“If there is one thing I'm good at, it's keeping a scrapbook.” Cecil F. Head , April 1988
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| AI image by Gemini for illustrative purposes only |
Cecil Head Looks Back.
One imagines the first leaves of Spring pushing the fading show of fluttering blossoms, pink on the redbud, white on the dogwood. And either a clear blue sky or a grayer wind─your choice, your imagination. And the weather being so fickle in April Indiana.
You might not have to imagine at all, but just open your eyes and see...
A plain little house, modest but sturdy, and well kept, just off a rural crossroads. It's a part of town clear near the outskirts, almost country, but then, oh clock, sparsely industrial with gravel dust and the sound of big wood chopping, until finally now, engulfed in the commercial noise and glut of southside suburban sprawl. It's a moving picture, a changing scene, on the edge of every city, but this one Whiteland, Indiana, and this humble little place the home of artist Cecil Head.
Cecil Head, in his early eighties, sat for an interview, with his local paper in April of 1988. One imagines, in that house.
Michael Aldrich's Daily Journal article “Whiteland painter speaks out on art” appeared in the Franklin, Indiana paper on April 27, 1988. He spoke to Head
about the exhibition of two of his paintings in the 20th Joslyn Biennial, at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska from April 2 through May 15, 1988. The paintings, 'A Real Bee on Sunflower' and 'Sweet Indiana Corn' both depicted the artist's Indiana scene, perhaps right outside his door.
Head explained that on the Sunflower picture, which he was painting away at in his studio, a bee flew in, buzzing around. The bee paid the ultimate price for being too attracted to the spiraling disc flowers of Head's huge sunflower bloom and was caught by the artist and stuck right on the wet paint, then and there.
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| Cecil Head A Real Bee on Sunflower |
By there, I mean the location of Head's art journey, most all in central Indiana, from birth in Lebanon, to art school in Indianapolis and then home and gallery association in Whiteland and Greenwood in Johnson County. By then, Head had been for sixty years making art, although a little off and on, as he was to explain, looking back, and looking up large from a large black-bound album, his artist scrapbook.
The flow of art preserved as brittle columns of newsprint, photos, awards and exhibitions, clipped and pasted like specimens in a way, like the bee to the sunflower. The oldest entries taking on the yellow varnish of the patina of passing time. A fresher new sadness followed by a reawakened art, and a philanthropy, and the inevitable death of art friends in the bright, white latest pages.
The artist's fingers, tracing his path through the pages of the book, the arc of his arrow of time, grounded so near his Indiana scene, yet also once so near to the sun.
A Tall and Dark Young Man.
Page one of Head's scrapbook is a large photograph, an 8 x 10, showing a John Herron classroom with five students and an instructor, among easels.
The identities and the date are not noted on the Bass Company photo of four men and two women, and five visible artworks (three of which share the same subject of a standing uniformed man, either military or police, speaking to a group of women in a kitchen-like setting.)
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| John Herron Art School ca. 1929 |
A tall young man, impeccably dressed in suit and tie with a thick shock of Clark Gable hair, stands in profile far to the side of the other students and their instructor. The dark stranger is leaning back on his heals, holding paint brushes before a painting, listening on. The composition of the photograph and its grouping of figures mirrors the composition of the artworks in their midst.
The scrapbook was his own, with no need to annotate for himself. His memories could fill in the gaps. But as he is gone some many years ago, the scrapbook contains mysterious to be unraveled or conclusions to be inferred.
A Depression Era Golden Age.
Likely in his own handwriting, page two of the scrapbook is Head's curriculum vitae.
He writes that he studied art at the John Herron Art School.
He lists a number of his important awards and exhibitions from what looks to be his most productive and successful period, 1933 through 1941.
In 1933, Lucille E. Morehouse in her Indianapolis Star column 'In the World of Art', discusses Cecil Head's still life winner of the J. I. Holcomb Prize at the 26th Annual 'Indiana Artists' exhibit at the John Herron Institute of Art.
