Driftless: Nick Engelbert & Ernest Hüpeden +David Rhodes

Art-environment builders Nick Engelbert (1881–1962) and Ernest Hüpeden (a. 1878-1915) both immigrated to the United States from northern Europe. Each created an art environment in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin.

Austrian-born Nick Engelbert settled in Hollandale, WI, in 1913 and purchased the small farm he called Grandview in 1922. In the early 1930s, inspired by a visit to the nearby Dickeyville Grotto, he coated a planter with concrete inlaid with stones and shells. Eventually, he embellished the entire façade of his clapboard house in the same fashion. By 1950, he had transformed the yard around the home into a fantastic landscape with over 40 concrete sculptures of his own making.

In his later years, Engelbert took up painting, and, in 1990, Engelbert’s children gave the John Michael Kohler Arts Center 75 of his works. The Arts Center cares for several sculptures too fragile to remain on site; replicas stand in their place at Grandview.

An immigrant from Germany, Ernest Hüpeden was an itinerant painter working in the late-nineteenth century whose most impressive and well-known work of art is called “The Painted Forest.” The art environment is located in what was once a meeting hall of the Modern Woodmen of America; Hüpeden’s mural paintings cover the walls and ceiling of the hall with allegorical representations of the fraternal organization’s values and secret initiation rites.

Acclaimed novelist David Rhodes, a resident of the Driftless Region, contributed a short work of fiction to this consideration of Engelbert’s and Hüpeden’s art environments. In his response, Rhodes offered an account of the people and geography of the region where Engelbert and Hüpeden lived and worked. He revealed a culturally rich landscape that allows idiosyncrasy to thrive.