Von Brunn asked the gallery to display the patriotic art he had painted - his motifs included bald eagles, American flags and cowboys - but the owners rejected his request. The art was "not demonic or vile," Era said, just not "up to the quality that we would carry" in the gallery.
"He got very angry and went stalking out," she said.
His Maryland ties go back to 1950, when he married Patricia Beverley-Giddings, whose family owned an Eastern Shore farm. (She was not the ex-wife quoted by the Daily News.) His wife's father, Arthur Beverley-Giddings, was a novelist with homes in New York and Schoolridge Farm in Somerset County.
In 1963, a Baltimore Sun article reported on his elevation to president of the Academy of the Arts in Easton. That year's show featured two of his paintings. Both were of tidewater scenes in Talbot County - "his favorite subject matter," according to the article. One showed watermen preparing for a day on the water. In an accompanying photo, a smiling von Brunn is wearing a bow tie, his hair swept back.
Five years later, in 1968, von Brunn was sentenced to six months in the Dorchester county jail for assaulting a sheriff, according to a Sun article.
Von Brunn, living in Trappe at the time, was arrested after police said he drove across a restaurant lawn and failed a sobriety test. Von Brunn hit the sheriff because he did not want his picture taken while being booked, the article said.
The article said von Brunn was an alumnus of Washington University in his native St. Louis, and served in World War II as a Navy lieutenant. He was working for the New York advertising firm Benton & Bowles Inc. at the time.
On Web sites, von Brunn has proudly detailed his German-Austrian roots. His father, Elmer, was superintendent of a Missouri steel mill, he said, and his mother, Hope Wenneker von Brunn, was a homemaker and an "accomplished pianist."
According to the Anti-Defamation League, von Brunn's "magnum opus" was a self-published anti-Semitic book called Kill the Best Gentiles. He has written many anti-Semitic essays and in recent years maintained an anti-Semitic Web site, holywesternempire.org.
Friedman, of the Anti-Defamation League, visits the Holocaust museum twice a week and helps conduct training sessions for many area police departments, including those in Baltimore and Baltimore County. "For people who are fueled by the hatred of Jews and the Holocaust," he said, "the terrible reality is that this museum is a symbol of what they hate most."
Baltimore Sun reporter Nicole Fuller and researcher Paul McCardell contributed to this article.
