Dorothy Morlan in the 1940s – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 6

seated Helen Hibben, standing left to right, Dr. S.J. Carr,  Simon Baus, Clifton Wheeler
and Dorothy Morlan

Dorothy Morlan in the 1940s and Beyond 

By the beginning of the 1940s, Dorothy Morlan was approaching her mid-fifties in age. She had been painting and exhibiting continuously for over three decades, ever since her debut while yet a student at Herron Art School in 1906. She had been honored with several solo shows over that span of time, admirable, as a trailblazing woman artist, when such shows were still called 'one-man' exhibitions, even by Indianapolis' well-known female art critic, a trail-blazer herself, Lucille Morehouse.

Morlan had thoroughly studied the local landscape through her tireless painting in the Whitewater River region south of Richmond and the Ohio River area near Hanover. She returned over and over again to studies of the flatland fields, the treelines and creeks and the endless skies near her Irvington home.  The area was still rustic around the edges and a rural idyll on the outskirts eastern Indianapolis at that time. She had painted more distant sights during extended painting sojourns along the coast of Maine and high country in Colorado. Her travels, whatever the reason – educational or personal – resulted in additional artworks around Indiana depicting the Wabash River valley at the border to Illinois, and around the country, from the Philadelphia mill country in the east and all the way to California.

She had exhibited with the Society of Western Artists in Chicago and around the Midwest, at the Indiana Artists at Herron Institute, at the Hoosier Salon, the Irvington Artists and countless regional shows in Richmond, Muncie, Lafayette and Evansville, to name just a few.  Morlan had also been chosen to participate in national shows in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.  

Expressive themes such as solitude and  expansiveness  – the order and splendor of nature  – were core forces at the root of her pictures and permeated her work throughout her career. She painted only the landscape. The color blue especially, and the variations of its color wheel neighbors; grays and greens and slates – and winter, that most solemn of seasons – captivated her artistic impulse. Nature's was the voice that spoke to her. 

She learned from influential masters of the Hoosier Group, primarily J. Ottis Adams, in her early years, and William Forsyth, as teacher, neighbor and fellow exhibitor. She learned the noble task of humble artist, with bent knee, before the wonder of the world.

Palm Beach and New York City.

In 1940, Dorothy Morlan would spend the winter season in Palm Beach, Florida with friend and fellow artist Miss Bertha Lacey. According to the Palm Beach Post, February 15, Miss Lacey had just completed her work on a portion of Indiana State House mural depicting a Civil War theme.  However, a later Indianapolis Star article dated May 29, 1940, reports that the mural project was in the Fountain County (Indiana) Courthouse, where Miss Lacey assisted mural painter Eugene Savage in the project. Both Dorothy Morlan and Indianapolis Star art critic Lucille Morehouse attended the dedication ceremony for the completed mural with a keynote address by Wilbur Peat of the John Herron Art Museum.

Around 1941, a new art gallery would be launched in New York City, headed by longtime New York sculptor and teacher, Naum Michel Los.  According to the Brooklyn Eagle paper, December 21, 1941, the enterprise was called Sixtieth Street Gallery.

A year later in December 1942, the Courier and Press (Evansville, Indiana) reported  That Dorothy Morlan had a show of thirteen paintings at Sixtieth Street Gallery in New York from November 30 through December 12. The show consisted primarily of her out-of-doors views of the Colorado Rockies and Ohio River in Southern Indiana. 

After the New York show in 1943, select paintings from the exhibit traveled to locations in Ohio, the state of her birth. Locations including Youngstown and Springfield, according to various news reports, including her hometown paper, The Salem News, in the April 27, 1943 edition.

October of Her Years.

As the mid-1940s approached, men in uniform appeared more and more in the papers as America was once again at world war.

The exhibition schedule of Dorothy Morlan decreased, at least to the extent that it was reported in the reviews. She was showing, by this time, only in the Hoosier Salon, which was held in the Wm. H. Block store in Indianapolis.

Perhaps her snub by the annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron a few years prior had soured her on that event, or perhaps she had submitted work, but it had either not been accepted or not remarked upon by the critics. The scant evidence is, more than likely, her travels and time spent for long periods in Colorado had affected her ability to exhibit in Indiana over those years.

As Lucille Morehouse reports in her art column on January 23, 1944, in The Indianapolis Star, in which she was covering the 20th Annual Hoosier Salon held at Block's, 

“In a gallery hung with oils there's a medium-sized vertical landscape design, founded on realism, in which the light gray-green of foreground field and its clumps a dark green pines and white-trunked birches, its distant deep blue mountain range, beyond which is a glimpse of snow-clad peaks, all combine to produce an effect of serenity, of dignified calm.”

Morehouse reveals that the painting is by Dorothy Morlan, in a picture called Glade in the Rockies in May.  

The description sounds familiar to a painting described earlier in this series by Morehouse in a past column, which may indicate Morlan's unrelenting efforts to capture the ephemeral moods of the mountains. She had been returning to Colorado and the Rockies again and again. Her dogged fixation on a place and a theme, much as Cezanne and his Mont Sainte-Victoire some fifty years prior. Indeed, Morehouse further reports that Morlan had just returned to her Irvington home after living two years in Colorado. 

The art critic reports further that, the previous year, Morlan had her first solo show in the East at a New York City gallery which received favorable reviews in New York papers and Art Review magazine, presumably the Sixtieth Street Gallery show.

One year following, Morehouse again discusses Dorothy Morlan in the context of the Hoosier Salon at Block's, the 21st annual, in her January 28, 1945 review. In discussing the artist's picture October, she writes,

“Miss Morlan's creative landscape is red-orange...also red-brown that blacken in the depth of shadows far back under closely placed trees. The foreground is a mass of deep, rich green. Level fields reach far into the distance – on a vary narrow strip of canvas – under a lowering sky, blue-gray and portentous.”

Lucille Morehouse may be describing a painting now called Mood of Autumn in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. If not the same painting, then nearly so.

Morehouse concludes her remarks on this picture, and the last noted Hoosier Salon of Morlan's career, with additional words on Dorothy Morlan herself, the seasoned artist, her longtime Irvington neighbor, and her fellow female trailblazing spirit, with this acclamation,

“Dorothy Morlan has been regarded as one of Indiana's most gifted women artists. October proves her ability to interpret a wild mood of autumn.”

Requiem for Singing Skies.

A young girl at her father's side. She sees him draw – marks upon the paper – a scene stolen from the world –  its earth and air, its lines, its exquisite design – enshrined in the leaves of a treasured sketchbook, to pour over later in amazement.

Dorothy Morlan was to enjoy a last major exhibit in Indianapolis in 1946. The John Herron Art Museum, along with the Art Association of Indianapolis and the Indiana Artists' Club was presenting a series of two-person shows from spring to fall that year.

Once chosen by the museum and a committee, the artist was free to act as juror and select their own works for the show. Morlan's show was scheduled, along with Muncie artist Hill Sharp, for the second iteration of the spring line-up, following Clifton Wheeler and Marie Goth.

Always an attentive observer of Dorothy Morlan's work, Lucille Morehouse would write a final time about the artist's pictures in her March 2, 1946, Indianapolis Star column about the two-person show.

