The New Mona Lisa: Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's "Marie" at Walker Arts Center

Eugene von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983) lived and worked as a baker and a florist in Milwaukee.  By night, he constructed elaborate dreamscapes and fantasy worlds in multiple media.  He painted, sculpted, wrote poetry, and took a remarkable series of photographs of his wife, Evelyn T. "Marie" Kalke.  A room of these photos is currently on exhibit at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, as part of the "Midnight Party" exhibit, curated by Joan Rothfuss and focusing on "dreams, fantasies, visions, and meditations."

Von Bruenchenhein met Marie at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1939.  Their all-American beginnings led to an all-American pastime: they took dirty pictures together.  Except, as the Walker's exhibition captures, they really aren't dirty pictures.  "A fictive pleasure world" is the language the Walker's description uses.  And the Kinz & Tillou website describes the images as "passionate and provocative, yet playful and loving, pinup-like photos."  In the series, Marie is posed in a variety of provocative settings--some just a little cheeky, others with a bit darker resonance.  In all the images, though, there's an eager, dreamy quality of Marie's expression that really becomes the emotional ground for the viewers response.  Without simplifying the complex psycho-sexual stagings, Marie makes the viewer feel invited.  Without making the situations feel safe or comical, exactly, she opens the eroticism of the images to us.  Eugene may get top billing in this sequence of photos, but it's clear to anyone that Marie is the reason these images have life all these years later.

The pictures are dated 1940 - 1965, so my thought is that they must've been discovered after both Marie and Eugene had passed.  I don't know anything about their intentions regarding these photos--whether they had ever been meant for public consumption.  I know that Eugene's work has been displayed at the American Folk Art Museum, and he has been described as an "untrained" artist.  I'm sure there are exhibition catalogues and scholarly works on von Bruenchenhein emerging in recent decades.  I'm happy that these photos exist.  They stand as evidence of the private life.  They remind us that we are more than the day-to-day roles we play, and that by relying on nothing more than our personal resources, we can create enduring works that carry our best energies forward beyond our lives.

And they remind us--as the Mona Lisa continues to--of the incredible power of a facial expression.  Our desire to know another person, our desire for contact....  When we encounter Marie's open, confident, inviting, but just slightly inscrutable gaze, we sense the presence of an energy that was real, and one that we can't quite know.  And the question that that encounter leaves inside of us is powerful, and compels us to return to the image again and again.

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