Milwaukee was never comparable to Paris or New York as a mecca for innovators. And yet, throughout the last century, Milwaukee was home to an accredited art school and a Central European fine arts heritage while being open to some of the modern ideas that changed the face of visual art.
Accompanying its extensive exhibition of work by George Raab, Landmarks Gallery (231 N 76th St) is mounting “Wisconsin: The 20th Century” (through July 3), a small selection of paintings by other Wisconsin artists, most of them contemporaries of Raab. Especially striking are a pair of WPA-era oil paintings by Gerrit Van Sinclair. Jones Island depicts wooden houses and picket fences from the district’s final years as an offshore fishing village. The West travels far from Wisconsin and into a mythic American image of ox-drawn covered wagons pulling toward the viewer against the backdrop of purple mountains.
Perhaps even more outstanding is the oil on Masonite painting by Eugene von Bruenchenhein, a true outsider artist (the term has been much abused) who worked in Milwaukee from the 1930s through his death in 1983. The untitled 1955 painting on display includes patterns of arches and spires suggesting an alien cathedral or city skyline on a distant planet. The greenish atmosphere glows slightly as an unknown sun pierces the clouds.
Untutored, Bruenchenhein worked in obscurity at his kitchen table and was undiscovered until after his death. The founder of Landmarks Gallery, Huetta Manion, along with the Milwaukee Journal’s late art critic, Jim Auer, played a role in identifying the value of Bruenchenhein’s oeuvre.
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Among other works included in “Wisconsin: The 20th Century” is a 1942 watercolor in the Audubon manner of a pheasant in flight by Bruno Ertz; and a circa 1930 watercolor by J.R. Hampel of a Wisconsin farm, the scene vibrating with life from improvisatory brushstrokes that suggest, like quantum physics, that the world we see is less solid than we know.
