Art Collection of Irvington Historical Society

Self Portrait by William F. Kaeser

Exhibit of Artworks from the Irvington Historical Society Collection

Currently at the Bona Thompson Center, is the exhibit An Artistic Legacy: Selections from the Irvington Historical Society Collection.  The show presents a selection of artworks from its permanent collection or on loan. 

The show coincides with the concurrent exhibit The Lost Photographs of Osbert Sumner, which continues at the same location.

Works include historic examples by members of the Irvington Group which was active from 1928 through 1937, and noteworthy pieces by more recent and contemporary artists, most with strong ties to Irvington.

Installation view detail from An Artistic Legacy show,
including Dorothy Morlan's Grey Landscape, far left

A wonderful Dorothy Morlan painting, of what may be a bend of the Ohio River, shows a bluff above a couple of cottage roofs, covered in snow, looking down over a vast river valley. The picture, Grey Landscape in this hanging, is called In the Valley (Harmony in Gray), 1933, in the book Skirting the Issue by Newton and Weiss. It is indeed musical in its interplay of varying shades of blue and gray, from very light in the skies and on the water, to more medium gray in the distant river banks, and finally a turquoise in the foreground that hosts a few thin trees that cling to a few leaves on the uppermost tips of their branches. The artist was painting near the Ohio in this period, as her Through the Trees Near Hanover appeared in the 36th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at the Richmond (IN) Art Museum in 1934.

There are two portraits of Irvington Group painter William Kaeser. One is his own Self Portrait, c. 1960, showing him at middle age, graying hair, smoking a pipe wearing a gray cardigan sweater. The canvas is brightened and its mood enlivened by the bright orange shirt he wears, and the way it plays off the small painting's teal background. Most known for his early social realistic landscapes and circus motifs, the portrait displays his sure and fluid handling of paint, where his transitions from light to shade appear skillfully executed by his touch.

Portrait of William Kaeser by Cecil Head

The second Portrait of William Kaeser, c. 1940. is by Cecil Head. Although Head did not exhibit in the Irvington Group shows, the Whiteland artist had a long association with Kaeser. They shared studio space, along with Indianapolis artist Floyd Hopper, in downtown Indianapolis on Market Street in their early days in the 1930s, and continued to exhibit together in their final years some forty years later, in a group they called The Five. 

Head's portrait shows Kaeser nearly life-size, as a young artist smoking a pipe. The play of light and shadow seems the primary study of the painting, with Kaeser's white shirt collar, the side of his neck and face and the glint off the stem of the pipe catching the brightest attention of the artist's brush. Kaeser's face, turned away, is lost in the shadow of the dark surrounding background. The portrait is similar to a self portrait by Head, and a portrait of he did of Hopper, from the same period, both exhibited decades later at the Southside Art League.

Sycamores on West Farm by Frederick Polley

Another Irvington Group artist, Frederick Polley, is well represented in the show, with three works of three varying media; painting, etching and drawing. The artist revealed his own art origins in a 1920s newspaper article that was profusely illustrated with many of his etchings. Working as a telegraph operator in a small Illinois town, he observed an artist, new to town, sketching various buildings for a feature in the newspaper. He was inspired to try his hand at sketching and found that he had talent for drawing buildings. It was a discovery and a passion that would lead to his own career in future years, when he provided etchings and drawings to be published in the Indianapolis Sunday Star across from the editorial page, for years.

In this exhibit, his colorful oil painting, Sycamores on West Farm, is first to capture one's attention with its color. The autumn scene is of a rolling slope of foreground, so often seen with him, and in this picture, a retreating row of sycamores. The gleaming white bark is bright in sunshine, amid an otherwise warm study of the fading colors as summer turns to winter. Tan and beige ground, some final yellow leaves, brown shadows and dark orange treelines in the hazy gray distance.

