Castle, who lived in Idaho, was hardly known east of the Rockies until recently. He's not included in the principal Art Museum exhibition, although an adjunct show of self-taught work in Philadelphia-area collections contains a drawing and a paper construction.
Von Bruenchenhein, the subject of several museum exhibitions since he died in 1983, is represented in both Art Museum shows. The large ``anthology'' contains examples of his art in all the media in which he worked, while the area-collections show has seven ceramics.
The Fleisher/Ollman show contains by far the largest number of ceramics, more than 40. Although Von Bruenchenhein worked in several other media and wrote poetry, he was most consistently involved with clay.
Born in 1910 and a resident of Milwaukee, he represents the most fascinating and appealing kind of self-taught artist. He was so obsessive about art-making that he transformed his house into a personal museum.
To create his ceramic pieces, he dug clay from local construction sites, hand-built vessel forms, fired them in his coal stove and then painted the bisqued ware with commercial paints.
Most of the ceramics at Fleisher/Ollman are openwork vessel forms pieced together from small elements that resemble plant leaves twisted at the tips. Some pieces are open at the top, while others finish in a point. The overall effect is one of delicacy and Victorian fussiness.
The show also includes solid bottles, a yellow-and-pink ewer, openwork ``crowns'' and small sculptures of individual flowers. But the vase-like forms, with their flaring, foliated architecture, are his most impressive achievement, even if their colors are sometimes garish.
