Uncovering a midcentury mural
Von Trier installs black lights so modernist piece can be viewed as intended
Groovy black lights are once again trained on a nearly 60-year-old modernist mural, uncovered this week at the east side German bar Von Trier.
Maybe no one is as surprised that the painting still exists as the 93-year-old artist, now living in Washington state. Unseen for nearly 40 years, the roughly 7by-25-foot mural will be on view for a couple of months at Von Trier, 2235 N. Farwell Ave.
Von Trier owner John Sidoff said he vaguely recalled a modern mural on the wall behind the bar, illuminated by black lights, back when the lounge was still called Rieder’s in the mid-1970s and Sidoff was a customer.
Peter Goldberg definitely recalled it. He was a customer at Rieder’s and found the mural striking, done in paint that glowed under the black lights. Rieder’s was a favorite haunt, in part for its eclectic jukebox — rhythm and blues, opera, jazz, classical, blues, rock.
Goldberg said he mentioned to Sidoff that the mural must still be under the Teutonic painting installed when German native Karl Lotharius bought Rieder’s and turned it into Von Trier in 1978.
To satisfy his curiosity, Sidoff had a worker remove one of the German mural’s panels last week.
“It was there,” he said.
“How often does that happen, that you
find possibly a treasure?” Sidoff said.
Next, Sidoff wanted to learn who the artist was.
Goldberg reached out to a cousin who was a friend of Fred Berman’s, a prominent Milwaukee artist in the second half of the 20th century, thinking it might have been an artist in Berman’s circle.
The cousin, Sandy Lewis, not only knew the artist’s name but had known him personally, Goldberg said, but had no more information. He then posted the name of artist William Lachowicz on Facebook in the hopes someone could reveal more.
In the next lucky stroke, he learned that a friend, David Riemer, had attended Riverside High School with the artist’s son, Steve, and had just visited him and his parents on the West Coast. The trail had led across the country to the mural’s artist, now living in Snohomish, Wash.
William Lachowicz, reached by phone, said he was shocked to learn the mural still existed.
“I wasn’t sure what happened to it,” Lachowicz said.
The rest of the German mural’s panels were removed Monday, uncovering the Lachowicz mural for the first time since the late 1970s.
Lachowicz said he painted the mural in about 1958.
He would stop in at Rieder’s, which was on his way home from work, building and designing the windows and decorations at the downtown Boston Store, and became acquainted with owner Frank Rieder.
“I kept badgering him about getting that space behind the bar” to paint a mural, Lachowicz said, and Rieder finally consented.
The painting Lachowicz wanted to replace “was a little bit cheesy, cocktail glasses and piano keys, stuff like that.”
Lachowicz and Rieder agreed on a design from the four or five the artist sketched, and he set about painting the mural.
It was a linear design, something more contemplative than cocktail glasses and piano keys, Lachowicz said.
“I thought it fit in with the atmosphere of Rieder’s at the time,” Lachowicz said. He remembered it as eclectic — that jukebox had made an impression on him, too. “A good date bar,” he said, comfortable, with good drinks.
“Frank was fastidious in his appearance,” Lachowicz recalled. “He always wore a white bolero jacket and a bow tie.”
Rieder paid him around $600 for the mural, as Lachowicz recalls. The large work was a one-off; Lachowicz, a native of Two Rivers, otherwise painted personal works on easels. He continued painting while he worked at Boston Store, entering exhibitions in Milwaukee and across the state with a circle of other young Milwaukee artists.
That included his wife, Dorothy, whom he met while both were art students around 1946 at the former Layton School of Art, the forerunner to the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.
The couple now have been married 68 years, first moving to Oregon after Lachowicz retired in 1985, then to Washington to live with their daughter, Brena.
Some of Lachowicz’s works are owned by museums. The Milwaukee Art Museum has paintings of his called “Chrome Red” and “The City”; the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, has an oil painting of his titled “Signal.”
The curious can see the newly visible midcentury mural at Von Trier for the next couple of months.
“We’re not going to cover it up again,” Sidoff said. He expects to remove it and have it restored, and he hopes to sell it to someone who can house a mural of its size.
The Germanic mural will go back up, now that Von Trier will remain a German bar.
In another bit of intrigue, Sidoff said that taking down that mural revealed what appear to be bullet holes in the back.
He had heard rumors that figures in the mural had been shot and the mural repaired.
Sidoff announced in August that he would switch the format to a midcentury cocktail lounge, a move met with an outcry from residents of the neighborhood and beyond.
In October, Sidoff enlisted new operators — Wes Shaver and Mike Sorge — to run his bar, vowing to keep the German theme and name. Sorge and Shaver, who own Black Sheep in Walker’s Point and have partnership stakes in the Love Shack in Walker’s Point, recently began managing the Schwabenhof in Menomonee Falls.
Von Trier will be open through the holidays, then will close for about a month for a freshening up before reopening in early February.