The Epic Dramas of Artist Elmer Taflinger – Act Two

Phantasm, Elmer E. Taflinger, pastel, 1928
offered as a prize in costume competition

Experience and Innocence.

That a struggle continued for Elmer Taflinger upon his return to Indianapolis in the 1920s is made evident by one of the earliest prizes his artwork earned upon his return.  Recall that Bridgman warned him to teach no more than a year at a time, to save room in his art life for pure creation. An admonishment to hold dear 'art for art's sake,' as opposed to other more mercantile pursuits. That teeter-totter between commission and creation, plan and serendipity, between Beelzebub and the Bible.

The March 9, 1926 Richmond Item newspaper announced the award winners at the 2nd Annual Hoosier Salon held at Marshall Field galleries in Chicago. Among the creators and winners was Wayman Adams and his masterpiece, the shows outstanding picture, The Art Jury. Also included was T. C. Steele and his beautiful The Hill Country – Brown County.

Elmer Taflinger was represented with the prize winning commission or study, Over Blackboard decoration for European History classroom.  Unfortunately, no description of the work is provided, but its title is as snooze-inducing as a lecture on the Reformation. 

During this time, Taflinger continued to pursue teaching as well. Beginning in 1927, he instructed night classes in figure drawing at the Circle Art Academy in Indianapolis, the teaching atelier of George and Gordon Mess. By 1929, he ended his association the brothers and their art school, as explained in a news article in The Star in June, 1929, although no reason was provided for the separation of ways.

Taf would soon set up his own school, teaching in his studio on the top floor of the Pierce Building, downtown, and then when he changed locations, at his 14th Street studio in the stable house of the Indianapolis Propylaeum.  

Meanwhile, art direction continued to call upon Taflinger's experience and attention as can be noted in in his contribution of decorative figurative pastels for the Indiana Artists' Club Annual Costume Ball at Herron Art Museum in April 1928. 

The first inklings in newsprint of Taflinger's somewhat manipulative and self-promoting inclinations begin to bubble to the surface of public awareness in the late 1920s as he approached the age of thirty. A tabloid persona of sturm und drang began to dominate his coverage in the papers, rather that the beauty or genius of his art.  

Whereas most other local artists would seem content to create art and enter exhibitions, and let the coverage, awards and sales fall where they may, Taflinger began to juggle his creative impulses and esoteric concerns in a very public way, with a  series of wobbly PR stunts, theatrically delivered by a cast of alter egos such as the faux innocent and the learned scribe. 

An example of Taflinger's coy provocation is demonstrated by the mini-firestorm of coverage generated by his attempt to enter nude artworks into the Indiana State Fair art competition in 1927.  An Indianapolis Star article in November recounts an ongoing saga of several months by then. A contest of wills between, on the one hand, an out-of-town juror, a gentleman artist from Chicago, finding the work meritorious, worthy of not only inclusion, but the grand prize. And on the other, the common sense of a local delegation of ladies, the state fair woman's board, upholding the moral decency of the fair-going public, and their children. 

The ladies' ban of the nudes would prevail, which opened the door for Taflinger to kick at a  hornet's nest of his own construction. A war, not on the battlefield of prudishness as Taflinger would have us believe, but on the grounds of a common sense modesty,  entirely justified and predictable for the venue and the time. He would wire a press release from New York, to keep stirring the pot, and to have the last word,

“Elmer E. Taflinger...had a canvas accepted for display in the winter exhibition of the National Academy of Design... New York.   

A telegram received last evening by Mr. Taflinger stated that his oil painting...Studio Interior...has been hung in the first gallery (of the exhibit).

Studio Interior is...an interior with nude figure, full length and about one-third life size.  Half sitting, half reclining, the slender form of a young woman gleams like a pearly-tinted  flower in a dark red calyx, as the round-backed seat on the which the figure is posed is draped with red velvet...

It is of interest to know that...(Studio Interior)...was entered at the state fair this fall and was so much admired by (a) judge (from) Chicago that he decided to give it the prize of $100 as outstanding picture...Acting in opposition to the judge's decision, the woman's board of the state fair...decided that the picture could not be hung because it was a painting of the nude.