“Dorothy Morlan's work as a landscape painter might be classified into several periods that include both grave and gay. Her latest painting, included in the seven richly colored oils on display, approached a type of imaginative design that borders on fantasy, and yet is linked to 'the good red earth' by its solidity of construction, its truth to natural forms in mountain peaks, meadow slopes and winding streams.”

About another picture, perhaps an even deeper foray into the realm of fantasy, Morehouse says of The Hound of Heaven,

"The artist said she was not trying to interpret the poem by Francis Thompson which has the same name, but that his 'strangely beautiful' poem stimulated her as she developed the design. As the 'hound' leaps through the sky, farm animals flee frantically across the green meadow slopes.  The black tree masses of the foreground have been treated in a fantastically decorative manner by thin curving white lines – suggestive of trunks and branches – that might have been made with an ancestral quill pen in the early Spencerian handwriting.”

Morehouse discusses another canvas, smaller, again fantastic in theme, The Afternoon of a Faun, which continues the new theme of adding creatures to her landscape by adding the mythological faun beneath the writhing branches of a musical willow in the fore. Additional works include Autumn Sweeps Out to Sea and The Burning Bush. 

Morehouse describes in more detail the two final contributions to the show by Dorothy Morlan. 

Of Requiem, Lucille Morehouse writes these fitting  lines about a Dorothy Morlan painting,  

“...inspired by an unusual light on a mountain peak in Colorado...the glory of silver and rose tones transfigures the blackness of middle-distant ranges and foreground pines so that the depths become reddened and enriched with deep dark color."

And about Here Where the World is Quiet she writes, 

“The first line of Swinburne's poem 'The Garden of Proserpine' suggested the name – has gently rolling hills, a deep blue stream that widens into a pool, guarded by fantastic trees, and, in the far distance, above the long horizontal line of level country, is another shorter horizontal line of silvery smoke from a passing train that is not in sight.”

At that moment in time, the latest war over, a new era for America was set to begin. A moment when European artist refugees, having traveled to our shores, brought even newer modernist ideas of surrealism and abstraction. Those latest modes of painting, reactive, birthed as a defense mechanism to the raw horrors of wars and crimes too terrible to conceive, let alone portray head-on in art. It was a neurotic moment infused with angst and anxiety that would change the direction of art forever, and establish for the the first time, with the emergence of the New York School, the preeminence of America in art.

And at that same moment, Dorothy Morlan paints an evolution to the expressive modernism she had always pursued. Her expressive interpretation of music and sight, feeling and color, mythos and nature. She seemed at a crossroads, an existential predicament shared by everyone on earth since the invention and use of the atomic bomb. 

Not long after the 1946 show, Dorothy Morlan was to suffer a debilitating stroke that left her unable to paint. The details are lacking, but it is mentioned in two books covering Morlan; The Irvington Group, 1928-1937 in a piece by Sheri A. Patterson, and Skirting the Issue by Judith Vale Newton and Carol Ann Weiss.    

It is somewhat surprising that Dorothy Morlan's condition was never mentioned by Lucille Morehouse in her Indianapolis Star columns in the years that followed. The careers of the two women intertwined to an amazing degree, and the fact that they were Irvington neighbors for fifty years or more would lead one to believe that Morehouse knew intimately the details of Miss Morlan's medical case. But any knowledge along those lines seems to have remained private.

Dorothy Morlan was to die in October of 1967.

(It is noted that that neither Dorothy Morlan's notice of death or her obituary in the Indianapolis newspapers mentioned any prior medical emergency from years past or details about her final years.) 

A last photograph of Dorothy Morlan appeared in the September 24, 1951, Indianapolis News. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Irvington Union of Clubs, a pictorial spread was printed. The undated photograph shows past participants of the Irvington Artists exhibitions sponsored by the Club.  Miss Morlan, and fellow artists Simon Baus and Clifton Wheeler, are admiring Helen Hibben holding an artwork, while longtime exhibition host and sponsor Dr. S. J Carr looks on.

******* 

Morlan first appeared in print at age twenty with her impressions of the last day of February, 1902. In particular, her astute observation of a winter morning giving way to spring. Her writing, infused with poetry, sang of the movement of clouds and the mood of a changing wind. 

Her last words appeared fifty-five years later in an October 2, 1957,  'letter to the editor' of The Indianapolis Star. 

There is no poetry to be found, unfortunately, in her well-reasoned remarks about the meaning of democracy versus republic as she weighed-in obliquely on the Little Rock segregation debate. Her mind seems rational and coherent, but in a topical manner absent any expression of dream, any feeling of solemnity, any awe. Her medical condition seemed to have sapped her introspective spirit by then. These last public remarks come across as shouting at the clouds, clouds that sang to her their beauty for so long.   

Postscript.  

Printed July 21, 1947, Lafayette Journal and Courier

50 Years Ago Today (in the Lafayette Morning Journal)

“Miss Lucille E. Morehouse, a graduate of Purdue, has taken a position on the Lafayette Journal staff, and will devote most of her time to society and literary work. She is regarded as a young lady of more than ordinary ability.”

Printed January 28, 1958, Indianapolis News

Fifty Years Ago (1908)

“A painting by Miss Dorothy Morlan of Irvington was accepted for the exhibition of the work of American artists at Philadelphia.”

Mark Diekhoff, August 2025

See Also:

The Irvington Group, 1928-1937 

Skirting the Issue by Judith Vale Newton and Carol Ann Weiss.    

both books available at the Irvington Historical Society

Dorothy Morlan in the Late 1930s – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 5

Dorothy Morlan in the Mid to Late '30s 

Art's Flow Through Time.

As the years of the decade of the Great Depression marched on, the art world in the United States and Indiana would transform from romantic or academic realism, American impressionism, and the modernist first expressions and urban realism of the Ashcan School toward new visions. A new art, with new methods and aspirations, and state-sponsored, at times, under Roosevelt's New Deal programs to combat poverty and unemployment. 

Artworks depicting rural social utopias, on the one hand, and grittier urban scenes that celebrated work and endurance, on the other. There was an idealization of work and land in art, perhaps due to the scarcity of soil and employment in the real world of dust bowl erosion and chronic joblessness. Artworks of starving desire, of shortages fulfilled, almost propaganda, like future television ads or Instagram feeds –  sumptuous still life cornucopias offered for the eager eyes of hungry hearts. 

Although Dorothy Morlan remained largely untouched by the new movements in art, many Indiana artists a half-generation her junior embraced the trends in Social Realism and the American Scene.  Artists such as Cecil Head, Edmund Brucker, Florence Bartley Smithburn, Floyd Hopper and E. Roger Frey were in this group of artists. William Edouard Scott, a contemporary of Morlan's with Indiana roots, had a style that changed over the years, and he adopted the new trend of social scene painting in the 1930s.

As described in the last part of this series, Morlan alluded to the 'ideal' in her talks about art in the early years of  '30s, despite her dedication to, almost deification of, a more personal expression.  It was as if she caught wind of the new communal wind blowing, whether or not it would carry her away.

