Mary Nohl

Back in the '70s it was a ritual for many Milwaukee high school students-the drive to farthest Fox Point to check out the "Witch's House." Whether or not anyone believed that the dweller in the lakeside cottage practiced the black arts, she was widely rumored to be an old eccentric, a hermit toiling in the more obscure fields of creativity while adorning her property with Easter Island faces and stone gardens of statues. Sometimes the Witch's House attracted the unsavory attention of vandals, determined to diminish someone else's idea of beauty, probably because they had none of their own.

Since those benighted years, the name of the old woman in the Witch's House has become well known in Wisconsin, especially among artists. When she died in 2001, Mary Nohl left her inherited fortune of over $11 million to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation to support fellowships, scholarships and art education. The Kohler Foundation got the house and her work became part of the permanent collection of Sheboygan's Kohler Arts Center.

Mary Nohl Inside & Outside: Biography of the Artist (published by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation) peers into the secluded Witch's House and offers an account of the woman who lived and made art there. Barbara Manger, who befriended Nohl in her last years and had access to her diaries, wrote the text. The book was beautifully designed by Janine Smith with an eye toward attractively displaying a cross section of Nohl's abundant work, including statues, paintings, ceramics, jewelry, drawings, lithographs and wood cuts, a well as the murals and customized furnishings found inside her home. Insight & Outside is a treat to look at.

The daughter of a socially prominent old Milwaukee family, Nohl's gift for making things with her hands was already evident in childhood. Insulated from the Great Depression by her father's wealth, Nohl studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Among her instructors was art historian Helen Gardner, whose revised editions of Art Through the Ages remains a standard text for college-level art history instruction. Gardner was an eclectic scholar interested not only in the traditions of Western Europe but the arts of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, and not only in fine arts but crafts as well. The scope of Gardner's interests may have inspired Nohl's wide-ranging art.

Nohl has been carelessly categorized as an Outsider Artist, but clearly, her education and experience was broader than Eugene von Bruenchenhein or Henry Darger's. She enjoyed formal academic training at one of the foremost art schools, operated a commercial ceramic shop in the early 1950s, occasionally exhibited her work and belonged (earlier in life) to artist associations. And yet, one suspects an inner wall of reserve that kept her apart even when she took part in society. Unencumbered by a husband, children or financial worries, Nohl was able to live more or less as she liked, devoting herself to whatever interested her. The result is a prodigious body of work that took modernism down an idiosyncratic trail.