CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/10/2016

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: King of Lesser Lands

"I remember feeling a strange dizziness," Joanne Cubbs writes in Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: King of Lesser Lands, the most comprehensive monograph ever published on the great American outsider artist, and the only book currently in print. "My heart was pounding, and the only words that I could squeeze out were faint whispers of astonishment.
It was 1983, and I had just stepped into the wildly imaginative universe of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. The artist himself had recently died, a few tragic weeks before his long-sought recognition by the art world was about to begin. I was the lead curator of
a mission to rescue his work from its near encounter with oblivion, and standing in the center of his small, crumbling home on the far west side of Milwaukee, surrounded by the intricate wonders of his forty years of creative work, I knew that my conception of art itself was about to change." Featured image is "Untitled, February 19, 1955."