Her journey, through her skies, across her vast fields, was a soulful search, a pilgrim's trek, not for the basics of life like farm and food, home and hearth, production and profit, but something much deeper, more spiritual, inexplicable and mysterious. Her personal path would carry on. 

In the mid '30s, Irvington and Indiana art icon William Forsyth would pass away. Within a couple years, the Irvington Artists annual show would also end. Morlan's participation in art exhibitions and interesting new shows would continue tirelessly as the 1930s ended and the winds of a new war blew ever closer to our shores.  Far-off vistas and mountain views would call to Morlan by decade's end as her paintings of the Colorado Rockies and English Isles attest.

Demise of an Art Instructor and the End of the Irvington Artists Annual.

William Forsyth and Dorothy Morlan each produced a landscape painting deemed “outstanding” by Indianapolis Star critic Lucille Morehouse in her March 18, 1934 'In the World of Art' column.  Exhibited in the 27th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron, the pictures were Waterside by Forsyth and Frosty Morning by Morlan.

About William Forsyth, one of Dorothy Morlan's most influential teachers and a neighborhood mentor to her for many years, Lucille Morehouse writes,

“(Waterside is) brilliantly executed and characterized by poetic feeling and charm. High in key, this picture of mirror-like bit of lake, reflecting color from sunny cottages and moored rowboats, a balancing element of strength in the sturdy-trunked old willows, might be regarded as typical of Mr. Forsyth in his most joyous moods.”

One is happy to hear reported the happy effect of the painting from an artist suffering through hardships over the past few years.  According to the book The Herron Chronicle, 2003, things took a turn for Forsyth, beginning in 1933, when he lost his job teaching at Herron after 42 years.  And at age 78, in the days before Social Security or retirement pensions, the aging artist found it necessary to apply for government aid under the federally funded Public Works of Art (P.W.A.) project. Health failing, his final works of art would be funded by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, a program designed for artists in the most dire need of assistance.

On Morlan's picture Frosty Morning, Morehouse writes about the artist's by-now familiar motif,

“(Frosty Morning is) a wide view of river valley with distant curve of the Ohio, seen in the misty gray-violet light of early dawn.”

That year, both Forsyth and Morlan created works funded by the P.W.A. and which were included in a national exhibition of such works at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 

Reported in The Indianapolis News on April 30, 1934. Forsyth's contribution was a decorative landscape in tempura intended for the reception room at the Indiana State Library.  Morlan's painting was the oil, Ohio River from Hanover, created for the Manual Training High School library. A young artist who would make his name as an 'Indiana scene' painter, Cecil Head, also had a picture in the show, the oil on canvas Canal Boat (Wabash and Erie Canal).   

Months after, the annual Irvington Artists exhibition at Carr's Hall recurred in late 1934.  

In her December 16 column in The Indianapolis Star, Lucille Morehouse covers the work of Simon P. Baus and Dorothy Morlan extensively. There was a full wall of Forsyths in the show, the most recent of which were in tempura, a medium the aged Hoosier master was using for his W.P.A projects. The Forsyth works were covered in the Star column by the writer a week before on December 10. Morehouse remarks that the Irvington Artists show was practically a group of solo shows under one roof, as several artists were allotted substantial wall space for a large grouping of works, 8-12 each. 

In the December 16th article, Morehouse describes a Baus figurative composition Pueblo Gossips as “three small (indigenous American) figures, brightly blanketed, (who) give color to a background of adobe wall.”  

And of Morlan, Morehouse writes, in part,

“Midwinter...impresses me as one of the finest landscapes from the brush of this artist who paints realism in such way that there is a close union between reality and imagination....There is nothing fantastic or fanciful. But there is an imaginative interpretation of the solemnity, the tranquility, the majesty of nature; an interpretation of the grandeur of our hill fields when locked in the snows of winter – a grandeur which influences powerfully without approaching the dramatic.”

You get the impression Lucille Morehouse really enjoys and understands Morlan's work. About the canvas Spring in Town, Morehouse observes,

“Spring in Town,  an interpretation in lighter mood, painted in front of the new State Library, looking across the State-house grounds. But the locality only suggested a motive. Imagination did the rest. The distant office buildings might be marble palaces.”

Retreat of Autumn, Old Elm in Winter, Harmony in Blue, Skyline From the Cold Spring Road,  and Near Rockville are listed as additional works by Morlan in the show.

Just one year later, by the time of the 8th Annual Irvington Artists show in December 1935, William Forsyth would be dead.  The last surviving member of the Hoosier Group had succumbed to kidney failure on March 29, 1935. He had been ailing since a prior heart attack about one year earlier.

Lucille Morehouse covers the exhibition in her December 15 Star column. A special hanging of 21 paintings by Forsyth took up the same entire wall as the year before. The memorial included early paintings from the Munich years, a self-portrait (then owed by the Irvington Union of Clubs) – floral pictures in oil and watercolor – and the main bulk,  his Indiana landscapes. Three of the Hoosier pictures, given their titles, were Down at Connorsville, Hills of Morgan and Along Pleasant Run. 

Morlan was in the overall show with her fellow Irvingtonians, which included a newcomer, William Kaeser.  Morlan was  represented by five works, including the interestingly titled The Plough Handle, a large Ohio River landscape of a view near Hanover (possibly Logan's Point), and the additional works Silhouette in Gray, The Cloud, Winter Sketch and Thunderheads.

A year following, in the December 6, 1936 Indianapolis Star, Lucille Morehouse reports that the current 9th Annual Irvington Artists exhibition was held, not on the second floor of Carr Hall on Washington Street, as in prior years, but in a series of artist studio open house locations spread over Irvington. The innovation, inspired by similar open studios events by the artists in Brown County, Indiana, was not expected to be a permanent change, but rather a change of scenery, perhaps after the death of William Forsyth a year earlier, and the loss of several of the Irvington group artists who had moved away for one reason or another. The list of artists who relocated away from Irvington over the past year included Frederick Polley, Martha Lee Frost and Carolyn Bradley.

The novel presentation would allow for more informal interaction between artist and public and allow a peek behind the curtain of the creation process by laying the studio confines bare.  Transportation between the locations by lent automobiles was arranged to shuttle persons around the various studio homes.

Dorothy Morlan's studio on Lowell east of Arlington, would host her work and that of painter Simon P. Baus. The Wheelers, Clifton and Hilah, along with Robert Craig, would be showing at the Wheeler home, also on Lowell, but west of Ritter. William Kaeser would show his work at his Emerson Avenue home. Constance Forsyth, at her home (and that of her late father), at the corner of Emerson and Washington, would show her work, and that of Robert Selby and Helene Hibben. Charles G. Yeager would host his own work and a sculptural grouping by Paul Baus (so of Simon) at his studio on Campbell Avenue.

In an unnamed review of the show in the December 13, 1936, Indianapolis Star, a thoughtful writer, possible Lucille Morehouse, provides a detailed summary of the open studio event, with her added suggestion of the most efficient route of travel among the studios.

