 |
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
