her brother’s celebrity, she was utterly captivated by thoughts of what might be found in the depths of the lake.
The gear Max Nohl had designed resembled a black rubber space suit, the helmet a glass-fronted globe with tubes emerging here and there. While the water looked murky from above, Max described fish, sunken boats and plant life below: an alternate world. His adventures inspired Nohl to develop a cartoon strip featuring “Danny Diver” and his astonishing encounters beneath the waves, particularly one involving a “Mere Maid” and a villainous octopus. These charming characters became prototypes for those she used ad infinitum in subsequent decades. In a style unique to Nohl, surrealism and cartooning merged. The diver character with his enclosed headgear visually fused with mermaids and fish into ghostlike forms with blank or disk-like faces and limbless bodies: loose, squiggly humans for whom the rules of gravity did not apply.
Danny Diver was, in many ways, emblematic of Nohl’s core battle with her artistic self that would continue for decades. Naturally given to design, narration and illustration, she longed to be more sublime in her work. Her father’s industrious nature added to her struggle as he encouraged Nohl to strike a balance between her art and a lucrative career.
Leo Nohl had enjoyed a successful law career in Milwaukee and the family was well off. As a businessman, however, he demanded that his support of his daughter’s artistic endeavors include a revenue-producing element and together they hatched the idea of building a production pottery studio and shop. In 1947, Nohl opened a sleek modern space that she had designed herself, featuring a circular display window and plenty of room to work.
For the first time, Nohl’s days belonged only to her, and she began to create profusely. Referring to her shop simply as “the pottery,” she made slip-cast vases, lamp bases, ashtrays, tiles and ceramic figurines. She picked up a steady stream of customers, including florists who purchased her vases for their stock. But as Nohl immersed herself in the endeavor of production ware, she was surprised to find true artistic freedom still elusive. Her avant-garde clay forms, effortlessly mingling surrealism and child’s play, embraced modernism’s dictum to “make anew.” Yet her slip-cast multiples and the enterprising shop felt, after a time, stultifying.

Nohl joined the Wisconsin Designer Craftsmen (WDC) group, and for the next decade immersed herself in artists’ lectures and technical demonstrations. Although Nohl’s work was often influenced by current styles and artists she admired, her own forms remained highly individualistic. In addition to ceramics and newfound (if short lived) explorations in glass, Nohl’s favorite medium became silver.

She entered both silver and ceramics works in juried exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Institute, the annual Wisconsin State Fair and in exhibitions sponsored by the WDC. The idea of “wearable art” appealed to the craftsman, the designer and the artist in Nohl: it was a realm in which practicality and transcendance might finally meet. The inherent elegance of silver also lent sophistication to her formal vocabulary. In 1955, she entered a pendant into the Huntington Galleries and Smithsonian Institution’s joint traveling exhibition “American Jewelry and Related Objects.” From more than 1,000 entries, Nohl’s piece was among the 322 selected. While Nohl was pleased, she had come to view the effort of seeking renown as an impediment to creativity. Later that year, when invited by Minnesota’s Walker Art Center to submit photos of her jewelry to Design Quarterly (for a now-celebrated issue on the studio jewelry movement, edited by designer Margaret de Patta), Nohl casually dismissed the invitation, saying that she had no snapshots available.

Nohl spent decades maintaining scrapbooks of all she found visually inspiring. Articles on Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell and Louise Nevelson were pasted side-by-side with clippings of work by untrained artists doing radical and unique things. Nohl was impressed by the personal vision manifested in the life-sized animals and lumberjacks in Fred Smith’s Concrete Park in northern Wisconsin, Sam (Simon) Rodia’s sky-scraping Watts Towers in Los Angeles, and Ferdinand “Le Facteur” Cheval’s Palais Idéal in France, an 1879 castle built of oddly formed stones and carved sculptures dedicated to the world’s great religions.

Nohl’s “idea books” embody her fondness for intermingling high and low art forms, filled as they are with images ranging from garden topiary and eccentric modern furniture designs to a raft made entirely of plastic milk jugs, an 18-foot tavern bar covered in pennies, Native American totem poles, a female figure painted inside a bathtub and a chainsaw log carving of John F. Kennedy. Bits and pieces of world culture permeate Nohl’s art, whether a silver brooch of a giant fish swallowing a man, or painted images of ruins and shape-shifting figures.

Throughout the 1950s, Nohl worked intently with silver, making brooches, pendants, cufflinks, buttons, rings, earrings and necklaces. Drawing on Mexican Taxco styles and her Danny Diver characters, she also found opportunity to explore abstract forms while designing clever clasps and chain links. A brooch might echo the grace of Jean Arp or the elegance of Constantin