...Taflinger...entered four nude subjects at the state fair, two oil paintings and two charcoal drawings, all of which were thrown out, much to the regret of the artist-judge from Chicago.” 

In an Indianapolis News article dated December 3, an unnamed writer reports Taflinger's Studio Interior and its inclusion in the current National Academy of Design show in New York, along with Indianapolis sculptor Myra R. Richards. The column contains a large photograph of Richard's slightly cubist, clearly modernist, portrait bust, titled Judge Napoleon Taylor. Again, no surprise, Hoosier modesty prevailed, an no photograph of Studio Interior is printed. 

A first impression of another trick up Taflinger's sleeve is rolled out in the same art column. His alter ego, as not only purist-pretending provocateur,  but as learned sage. Over time, it would also be a recurring trope, as we shall see.

The anonymous News writer dutifully reports to the Fine Arts page readers that,  

“At present Mr. Taflinger is carrying out researches in perspective begun during his trips to Europe.  He is convinced that the Greeks and Romans knew laws of perspective that have been lost, and that some of the early Italian masters had an inkling of the forgotten methods. His work for several years has been devoted to experimentation along original lines.”

Taflinger on the verge of turning common lead to elusive gold. If we buy into his words – hook, like and sinker – he's privy, or nearly so, to a long lost DaVinci code. But alas, the Bible says, a tree is known by its fruit. 

Art Milieu Multi-Tasking.

As the the 1920s would wind down, as the stock market would crash, Elmer Taflinger continued his multifaceted art career. 

That he continued to toil and perfect his touch at nude drawings is documented in Lucille Morehouse's remarks on his works as displayed in the 22nd Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron Museum.  Her column in The Indianapolis Star on March 17, 1929, observes,

“Elmer E. Taflinger is represented with two admirable studies in charcoal of the nude figure.  One is a female figure, reclining on a couch, the pose one of graceful relaxation. The other is a male figure, also in reclining posture but posed so that muscles are tense, while legs and arms are flexed,  so there are difficult problems of foreshortening, all of which have been skillfully solved by Mr. Taflinger.

If all painters of the figure had Mr. Taflinger's knowledge of anatomy and his skills as a draughtsman, I am guessing that there would not be so much resorting to distortion of the human figure under the plea of allying one's self with the modernistic school.” 

Taflinger was teaching drawing and painting out of his studio and presenting at least one public exhibition that September, Original Drawings by George B. Bridgman, as verified by a newspaper ad dated August 31, 1929. 

That Taflinger continued to make phone calls or whip out press releases to keep his name in the papers seems possible, when he was mentioned in passing in an Indianapolis Times front page bleed-leading snippet, 'Lives Periled When Storm Sweeps City – Scaffolding is Hurled from Circle Tower.'  A harrowing storm is reported to have blown through downtown Indianapolis on November 27, 1929,

“(A) storm...endangered hundreds of downtown pre-holiday shoppers...as it toppled a section of elevator shaft scaffolding from the new Circle Tower, under construction at Market street at Monument Circle...

One timber fell into the studio of Elmer Taflinger, on top of the Vinton-Pierce building east of the circle tower. Another shattered a plate glass window in a neighboring candy shop.”

During roughly the same period, Taflinger was art director for a local costume ball, as reported in the March 22, 1930 Indianapolis News, 

“ A gay Chinese setting will greet members of the Indiana Artists Club and others attending the seventh annual artists' ball to be given March 29 on the roof garden of the Hotel Severin.  The elaborate decorations planned by Elmer Taflinger, former theater art director, will call for almost 10,000 square feet of paper, which will be used to decorate the walls and ceiling of the roof garden and transform it into a Chinese ballroom.” 

 

Shame and Stigmata – The Thomas Hart Benton Affair.

Deciphering the Taflinger Code, a numerologist may expect the number 33 to reign significant as a clue. And so it was,  in the first month of 1933, on the ninth day (3 times 3), on a front page that announced in bold headline,  'McNutt to Become 33rd Governor Today,' that Elmer E. Taflinger would land himself, above the fold, on page one, section one, of The Indianapolis Star. 