The first stop is Morlan's two-room studio, situated in the side yard just east of the family home on Lowell Avenue. The cottage studio, in it park-like setting of mature shade trees, had a gallery-like  entry room and a back studio work room.  In the entry area, eight paintings by Simon P. Baus were arranged, including in the most prominent spot, the large Portrait of Grace Julian Clarke, a work that was a recent prize-winner from the L. S. Ayers 'downtown' exhibit. Baus had additional works of various subjects, including landscapes, most notable a large mountain scene called Near Estes Park, some floral pictures and additional portraits including one called Taos Indian.

For her part, in the work room, Morlan exhibited several large landscapes from earlier years, included two views of the Maine coast, her Old Mills piece painted near Philadelphia, highlighted earlier in this series, and several Southern Indiana views of the Ohio River. 

A recently painted river view, the large 32 inch by 42 inch canvas Symphony in Gray and Green was included, and described in detail,

“...an Ohio River landscape subject, an interpretation of November in which clumps of dark green evergreens, the green of alfalfa fields, and dark olive green of fields in the foreground, together with silvery sky and water and bits of melting snow suggest the title...”

 A year later, the 10th Annual Irvington Artists exhibit returned to Carr hall for exhibition. Dorothy Morlan's contributions were primarily new mountain scenes created from sketches or completed plein air in the Rocky Mountains in the preceding months. Although not noted, perhaps not known, at the time, it would be the last of the annual shows of the group of artists that would later be called the Irvington Group. Perhaps due in part to loss of the indomitable William Forsyth, or the continuing economic strains of the Great Depression, or whatever combination of changes in the personal circumstances of the various artists, the once popular annual event would end after ten years.  

Lucille Morehouse's December 5, 1937, Indianapolis Star column on the day of the show's closing, describes Morlan's mountain pictures,

“July in Estes Park, one of Miss Morlan's most beautiful mountain scenes, is a good example of cloud-patterned mountain slopes. Glade in the Rockies, with its slender white trunks of aspens outlined against the almost perpendicular mountain walls, is an effective bit of mountain painting.”

Morehouse notes that the largest of the paintings, A Mountain Tarn, was painted on location in the Rockies as opposed to in studio later, from sketches.  Regarding the mysterious title, 'tarn' is a variation of an old Norse word that describes a small lake or pool in the mountains, formed in a glacially-carved hollow.

Interesting One-Off Shows.

During the mid to latter '30s, several start-up and pop-up art exhibitions debuted in Indianapolis. The shows covered the range of current styles practiced by local artists, including realist/academic, impressionist, modernist/expressionist and the newer social scene schools. Dorothy Morlan participated in many of these exhibits.

In February of 1935, Emmerich Manual Training High School celebrated its 40th anniversary with an exhibition of artworks consisting of three parts; student class works preserved over the years, works by  leading artists in the school's collection that had been either acquired by outgoing graduating classes of students or donated by the artists themselves, and finally art works on loan for the show from alumni of the school. 

Noteworthy portraits in the show included a painting of Otto Stark, a beloved early art instructor at the school by Wayman Adams, and a large canvas of school namesake, Charles E. Emmerich, by T.C. Steele, a mainstay on the walls of the school library for many years.

Dorothy Morlan's contribution was a recent landscape painted near Madison, Indiana, now in the school's permanent collection, that had been created under the previously mentioned New Deal art project and Corcoran exhibit.

Lucille Morehouse wrote about the Manual event in her February 21, 1935 Star column,  and discussed another painting of note in the exhibit – the most-recent donation to the school's collection (presented on the date of the 40th anniversary) – the  John Hardrick canvas Among the Vines. The painting had been acquired by an African-American alumni group of Manual High School and depicted a girl, dressed in red, in a setting of vines and red berries. 

The painting has been recently seen in the 2025 exhibit John Wesley Hardrick –  Through the Eyes of an Artist show at the Indiana State Museum. The painting, one and the same I believe,  with the currently titled Little Brown Girl, in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. It hangs currently, as of this writing, on view in a public gallery of the museum.

Of side note to Morlan's federal work project canvas noted in the Manual exhibit, was her contribution to the 28th Indiana Artists exhibition at Herron, and mentioned by Lucille Morehouse in her March 17, 1935, newspaper column.  Morehouse described the painting as a, “big, sober composition dominated by long, shed-like buildings whose roofs are whitened by a light fall of snow.” The piece called Civilian Conservation Camp draws further emphasis of Morlan's, and other artists, output tied to the W.P.A. Projects at the time.

An interesting one-week show was previewed by Lucille Morehouse in her October 7, 1935 Indianapolis Star column. The Street Art Exhibit would showcase works by many local artists in the storefront windows of participating business along Pennsylvania Street from 16th Street to Washington Street. As part of the overall show, an additional display of works by women artists would be held at 333 Pennsylvania at the Architects and Builders building. Dual in nature, the women artists show would have both living artists and deceased artists represented in a memorial of gathered works. 

Artists of the Irvington and Brown County groups would be represented in the shows, as well as other artists in the Indianapolis area. Participants would include Irvingtonians Dorothy Morlan, Simon P. Baus, Constance Forsyth and Frederick Polley – Brown County artists Dale Bessire, Carl C. Graf, Marie Goth and V. J. Cariani – and Indianapolis artists Cecil Head, John Wesley Hardrick, Gordon Mess and Elmer Taflinger – just to name a few of the over eighty participants. 

The following year, a reactionary show was organized when a large group of artists, regularly appearing  and even receiving awards in local exhibits, were shut out of what was arguable the city's keystone exhibit, the 29th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron. In response, the Rejection Exhibit, was organized by Damian Lyman of Lyman's Fireside Gallery of Indianapolis. The show was open only to artists whose entire submitted works were rejected by the jurors of the Herron show.  There were an unusual number of artists so affected that year, and so the show was mounted, similar to others around the country of late, and perhaps inspired by the original Salon de Refuses in Paris many decades prior when avant-garde artists created their own scene after being snubbed by the officially-sanctioned, academically-oriented Paris Salon.

Of all artists in the Rejection show at Lyman's, two of Dorothy Morlan's paintings were on the receiving end of a bit of critical punditry by a writer named Anton Scherrer regarding the Rejection Show, when he says of Morlan's pictures at Lyman Gallery,

“Walter Pater, (a 19th Century British art and literary critic) in his most oracular mood, once wrote an essay to the curious text that all art aspires to the condition of music. We were reminded of it the other day at the Lyman Gallery when we saw Dorothy Morlan's picture labeled 'Maestoso.'  Miss Morlan picks names like 'Maestoso' and 'Largo' to drive home her point. It isn't necessary. We caught on right away. 

Like music, Miss Morlan's art is curiously devoid of substance, but it has the stuff of which dreams are made. And dreams, no matter what materialists may say, are more than intangible emotions. Given definite direction they may turn out to be the art of Albert Ryder and Augustus Tack and, maybe, of Dorothy Morlan, too.

If Miss Morlan's pictures were entirely successful, their importance could scarcely be overestimated. They are by no means entirely successful – not yet, anyway. We are still too conscious of paint. But they have their appeal and it is those who believe with Browning that 'a man's reach should exceed his grasp.' ”   

About the same two paintings, Lucille Morehouse wrote in her column in The Indianapolis Star a few day earlier on March 29, 

“Dorothy Morlan's large decorative landscape – unusual because of its rhythmical as well as imaginative quality, and its harmony of dark green tones – has been displayed before under the title Marching Tree.