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| Cecil Head, Holcomb Prize Winner 1933 |
“While there is nothing especially original or unusual in the objects selected for this composition...” referring to the pots and jars and vegetables depicted in the painting, “...the work has that indefinable something that makes it art. There are no mannerisms, no straining after technical effects. The young artist won his prize with honest work on a picture whose style is straightforward and convincing in its simplicity.”
A year later in 1934, in the 27th Annual 'Indiana Artists' exhibit, Head was awarded Honorable Mention in the figure composition category for his ambitious painting, 'Builders'. Again, Ms. Morehouse covered the work in her art review column, saying the painting is “...a figure composition full of life and vigor.” She continues, “Cecil Head not only did good figure work in his group of seven men, busied with different tasks, but he used fresh, beautiful color, and well-balanced masses of lights and darks, that help to make his canvas an outstanding one.”
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| Cecil Head The Builders |
The same painting won the prize for best figure painting later that year at the Indiana State Fair art competition. To put the State Fair win in proper perspective, Hoosier Group legend William Forsyth won the outstanding landscape award in the same show. It was a showcase of the best and the brightest in those days.
Her column remarks favorably on not only Head's industrial and urban landscapes, but also winter and water scenes, in watercolor or oil, as well as his handling of portraits, complimenting the artist's beauty of color and form, and deft mastery of light and shadow.
In 1937, Cecil Head's painting 'A Winter Day' split a landscape prize at the Hoosier Salon annual exhibit held in Chicago.
But a bigger prize was coming later that year in the 'Indiana Artists' annual at the John Herron gallery, when 'Indiana Potato Planters' received the Meritorious Work of Art award.
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| Cecil Head Indiana Potato Planters |
Covered by Lucille Morehouse in her 'In the World of Art' column, she says of the Head painting, “ It is not altogether the depth of color, but the depth of emotional feeling, as well, that gives intensity in the blue sky back of the big red barn...” And further, “...two tall lank-bodied farmers are walking down the potato patch...their simple work clothes take on a beauty of color, the small deep-furrowed lot takes on a luminosity under the bright sun...”
In 1939, Head was included in the exhibit 'American Art Today' at the Contemporary Art Pavilion at The New York World's Fair. (It is not noted in the scrapbook the artwork Head displayed.)
A final glimpse of the type of work described enthusiastically by Morehouse in numerous columns in the 30's can be seen in his painting 'Along Fall Creek' which was exhibited in the 33rd Annual 'Indiana Artists' show at John Herron. The urban winter scene is presumably circa 1940, although the clipping is not dated.
The meritorious 'Indiana Potato Planters' was later exhibited as part of the 'Directions in American Painting' exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1941.
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| Cecil Head's Indiana Potato Planters at the Carnegie Institute 1941 |
And with that, a gap, the scrapbook pages from 16 to 23 are missing.
A Hiatus of Years and a Late Life Renewal.
According to various interviews many pages later in the scrapbook, the Great Depression and a commercial art career curtailed Cecil Head's fine art output for the middle forty years of his life. But after the death of his wife, Leverna, and an illness of his own, and after the urging of friends, he found himself more active before the easel once again.
He renewed his association with his fellow 'Market Street Artists', Floyd Hopper and William Kaeser. (They had run a studio gallery in the Union Trust Building on Market Street in Indianapolis for about ten years in the '30s.)
In July 1977, Head along with newly christened 'Hoosier Five' artists, Hopper, Kaeser, Wilbur Meese and Adolph Wolter presented works of various media at the IUPUI Student Union in Indianapolis.
Head, again along with Kaeser and the addition of Louise Johnson exhibited as three members of the same 'Five' group at the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce on North Meridian Street in October 1979.
Around this time he donated his favorite painting, 'Indiana Potato Planters' to the Franklin (IN) Public Library where it remains to this day.