He shared the honor with not only Indiana's new governor, but a swindling young banker from Rushville, who embezzled thousands from his employer and fled, only to be caught cross the state line in Kentucky. Also on the front page were the Chinese, having been bombed by the Japanese at their Jehol province. And below the fold, but still page one, a former alley cat, Big Boy, who bested all the other pedigree pussycats to win the blue ribbon at the 12th Annual Heart of America Cat Society show.

Taflinger's news, though, was not your run-of-the-mill political, crime, war or underdog reporting. It was more I the vein of man bites dog. 

as appearing in the Indianapolis Star, January 9, 1933

The prominent article in the center of of page one includes a photograph of Taf, splattered in paint, about to pounce at a banal-looking portrait canvas, locked-and-loaded paintbrush in his hand. The piece is sub-headed with an info-dump teaser, 'Prominent Local Artist Brands Awarding to New Yorker of State's World Fair Work as Disgrace to Hoosiers,' and reads, direct from a court petition filing penned by Elmer Taflinger, 

“Indiana artist is a term recognized as identifying Hoosiers of the brush and easel as nationally eminent in their profession, but in their own commonwealth of Indiana it amounts only to a stigma as far as state officials are concerned.”

The article goes on in further explanation,

“Elmer Taflinger, noted Indiana artist, makes this charge in an unusual petition which will be filed in the Marion Circuit court this morning. 

He asks that the court 'change the place of his nativity.'  In other words, he believes he can get further in his profession, at least in Indiana, if no one is able to prove that he was born here.

He offers in evidence the fact that Thomas Hart Benton of New York was given the contract by Richard Lieber, director of the state conversation department and head of the Indiana world's fair commission, to paint the murals at the Chicago fair depicting the history of this state.”

Taflinger goes on to argue that countless Indiana artists possess all the necessary and various talent needed to be awarded and to complete the world's fair project in an exemplary manner. He complains that the commission's decision was not an open process, and the result is similar to when local artists were shut out of the running for the World War Memorial plaza in Indianapolis and the George Rogers Clark memorial in Vincennes. Both those projects lacked Hoosier artist participation, which drew Taflinger's observation that “the only thing provided by Indiana was the dirt.”  

A couple of weeks later, Thomas Hart Benton offers a good-humored reply, from the busy workshop of his makeshift mural studio at Germania Hall on Delaware Street. The front page of the second section of the Indianapolis Times, January 25, 1933, begs in its headline 'Let's Have an Artists' Truce.' In the pictorial article with several photos of the artist and his preparatory work, a sub-headline declares 'Indiana's World Fair Muralist Prefers Work to War.'

Thomas Hart Benton, as appearing in The Indianapolis Times, January 25, 1933

The article by Times writer Arch Steinel plays up the controversy instigated by Taflinger's lawsuit stunt, and reports in part as follows,

“Benton waved the olive branch today at other Indiana artists. They have criticised his appointment by the department of conversation to the post of mural decorator for the Indiana building at the Chicago world's fair. 

...Benton tried to put all of the green apples of envy back into the barrel, offering to use students of his chief critic, Elmer E. Taflinger, to aid him in squaring up and doing preliminary work on his murals. Sure, I'm going to use some of Taft's pupils. Why not? He's a good fellow, even if he does want to change his birthplace through a court suit just because I was awarded the job. He can come down and help me himself if he wants to.”

Steinel writes about Benton's worries about the hubbub surrounding his assignment,

“His main worry is not the envy or the criticism clouding the state over his appointment, but the time he's got to do it in.”

Other local critics and artists joined Taflinger in complaining in the papers about Thomas Hart Benton, the carpet-bagging, out-of-town expert, who would have the last laugh as the masterpiece of his monumental mural-making would make him a household name and take the world by storm. 

We shall see in Part Three of this series, that like Thomas Hart Benton, Taflinger would create his own mural one day, and plan another one grander in scheme, but left undone.  