When Miss Morlan entered the canvas this year, she gave it a musical title Maestoso. (meaning performed in a majestic manner). Her other rejected canvas, displayed...at Lyman's, was also an interpretation of a movement in music and was entitled Largo.” 

Morehouse adds about Morlan, generally, as pertains to her snubbing by the two New York artists who made up the jury that rejected her work from the Indiana Artists show, 

“Miss Morlan is enough of a philosopher – and also has enough sense of humor, along with good sound sense – not to let one turn-down or even a dozen turn-downs by a jury turn her aside from a definite course in her career.”

Morlan was joined in the reject pile, most notably, by Simon P. Baus and Marie Goth, the entirety of whose submissions were also passed-by at the Indiana Artists show.

In another special show, in honor of the nationally celebrated Art Week, 1938, an exhibition of self-portraits by Indiana artists was shown at Herron the first week of November that year. According to Lucille Morehouse in her October 10, 1938, Star column, artists scheduled to participate included Dorothy Morlan, John Hardrick, Wayman Adams, Edmund Brucker, Cecil Head, Oakley Ritchey, Marie Goth, Constance Forsyth and others, 49 in total.

In a review of the show a couple of weeks later, Lucille Morehouse does not mention Dorothy Morlan as participating. The actual number of artists appearing was 43, so Morlan may have been among the six missing artists. It would not be surprising if she had second thoughts, given the entirety of her mature work was in landscape.

Morehouse cites John Hardrick's self-portrait as perhaps the best of the bunch. She also gives Earl Beyer a nod for most original picture with his innovative composition of a round shaving mirror that reflects his upper face, and a still-life of foam, razor and brush hinting at the rest.  

Far Afield – Colorado Rockies and British Isles.

Over the 1930s, many Indiana artists traveled to and painted the Colorado Rockies as can been noted in picture titles mentioned earlier in this series. The vicinity of Estes Park, in particular, was an artists' hub. Dorothy Morlan would begin spending considerable time in those mountains, and in painting them back home, as the decade came to a close. Her working travels would also take her to England around this time.

She had a small mountain painting, Glade in the Rockies, included in the 31st Annual Indiana Artists show at Herron in March 1938. 

In an exhaustive column appearing July 16, 1939 in The Star, Lucille Morehouse discusses Dorothy Morlan's recent mountain paintings. The artist spent four months in Colorado in 1937, sketching many scenes to be used as basis of the new oil paintings created in her Irvington studio.

Of Morlan as a mountain painter, Lucille Morehouse writes,

“Her mountains have an enduring permanency ...solidly constructed...with a realistic significance that is true to nature. An additional spiritual quality is an attribute that is interpreted with both force and gentleness.”

Morehouse describes three paintings in specific detail. Everlasting Hills, a picture with a Biblical title found in the Book of Psalms, portrays the forms, color and magnificence of the Rockies.  High Meadows in the Rockies is a large horizontal canvas, 30 x 42 inches, while Tarn in the Rockies is a vertically upright composition, a bit smaller, decorative in design, showing the mountain pond, a dark blue green, extending from side to side in the picture, topped by a treeline of evergreen, and capped by distant mountain peaks in gray-violet. The decorative nature of the painting, as noted by Morehouse, is emphasized by the placement of foreground tree branches stretching over a turquoise sky.  

The art writer also emphasizes the musical quality of Morlan's mountain work, a tune sung by Morehouse and other critics in prior observations of the painter's expressive and lyrical landscapes. She says generally about the work, 

“The lover of music will find in almost every one of Dorothy Morlan's landscapes a feeling for music – such is the rhythm and harmony with which she composes when working in form and color.”

And in particular about High Meadows in the Rockies, 

“As the eye comes back to the foreground, after dwelling upon the delicate tints and undulating forms of the middle distance and the distance, the contrast is like a clash of cymbals and blare of trumpets following the soft liquid notes of the wood-winds in orchestral music.”

Lucille Morehouse seems caught in a lofty, Wagnerian revelry when discussing Morlan's Rocky Mountain highs.

Morehouse also reports Dorothy Morlan followed her summer in Colorado with one in the British Isles the following year. She made many charcoal sketches on locations and was beginning to use them as basis for a new body of landscape works at home. One such finished paining, Evening. Isle of Skye was reproduced as part of the Star article. 

The greatest decade of the Great Depression comes to an end with Dorothy Morlan hitting a high note. What portends the artist and the world in the decade to follow, fate would decide, and will be discussed in the final part of this series on Indiana's first modernist painter.

Mark Diekhoff, August 2025

 

Dorothy Morlan in the Early 1930s - Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 4

Dorothy Morlan with her painting 'The Sentinels,' 1933

 

Dorothy Morlan in the Early 1930s

The early Depression era years were productive for Dorothy Morlan and the Indianapolis art scene. New annual exhibition opportunities were launched even as established annuals continued. Her thoughts about art were verbalized in several public talks she gave during these years, and noted a shift in her ideas about expression to those of an ideal. The inspiration of an aural and 'musical'  landscape and nature grasped her attention during this period as she continued to spend holiday seasons in the fields and by-ways near her Irvington home. An important solo show occurred in 1933 that would showcase her latest and most experimental modernist painting to date, The Marching Tree. Indianapolis' best known art critic, Lucille Morehouse, of The Indianapolis Star, continued to champion Morlan's work, and new writers weighed in as well with new viewpoints and observations.

Words and Pictures, Pictures and Words.

The second annual Irvington Artists exhibit at Carr's Hall on Washington Street was held over a period of just less than two weeks in the waning days of February, 1930. According to The Indianapolis Star on February 24, the exhibit had over two thousand visitors and resulted in the sale of several works by Frederick Polley, Simon Baus, Hilah Wheeler and Clifton Wheeler.

The large exhibit room of 100 feet by 40 feet allowed for 'on the line' hanging of nearly the entire show of works, as opposed to the salon-style cramped groupings seen more commonly in other  exhibits.

Morlan's contributions consisted of ten decorative landscapes, mostly large oil paintings and a couple of pastel sketches. She gave a talk as part of the show's run, titled 'Evolution of a Picture.'  The Indianapolis Times contained a confusing announcement of the talk that showed her photo and said the artist's talk would be about the movies. The talk was about painted pictures and not moving pictures as confirmed in The Star on February 21 which provided a summary of Morlan's remarks which shed light into her way of working and thinking about paintings, not movies.

Regarding the inception of an idea for a picture, Morlan noted that the enthusiastic suggestion from a friend for a subject or motif will not suffice the artist. She finds that the artist must be sparked by an urge, an awareness or a recognition of a personal, emotional or sensorial nature. 

"Often the stimulus to create is stirred by something other than an appeal to the eye.  It may be the voice of a bird, the tone of a bell or the ragman's tuneful call in spring. Something of this kind, often found in the most commonplace and unexpected of places, will touch the spring of the artist's imagination and stir the emotion that starts him in a quest of material to express it.”

