an entire room was devoted to his work at the Hayward Gallery’s An Alternative Guide to the Universe in London.
In 2004 in San Francisco, his photography was shown at the YBCA’s Create and be Recognized, Photography on the Edge with that of other unclassifiable photographers, including Miroslav Tichy and Lee Godie.
Von Bruenchenhein, in the fashion of Alfred Stieglitz, transformed his wife into a new Georgia O’Keeffe. His photographs attest to his devotion to Marie and their clearly visible complicity goes beyond the relationship of a Pygmalion to his pin-up. Their amourous games, intertwined with fetishism, transgressed Mid-West customs even as they offered a domestic version of modes of representation of post war eroticism–a troubling American Beauty.
Current Exhibition runs until Nov 23rd in Paris
American Beauty
Eugene von Bruenchenhein
Until November 23rd, 2013
galerie Christian Berst
3-5, passage des gravilliers
75003 Paris
France