Finally, though, near the end of his life, he would tirelessly pursue a three-dimensional mural of sorts – a grand assemblage of earth art, found object and landscape. A massive and towering final work. With the mathematical precision  of its symmetry and the romantic splendor of its titans in stone, we see a culmination of Taflinger's artistic impulses resolved finally, and at rest.   

Both his stigma and his badge of honor – his Ruins at Holliday Park.

Mark Diekhoff, October 2025

The Epic Dramas of Artist Elmer Taflinger – Act One

Elmer E. Taflinger at his Ruins at Holliday Park, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1976

Overture  –  The Riddle of Elmer Taflinger.

It's not often that an artist makes the front pages of the newspaper. Perhaps the front page of the Living section, or Arts and Entertainment or even the Sunday Magazine insert, but not the front page of a city daily paper.

The Indianapolis artist, Elmer E. Taflinger, was to accomplish this rare feat, not once but twice, mirrored at both ends of his long career, once above the fold, and once below – a comedy at the beginning, a tragedy at the end. 

In between the bookends of his page one coverage, Taflinger developed a persona as a rollicking genius and an outspoken provocateur, acting the part in the local art cosmos of know-it-all, of spoilsport, of jester.  Even while speaking truth to power, and earning, eventually, the title of grand old man of arts, there was a bit of P.T. Barnum to his guru.  His showy burlesque, his public apotheosis, seemingly his every word, a proclamation, or a riddle. In his later years Taflinger was covered by the press in a series of articles, snippets and lengthy spreads, crossing the genres of straight news, society reporting, art world and human interest. 

A life story told in newsprint, with the symbolic depth of a holy book or fairy tale, recited in a series of satyr plays  (to belabor the Greek drama metaphor),  of a man who had seen it all, and lived most of it too. The many exploits of Elmer Taflinger, starring Taf or Taffy, depending on the episode.

E.T. was often photographed, in character, wielding a cane or umbrella like a scepter, the magic power of pointing and prodding. With ever-present French beret askew upon his head, a bundle of out-of-this-world ideas wrapped in a bulky Columbo overcoat.  His omnipresent image, accompanied by his omnivorous quotes –  his dialog proclaiming secret revolutions and revelations to come.  He spins a lop-sided yarn – his gravitas teeters with mischief.  He plays the king's fool – teasing, mocking, trolling and throwing shade.  

Of his crowning glory, Taflinger says in old age, not his Ruins, his concept made real in the 1970s, but his Green Goddess, his painting perfected, decades before. Which begs the not so serious, yet mysterious questions, perhaps befitting a lengthy Sunday magazine newspaper pictorial; which came first, the salad dressing or Taflinger's self-important painting? And what became of either, in the end? 

Both may have been inspired by The Green Goddess, a popular stage play (and later silent movie), in the early 1920s. The delightful condiment was conceived and born at San Francisco's Palace Hotel in 1924 in honor of the play's starring actor, George Arliss. It gained nationwide popularity and was eventually sold coast to coast on grocery shelves. When Kraft bought Seven Seas in 1987, it was lost in the merger, disappeared, and has been largely forgotten. 

And what of Taflinger's painting of the same name, his Green Goddess? He mentions its preeminence in his ouervre in a late interview in 1970. At that time the painting was still in his possession, in a place of honor, in his spacious studio in the carriage house on the Indianapolis Propylaeum grounds.  Now, it is mentioned obliquely in the artist's personal papers, housed in the archive rooms of the Smithsonian Institute. Studies for the elusive masterpiece are cataloged, locked away and gathering dust, according to the museum's index. But his prized picture, the canvas itself?  Whereabouts unknown. Lost in a black hole of phased-out mid-century flavors. 

In late life, Taf spoke of a newfound obsession – writing – his love of sentences and words. He spoke  of an autobiography he was completing to contain his findings and his methods. But his alchemic recipe book remained unpublished. He took those secrets to his grave. 

To unravel his mystery,  maybe, is to look at the life of Elmer Taflinger, his grand tableau of ruins. The haphazard and often comical clues of his paper trail. The actor in a mirror – as reflected in the papers.  His stage, both regal and wrecked.  His performance, idiosyncratic yet always in-character. His fabled tale, an epic, Quixotic, mumbo jumbo of a quest, that spanned the globe.  From Indiana to Florence, Italy.  New York to Mexico. Minneapolis to, well, back to Indiana for the final act.