She expresses her unapologetic approach to landscape,

“...artists represent different types and sources of inspiration. We have the strict realists who take pleasure in depicting plain, cold facts. It is doubtful if the strict realist performs the greatest service in art for it is the personal element in creation that gives it its power. It is the union of realism and idealism that brings forth the most interesting results.”

In September of 1930, The Star reported on how the Irvington Artists spent their summer. William Forsyth traveled out west from the Grand Canyon into Southern California, sketching in paint along the way. His daughter Constance painted at Winona Lake, in Indiana. Clifton Wheeler, in the Colorado Rockies. Simon Baus and his family traveled by automobile on a grand tour of the West, taking the northerly route to the Pacific Northwest and returning the southern route through Taos, New Mexico, where he painted portraits and figure studies with local indigenous people as his subject.  

Dorothy Morlan reportedly stayed put near her Irvington home that summer, painting the fields and Pleasant Run.

That fall, The Lafayette Journal and Courier announced that Dorothy Morlan and Star art critic Lucille Morehouse would attend a luncheon given by the Wabash River Sketch club in Attica, Indiana, on October 25. Morlan and Morehouse would give talks and local artists would be presenting work, open to the public to all those interested in art.

A second Irvington Artists exhibit was held in calendar year 1930, in December, in which Dorothy Morlan both displayed pictures and gave a talk about her art beliefs. Her six submitted canvases included the large and striking painting The Marching Tree. According to a December 11 Indianapolis Star article. The picture is described as a striking view of a “valiant tree against a background of sea and stormy sky.” It was inspired by a Tchaikovsky symphony, according to Morlan, amplifying her earlier musings about the inception of art ideas emanating from sonic sources.

The deeply symbolic and abstracted landscape painting, clearly modernist, in now in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.

Morlan's talk during the exhibit run was called 'Painting as a Language.'  Her obsession over the topic of the relation of words and art, art as communication, is evidenced by her increasing number of prepared talks she presented that year. And recall, that her origins as a creator began with her poetry prose in The Indianapolis Journal twenty-eight years prior in 1902. In that writing about the last day of February, she observed her own exaltation with the sights, the colors, the sounds and the dynamic changing sky in the realm of her perception.

In her talk in December 1930, she returned to her current theme, that year, of the contrast of realistic art with an art infused with idealism.  In prior years years she spoke of expression as opposed to slavish realism, not idealism.  What are we to make of her ideas on idealism? It seems a concept based on groupthink as opposed to the singular psyche. Perhaps by that time, her aspirations trended to a more universal classicism. A capture of a worthiness, a beautiful suchness, based not on the picture's appearance but its meritorious effect. When she was younger she espoused a more experimental and individual 'expression,' whereas now, in later life, having achieved the aim of an art in that modern expressionist style, for some decades by then, she strives yet further, for the communal and lofty goal of some 'ideal.'

Specifically, Morlan is quoted from her talk by Indianapolis Star critic Lucille Morehouse in her  December 14, 1930, column as follows,

“...the realist can not hope to create such a lasting impression or make such a wide appeal as those who combine realism and idealism because there is something intangible within us that we long to express, something that casts a sort of radiance over the bare cold facts of existence.” 

Another important facet of her talk, summarized in the article, was her discussion of the role of a change of scenery for the artist in search of new inspiration and novel motifs.

Morlan conceded that a change of environment is stimulating to the artist, but further said that “it is not the only dynamic that can stir a painter to action.”  Morlan suggested a fresh mental outlook as equally important, thus enabling the artist “ to see with the eyes of imagination.” Morlan cited the examples of Albert P. Ryder and Arthur B. Davies as artists who “painted their dreams, yet gathered their material from the great store of nature.” 

There is little critical coverage of Dorothy Morlan the following year, other than a November 30, 1931 Indianapolis Star article that covered the closing of the annual Irvington Artists exhibit. Morlan had six works on display, including four meteorological studies from the sound of their titles; Thunder Caps, Cloud Study, Approaching Storm and After the Rain.

The silver anniversary of the Indiana Artists annual exhibit held at Herron was covered in Lucille Morehouse's April 3, 1932 'In the World of Art' Indianapolis Star column. Morlan was represented by the oil painting Blue Depths. 

The same critic covers the 5th iteration of the Irvington Artists exhibit in her December 4, 1932 column. She briefly remarks that Dorothy Morlan was represented by “outstanding work in big decorative landscapes, solemn and impressive for their imaginative design and of brilliant depth and color in blues and greens.”

A Year of Solo Shows.

The year 1933 would mark a year of two important solo shows for Dorothy Morlan. It can be noted that the most widely-used term at the time was still 'one-man' show and would appear often in newspaper coverage.

Reported in The Indianapolis News on March 27, 1933, Morlan's first one-person exhibit of the year occurred at the Woman's Department Club (of Indianapolis), presumably at their clubhouse mansion at the corner of 17th and Merdian streets. Her sixteen oil paintings displayed included several  “striking winter scenes for which she is widely known.”

She exhibited a painting as part of the traveling annual Indiana Artists Herron show at Richmond, Indiana's Morton High School building that was reviewed by an unnamed critic in the April 16 Richmond Item newspaper. The reviewer states that the overall exhibit was saved from mediocrity due to the presence of works by William Forsyth, Clifton Wheeler and Dorothy Morlan.  Morlan is described as one of Indiana's finest old line artists, and was represented by a painting described as “a tonal study, a large picture, a river scene, an occult canvas in blues and purples which is pitched in a key suggestive of cello.” Further, about the artist, the anonymous admirer says in an outmoded turn of phrase, “Miss Morlan does lovely things and should be seen oftener.” 

Morlan's second and perhaps more pivotal solo exhibition occurred in October 1933 as part of a series of 'one-man' shows of Indiana artists at Herron that year. 

Lucille Morehouse, always a critical friend of Dorothy Morlan, wrote an extensive column covering the artist's origins and history, the root of inception for her creative impulses, her observations about locale as related to the creative process, and her ultimate artistic aims. All this in addition to the critic's own thoughtful observations about the pictures on display.

The nearly half-page column appeared in the October 22, 1933 Indianapolis Star.

Morlan's art beginnings, as sourced from this article and other newspaper write-ups have appeared already in earlier parts of this Dorothy Morlan series, but there is much new information to be gleaned from the other sections of Morehouse's exhaustive column.

Morlan cites the nature of the artistic impulse when she explains,

“There are many sources capable of stirring the imagination of an artist who uses the material offered by nature to express his own moods and ideas – such as sounds, church bells, the whistle of a train in the far distance, wind in the trees, the rustle of snow against leaves. The fact the thing that stirs the artist to action may be so slight as to be almost indescribable, and yet call forth his greatest power – so that the life of the subjective artist might seem to be almost devoid of outward events and yet, to the artist himself, be full of interest and action.” 

Morlan alludes to the interplay of the external and internal worlds of artists when she says,  

“The old Dutch artists traveled scarcely at all – yet who has left a richer record of a life experience than Rembrandt? It would not have mattered in the least where he lived. The sources within him, his way of feeling and seeing things, would have resulted in masterpieces anywhere, any time.”

