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
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