His back home again deus ex machina, curtain call, and final bow. His three colossi. The enduring epitaph of his philosophy in stone at Holliday Park. 

Curiosity of Beelzebub, Take One.

Elmer Edward Taflinger was born in Indianapolis in 1891. He describes his early years in several lengthy newspaper articles beginning in 1970 when he was 79 years old.

Taflinger would wax on endlessly, well not poetic,  more like chaotic, first with Lloyd B. Walton in a flashy pictorial article in the Sunday magazine supplement to The Indianapolis Star titled “Tradition Arts Advocate” on August 3, 1970. He would elaborate, obfuscate and simply repeat himself in additional articles over the next few years.  Marion Garmel's Indianapolis News two-pager “A Man of All Arts” on December 18, 1974. And then Thomas E. Ketchum's “...Long Illustrious Career,” an Indianapolis Star piece dated April 4, 1976, that included the rare, at the time, color photo in the paper, and the artist's large fanciful autograph as banner to the column. And finally Lloyd B. Walton, taking a second bite of the Taflinger, in a bizarre and confusing magazine spread called “Solving the Mystery of the Murat” in the October 27, 1979 Sunday Star.

Taflinger tells us, as a boy, he survived innumerable close calls to death, including two near drownings and an attack from a scythe-wielding gypsy. Of the water mishaps he explained to Thomas Ketchum, succinctly, as if obvious to all, “once I followed a duck down and once I slipped on a sewer pipe.” 

One will come to recognize Taflinger's signature verbal sleight-of-hand of his story telling.  Look here, sensational, the rabbit from the hat. All the while, something crucial, not noticed, out of focus, left unsaid. A wink or a nod that suggests maybe it's all bullshit.  

About the gypsy-slashing, in the same Ketchum article, Taflinger tells a bloody tale sure to leave readers scratching their heads, and maybe clutching their ankles, 

“My mother scolded me one day when I was four for trampling her flower garden. A few days later I saw a gypsy cutting flowers at a neighbor's house and I started cussing him out because I knew he wasn't supposed to do that.”

Elmer in his own words – a quick-learner at the blame game – a busybody – a dirty-mouthed four-year-old – blaming the down-the-street hired help.

“He nearly cut my ankle off with a scythe, then I almost lost it to gangrene, and I had to learn to walk all over again.”   

Ahhh the magic of Taflinger's tongue...losing his foot twice and a divine miracle in the span of one  sentence. 

It's no wonder that such an excitable boy would find himself in trouble come around Christmas time, as he recalled in a December 25, 1975 column called 'Thoughts of Christmas Past' in The Indianapolis Star.  Taflinger remembers his Christmas morning from 81 years prior, again in that magic fourth year of life,

“They (his parents, Santa Claus, whoever) removed every piece of furniture from the parlor except the stove, and in the middle of the room they left a bundle of switches. Back then, you had to accumulate a lot of good deeds or you wouldn't get anything you wanted for Christmas and that year I got good too late.”

About his first forays into art, Taflinger tells the same basic story over and over among the various articles.

His family owned a beautiful Bible, an 18 pound marvel, full of illustrations by Gustav Dore. 

As a child, he would lay flat on the floor on his stomach and pore over the amazing images. He's quoted in the Ketchum story, about the pictures he'd see at school and the pictures in the family Bible,

“I didn't like the pictures they had at school. I didn't understand a lot of the Bible pictures. Some of them even scared me, but they intrigued me. I'd lie on the floor with my pet cat Beelzebub curled up next to me and stare at them. That Bible had everything but pink lemonade.”

Beelzebub and pink lemonade.  Ol' Taf strikes again.

He learned to think in pictures, as a result of that Bible.  But where did he learn to talk in riddles? 

He had an eighth-grade teacher, Katherine McLaughlin. She recognized his talent and boosted his interest in art. 'His downfall,' he said, about either McLaughlin or art.  