Her artistic aims are explained, in part, when Morlan says,

“Always I have wanted to express space, air, repose...depth, silence, solitude, a feeling of largeness, remoteness. Nature talks to me this way.”

The critic Lucile Morehouse observes about the pictures in general when she writes,

“Certainly in these large creative landscapes, so pregnant with the artist's thought and feeling, one can not but be convinced that Miss Morlan has realized her wish to interpret the solitudes of nature. Not many artists can paint on a canvas of such large dimensions as she uses habitually and cover the wide surface successfully.”

Morehouse attributes the feat to Morlan's mastery and prior practice of painting the large landscape on a small canvas. Indeed, an entire exhibit of such works was shown by Morlan in the frugal aftermath of the world war and covered in detail by her Star art column referenced earlier in this series.

About some individual pictures, Morehouse writes of Through the Trees at Hanover,

“The winding river takes on a pale blue luminous light from the reflected sky. The softly curving line of the river and distant hills is offset by the sturdiness of foreground trees whose trunks and bare branches are of reddish brown hue...the basic truths of form and color are not lacking, but there is no slavish holding to realism...nature lends itself only as a motif for more or less formal design in line an color.”

And about Marching Tree,

“Don't try to make thunder and lightning (as some have done) out of Marching Tree. For those phantom-like lines that cleave the air have nothing to do with storm...”

Morehouse provides perhaps an overly personal interpretation of the meaning of the picture, before she returns her observation to the picture itself, when she writes,

“Don't try to make a realistic landscape out of Marching Tree. It is a typically creative sort of composition. A thing of spirit, tied to earth my material paint and a canvas so that it can be seen by mortal eyes.” 

Morehouse experiences the painting's composition of colorful design, greens in the ground and gray in the sky, as musical color fields that inspire reaction and feeling more than any scene actually existing. The writer, with great descriptive detail, summarizes additional canvases in the show, including Hanover Hilltop, November Snow, Solitude and The Pool.

About Into the Sunset, a piece now, from my best guess, is in the permanent collection of the Irvington Historical Society, Morehouse writes,

“...(the painting is an example of)  the vigorous way (she) paints when she holds more closely to realism. Hedge rows, angling along sidewalk and back between many closely painted trees, whose branches are low and wide-spreading are partly covered with heavy snow...There is skillful painting of the later afternoon light that sifts through bare tree branches.” 

Some of the canvases from this solo show were also included by Dorothy Morlan in the 6th annual Irvington Artists show according to a November 21, 1933 Indianapolis News article.

And a piece not discussed prior, The Sentinels, was shown by Morlan as part of the 2nd annual 'downtown' exhibit on the eighth floor of L.S. Ayers & Company sponsored by the Junior League of Indianapolis. Of the painting, Lucille Morehouse writes in her December 10, 1933 Indianapolis Star column, “(The Sentinels is) a dark-toned landscape with beauty of mood."

Mark Diekhoff,  August 2025

Dorothy Morlan in the 1920s – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 3

Expressions in Blue – Dorothy Morlan in the 1920s 

Lucille Morehouse, in her Indianapolis Star art column on March 8, 1920, covering the current Indiana Artists exhibit at the Herron Institute, noted that the prize winning works that year were mostly smaller in size than in past years. The two main winners were both small watercolors; William Forsyth's Woods in Autumn and Francis F. Brown's A Cloudy Day.   Three artists were noted as Honorable Mentions including Dorothy Morlan for her small in size canvas, about 9 by 12 inches, Winter Evening. Morehouse notes the picture's small size, but large vision, depicting “...a wide stretch of blue-shadowed snowy field.” 

A lingering post war thrift and rationing hangover may explain, in part, the downsized art.

A Meeting of Kindred Neighbors.

A year and a half later, the current artistic inclinations of Morlan are described in a long July 10, 1921 Star column by Lucille Morehouse titled 'Studio of Local Artists Reveals Treasures – Work of Dorothy Morlan Shows Wealth of Unusual Talent.'

The art critic's fondness and respect for the artist is demonstrated by the lavish attention and poetic prose she used to open the article, which due to its beauty of description and stunning time-capsule effect is quoted in full, as follows:

“An Irvington studio, tucked away among the vines and shrubbery in the vicinity of Pleasant run, forms the workshop of an artist whose career has been one of serious study. Canvases large and canvases small bear evidence of the steps that have been taken, of the periods of change and development that have followed one another in logical order as advancement was made. From the time in girlhood days, with its usual dreams of books to be written, when there was a decision to take a few art lessons in order to make the decorative drawings that would illustrate the printed pages, until the present day, when big Indiana landscapes are being painted on little rectangular pieces of canvas, an art talent whose motive has been subjective, rather than objective, has been seeking to express the individuality of the artist while interpreting the beauty in nature. We are taught that all art is an attempt at self-expression. But we know that all art is not to the same degree stamped with the artist's individuality. 

It was one of those days when the thermometer was said to have registered 110 degrees on the street the middle of last week that I lifted unwilling feet over hot cement sidewalks a distance which, in usual weather, would have meant about a half mile walk, but which seemed immeasurable increased in the immense heat. A short stretch of cinder walk offered an alluring  turn from the glare of the pavement at Lowell avenue. A few steps brought me to number 6031, which marked the studio of Dorothy Morlan.  This two-roomed studio, in the yard, separate from the dwelling house, was built several years ago, but it so happened that this was my first visit to it.”

The article explains to the reader that despite Morlan's recent sparsity of exhibition in local shows, indeed it cites her decision to skip the upcoming Indiana Artists exhibition at Herron, she remained active and busy in her artistic creations, as attested by the many works, large and small, on the walls and in the corners of her studio. 

Her most recent 'period' of work are the smaller canvases along the line of Winter Evening discussed a year prior in The Star. The eight or ten such small pictures of the flat open fields surrounding Irvington, showcase Morlan's unique talent, as Lucille Morehouse describes, “...in the small pictures (Morlan's) representation of the big things in nature impresses with a feeling of vastness not always found in a landscape painting whose dimensions are several times larger.”

Morehouse contrasts the newer work with her earlier solo show some twelve or fourteen years prior, which included “...bright, joyous canvases painted at Hanover  – scenes along the Ohio River, interpretations of morning mists and the sparkle of sunlight on the water and the coming of springtime along wooded hillsides.”

Morehouse cites Dorothy Morlan as giving credit, in part, for her “strong feeling for the big things in nature” to the influence of the painters Edward W. Redfield and Walter Elmer Schofield, both of whom had works represented in the permanent collection of Herron Institute, and both of whom painted “big winter landscapes” with a “broad, vigorous brush.” 

Morehouse lauds Morlan for her determined, experimental approach despite the influence of those and other artists who she held in high esteem. “Be influenced, but do not imitate,” Morehouse proclaims, as a could-be Morlan mantra. 

Lucille Morehouse provides some final insider advise to her readers when she says about visiting an artist's studio as opposed to seeing the work hanging in a gallery or museum. “There is a sort of studio atmosphere, a feeling of intimacy and a charm of companionship with the artist that is wholly  lacking when one views the pictures of many artists in a large exhibition. Try it and see!”