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| Cecil Head Indiana Potato Planters Franklin Public Library |
Head continued to enter works in the Indiana State Fair art competition and won a third place in the professional oil painting category in 1982.
A solo show of the artist's work was presented at the Southside Art League Gallery in September 1984. He donated one of his paintings on display, a winter landscape, for the benefit of the Art League's building fund.
Two months later at the Irvington Historical Society, Head displayed a portrait of William Kaeser as a young man. Kaeser, a resident of Irvington and Head's friend since art school and the Union Building days, was being honored by the Society.
Head actually exhibited both the Kaeser portrait and a self portrait, side by side, both created in the late '20s, early '30s era. A scrapbook image of the men and the paintings reveal little due to poor resolution of the image, however, a thick shock of hair atop the self portrait painting does seem to indicate the tall dark student on page one of the scrapbook is Cecil Head.
In addition to the two classmate portraits, Head's seated portrait, 'The Nun' created fifty years prior as well, was also on display.
An Overdue Acclaim and His Continuing Philanthropy.
Cecil Head attained a newfound appreciation upon reaching the grand age of eighty.
For his birthday in 1986, the Southside Art League Gallery honored Head with an exhibition and a buffet supper on July 1.
In a Perry Weekly article dated June 26, Head explains what he paints─“the Indiana scene.”
His Herron instructors, including William Forsyth, Clifton Wheeler, Oakley Richey, Paul Hadley and Frank Schoonover instilled the appreciation for what is near to be dear. Head explains that he never traveled much, that there was no need to go a thousand miles.
“There's plenty to paint right here.”
The Art League birthday retrospective called 'The Cecil Head Show' was also covered by art writer Marion Garmel in her 'Brush Strokes' column in the Indianapolis News. Garmel writes, “Head...would have been called an American regionalist. His strong, blocky composition is reminiscent of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. But (it was)...his color sense...(that) intrigued the critics. You can see that... in 'The Builders', a 1934 painting of bricklayers and masons that sparkles as though it were painted yesterday.”
Newer paintings she describes in the column include 'Sweet Indiana Corn' and 'Light on My Wood Pile', both in acrylic and pastel.
A few months later, on October 26, a slide lecture was presented by Patricia and Frank Owings of Pleasant Run Gallery, on behalf of the Irvington Historical Society. The lecture was called 'Painting the American Scene in Indiana' and featured the 1930s art of Cecil Head, Floyd Hopper, William Kaeser and George Jo Mess. The lecture also compared these artists' work with other American regionalists of the time; Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Burchfield, Edward Hopper and Grant Wood.
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| Cecil Head Evening Meal discussed in 'Painting the American Scene in Indiana' lecture |
The renewed interest in Head's early works resulted in almost all of the '30s works being sold.
In this period of late success, Head's scrapbook pages contain, one after another, the clipping of obituaries of his instructors and fellow artists. First Oakley Richey. Then Floyd Hopper, followed by William Kaeser.
The sad pages, though, are interspersed with the smiling face of Cecil Head, announcing the formation of a fine arts scholarship to be awarded annually to a Johnson County high school senior to pay toward art school tuition. Cecil Head provided the initial $1000 donation to the fund in January 1988.
Head was to live to see the the scholarship awarded. A local community paper The Gazette on May 24, 1989, shows recipient Stephanie McWilliams, a senior from Center Grove High School, receiving the honor at his side. A young artist at the start, and an old one near his end.
Having already taken classes at John Herron and studied a summer in Paris, Ms. McWilliams would be attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, that fall. Her early art journey already taking her further afield than Cecil Head from his humble home.
But his dream was to paint his Indiana scene. And he did that. And in the photo, almost his last, they both smile the same smile.
The smile of joy, a creation awaits.
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| Cecil Head's self portrait as an art student? ca. 1929 |
Mark Diekhoff, May 2025
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