About Mclaughlin, Taflinger recalls in the Ketchum piece,

“I won (an) art contest because my teacher was good-looking. The prettier my teacher, the better my grades.”

Miss McLaughlin suggested Otto Stark's art class at Manual High School. Once enrolled, Mr. Stark  also noticed young Elmer's talent and dissuaded the boy's planned math studies at Purdue with the strong suggestion that he attend the Art Students League in New York. The young Taflinger took Stark's advice, as Marion Garmel writes in the fore-mentioned column,

“(Taf)...boarded a train at Union Station with his mother's fried chicken in a George J. Marott shoe box and carried the chicken uneaten all the way to New York. He was 16 ½ years old.” 

The moral of our hero's early story – a clever boy does not live on chicken alone.

Elmer Taflinger at 21 years old

Show Biz Years, Brush with the Greats.

Elmer Taflinger's first taste of the theater business happened while he was still a boy studying drawing in high school and delivering papers for the Indianapolis News. A young man of many interests, he was 'enthralled' with the theater, as he is quoted in The Star's Ketchum interview in 1976.  Taf took on a second job as a stage hand at English's Opera House on the Circle in Indianapolis, and was paid 50 cents a show. 

By 1910, when the newly constructed Murat Theatre in Indianapolis opened and presented its first show, Havana, on February 28, he was 18 years old, and employed there as a prop assistant.

Taflinger was assigned the odd job of running an errand for the play's star, James T. Powers, after the comedian appeared pale and hung-over after the show's first matinee, and needed a hot meal shuttled over from a nearby restaurant. The episode would eventually take on mythic proportions as a mystery in Taf's mind, that he would mull over and finally solve some seventy years later. 

Taf's Holy Grail was that the pale hang-over was a result of the beginning of what would evolve into a several decade's long series of practical jokes, back and forth, between James Powers and Booth Tarkington, as revealed in Powers' memoir. Taf had stumbled upon the book in the library as an old man. 

Taflinger declares his enlightenment regarding the affair over several pages of a Sunday magazine spread in The Indianapolis Star authored by Lloyd B. Walton. Frankly, it comes across as 'much ado...,' at worst, or 'you had to be there,' at best.

On November 10,1912, in a short news notice in The Indianapolis Star,  Elmer Taflinger is shown in a photograph. He appears handsome and emotionless above the news about his studies in New York,

“Elmer Taflinger, 21 years old...was one of the winners in the students' art exhibit held in the Wanamaker galleries in Philadelphia last week. Mr. Taflinger was reared in Indianapolis and received his first instruction in drawing under Otto Stark, drawing instructor at Manual Training High School. He is entering on his second year in the Students' Art League in New York, preparing as an illustrator. His work, Pen Se, which won in the Eastern exhibit, was the subject of much comment among the critics.”    

Rekindling his employment in show business, in New York City, Taflinger's burgeoning career in theater art direction is detailed by Marion Garmel in her December 18, 1974 column in The News,

“For more than six years Taf studied at the Art Students League and maintained a succession of studios that became home to every Indiana artist visiting New York City . Then in 1914 he fell into a job as Belasco's art director...”

David Belasco had a popular theater in New York in his name, Belasco Theater. He is remembered for the innovative lighting effects of his productions.

“Taflinger designed costumes and sets for Belasco, scouted plays, collected props...even designed some of the elaborate effects....”

For eight years, without a vacation, Taflinger worked for Belasco. He fled to Europe for a much needed  and overdue escape from the grind. He would eventually return to New York, not to his job at Belasco, but for continuing studies at the Art Students League, where he would meet George Bridgman. 

Given the direction of Taflinger's subsequent painting and drawing, Bridgman's influence on him seems to have been immense. 

About Bridgman, Garmel quotes Taflinger, 

“When Bridgman had taught me all he could he said, okay, I was ready to go out and teach but I shouldn't teach more than one year at a time if I wanted to stay a producing artist.”  

It appears, we shall see, in Act Two, that this was advice Taf chose to ignore.

Taflinger as an art director, c. 1930

Mark Diekhoff, September 2025