Less Exhibits, More Honors – Morlan's 'December.'

Morlan's hiatus from exhibition continues over the next years. In late summer 1923, she is mentioned in Star coverage of the Indiana State Fair art exhibition, not as an exhibitor, but as one of the many no-shows. Perhaps at that period of time, the State Fair exhibit was just getting established as a serious venue for Indiana's best art and artists.

On January 5, 1924, on the front page of the 'photogravure' section of the Sunday Star, an interesting full-page pictorial, depicting an interesting pastiche of Indiana geography, culture, history and architecture, is presented in a piece tied together by its title, Four Corners of Indiana.

Photogravure was a popular etching and printing method at that time, which resulted in images with subtle gradations in tone and a rich velvety texture distinct from standard photographs of the period. 

Four Corners showed images of the farthest reaches of Indiana, northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast, along with two fine contemporary homes, a photo of the last surviving indigenous people of the Miami tribe, an aerial view of Wabash College and two Indiana artists, Dorothy Morlan and Otto Stark, on opposite sides of the page facing each other, standing at their easels. A map of the Indiana and "the heart of Hoosierdom," Monument Circle,  is shown at the center of the pictorial spread.

In her March 1, 1924 Star column, Lucille Morehouse covers the 17th Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron Institute. Her observations note the distinctions in the show from those of prior years, describing the work as generally smaller, the landscapes generally fewer – with more still lifes, portraits and figure pieces represented – and also an increase in craft works and sculpture.

For the column, Morehouse speaks generally of the landscape work, not noting the names of individual artists or titles, but her words on one picture seem to be  about a Dorothy Morlan picture. 

“Outstanding among the landscapes is a big snowy field,  with an evergreen or two, when early twilight turns the snow to violet-blue.”

Lucille Morehouse was likely describing the large Morlan canvas,  December,  that was exhibited in the Indiana Artists show, and a photo of which appeared on a pictorial page of The Indianapolis Star later that month on March 30.

The picture was an important one for Morlan, and Morehouse, as the critic again describes the piece when it appeared hanging in a prime spot, a “place of honor,”  in an October 1924 exhibit of five women artists at Pettis Gallery, on the fifth floor of the Pettis Dry Goods store in Indianapolis. 

Morehouse reports that the five woman had appeared, some together, some in groups or solo, at various earlier times in venues such as the Indiana Artists at Herron Institute, the Indiana Artists' Club and Woman's Department Club House.

Morehouse says about the five women generally, 

“There are neither insanities nor inanities in this exhibition of paintings...” and further, “ ...in both subject and treatment, the work would hold its own with a like number of pictures by a like number of men...”

In discussing the honored Morlan landscape, confirmed to be December later in her column, Morehouse writes, 

“The fact that the canvas measures 30x42 inches is not the only thing that makes it big. And the fact that the wide, snow-covered field stretches back and back, apparently for miles, is not the chief thing that makes the picture big. But it is the artist's interpretation of a big solemn mood that stamps the canvas as one of the most distinctive, to my way of thinking, that has been painted recently by any Indiana artist, man or woman.”

Morehouse continues, in part,

“There is a beauty in execution...There is a tenderness, a tranquility, moderating its austerity.”

The First Hoosier Salon, The Valley, and Deaths. 

In March 1925, the inaugural Hoosier Salon exhibit opened at the Marshall Field and Co. store in Chicago, Illinois. Dorothy Morlan was represented with a prize winning painting, A Frosty Morning,  which later traveled with other representative works and was displayed at the West Baden Springs Hotel in Indiana. 

Lucille Morehouse details the first Hoosier Salon, the mechanics of its inception and initial patronage, the prize winners and participants over two articles appearing in The Indianapolis Star on March 8 and March 15, 1925. She describes an unnamed Morlan canvas, presumably Frosty Morning, as “a big sober landscape.” The picture won the $50 Nolan prize. 

The Indianapolis Star was running a pictorial series in its paper 'Notable Paintings by Indiana Artists' in 1925. On September 20, No. XIV in the Series was The Valley by Dorothy Morlan. The reproduction image looks almost like a drawing rather than a painting, or perhaps a watercolor, as fine dark lines sketch in the curving flow of river and the roll of hills. There is an etched or hatched quality to the work, a sgraffito of paint marks such that, if oil was used, it appears paint was very sparingly applied, and perhaps in a subtractive manner removed with a palette knife.

Lucille Morehouse reports on the summer activity in the studio of Dorothy Morlan in an October 25, 1925, Star article.  She describes, 

“ (Morlan) defied the heat of summer as she sifted 'snow' to the canvas, working from sketches she had made last winter, but modifying them so that the completed picture will in no wise be a realistic view along Pleasant Run.”

The following year, on January 10, 1926, The Indianapolis Star posted a death notice for Dorothy Moran's father, age 75 years. 

Albert Morlan was husband to Martha, and father to Miss Dorothy, and  to sons Percy and Harold, all of Indianapolis, and to son Ralph of Nashville, Indiana. 

Albert Morlan died at home on Lowell Avenue in Irvington, and funeral services were private.

An August 1927 'In the World of Art' column by Lucille Morehouse, reports that Dorothy Morlan had spent the summer in California, after the death of her mother in April, to tend to an ailing aunt. Morlan's aunt succumbed to her illness and Morlan was set to return to Indiana that fall. She had suffered the death of father, then mother and finally aunt within a year and a half.

The 21st Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron is reviewed by Lucille Morehouse in the March 4, 1928 Indianapolis Star. She describes Morlan's painting Where the Blue Begins, which, from the sound of Morehouse's description,  may have been influenced by Morlan's many close personal losses over the prior months. Morehouse writes, 

“Dorothy Morlan displays the largest landscape canvas, a big sober composition of slow-sloping fields with patches of snow under sullen sky and with distant body of water.”

A Group of Her Own.

The inaugural Irvington Artists exhibit at the Carr Hall automobile salesroom on East Washington Street in Irvington took place from November through December 1928. The event was widely covered in the local press which reported over one thousand visitors to the exhibit. A half page pictorial spread was devoted to the Irvington Artists on November 25 in The Star. It included William Forsyth and daughter Constance Forsyth, Helene Hibben and Thomas Hibben, Frederick Polley, Clifton Wheeler and Dorothy Morlan. 

Simon P. Baus, Robert Craig and Hilah Wheeler were not included in the pictorial, but did exhibit in the show. 

Clifton Wheeler, Hilah Wheeler and Simon P. Baus were all reported to have sold work during the exhibition's run.    

Dorothy Morlan was represented by at least two works, including Ohio River Valley and Valley in Winter.

The Irvington Artists exhibit, sponsored by the Irvington Union of Clubs, was noted in Lucille Morehouse's 1928 'year in review' column that was printed in the January 2, 1929 Indianapolis Star.

And with that, another decade in the career of Dorothy Morlan comes to a close.

Later that fateful year, 1929, a stock market crash would wreak havoc on the economies of the world. The 1930s would bring the Great Depression and worse. The perseverance of Dorothy Morlan and her fellow artists through those turbulent years will follow in Part Four.

Mark Diekhoff,  August 2025