Polley's etching, Getting Out in the Country, c. 1927, was one his works that appeared in the Sunday Star.  There is a poetry to his composition of a towering, almost foreboding, tree on one side, mirrored by its diminutive twin on the other, in the deep, receding perspective. Between the two, the tiny hamlet of a farm –  house, barn, shade tree and split rail fence –  that huddles beneath the open expanse of open sky.  The etching portrays the same rolling topography that is familiar in many Polleys, with the massive foreground tree atop a grassy rise that plunges the eye toward the more distant and detailed narrative of the homestead at the center the piece. 

 

The Ice House, Irvington by William Lawson

A current view of Irvington, by a current resident artist, is seen in the oil painting The Ice House, Irvington, 2019, by William Lawson.  Born in Indianapolis, he studied at Herron, and currently maintains a studio on an upper floor of the historic drug store building at the intersection of Bonna and Audubon. Lawson has been painting in Irvington since his return to Indiana in 2018 after living and painting in Seattle, Washington for a number of years.

Lawson paints his Ice House, not from Ritter Avenue facing the street, but from the other side, along the railroad tracks behind the building. He often finds points of interest off the beaten track as his many paintings of the city's alleyways attest.  Views aside railroad tracks are also recur in works by this artist over the years. The light of early spring is captured as it shines on the simple, harmonious color of the scene.  The red block tower contrasts with the emerging grass. The precise stiffness of the telephone poles and roof-lines is softened by the thin billow of clouds, the fuzzy treeline in the distance and the dusty gravel along the tracks.  An old tire and other litter are not unsightly, but noteworthy to his brush. The railroad tracks do not escape, but run through. They seem to summon somewhere. Either direction, come or go, something else to see.

North Arlington Avenue at Pleasant Run by Rachel May Blount Conner

Perhaps the oldest painting of the neighborhood in the collection is Rachel May Blount Conner's North Arlington Avenue Bridge at Pleasant Run, 1885. The rustic scene, painted in a self-taught folk art style, may first appear alien to any current views at that location.  But walks along the creek in the area of Pleasant Run Golf Course do show the similar details of exposed tree roots along the washed away creek-side and eroded walls on steep inclines beside the water. The open green surrounded by trees like in her painting still exist in the southern edge of the golf course today.  The main interest in the painting is its capture of the rudimentary bridge and its stone block abutments at either end that traversed the creek at that time.

The Bona Thompson Center by Ginny Taylor Rosner

The Bona Thompson Center, 2007, a gum bichromate photograph on Lanaquarelle paper by Ginny Taylor Rosner was part of a series of works created of Irvington landmarks for the former Legends Restaurant. The work, abstracted by its extreme close up presentation, shows vines growing up the side of the building and is a study in cream yellow and green.  

Robert Selby's 1929, The Forsyth's Backyard is wildly painted with expressive slashing strokes. The picture captures the spring season with pink blossoming trees and bright new leaves. Selby exhibited with the Irvington Group, and was son-in-law to William Forsyth and brother-in-law to Constance Forsyth, both of whom are also represented in this show. The Backyard is of the Forsyth home at the corner of Washington Street and Emerson Avenue, which is the location of a gas station today.

The exhibit also contains work by three other Irvington Group members, all watercolor landscapes. Clifton Wheeler's Hillside with Cabin, Hilah Drake Wheeler's Devil's Gultch – Estes Park,  and Charles George Yeager's Untitled view of a village beside a lake surrounded by rocky hills.

Benton House by Kathleen Biale

The exhibited collection also includes works by Harry Davis, John Wesley Hardrick, Florence Bartley Smithburn, Patte Owings, James Lynch, E. Roger Frey, Kathleen Biale, Phyllis Zimmerman, and Carl Zimmerman. and continues through the end of the year.  

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

Review of 'Stories of the Salon' Companion Exhibit to the 100th Annual Hoosier Art Salon

Booth Tarkington Portrait  by Wayman Adams? from Stories of the Salon

A Thousand Words on Stories of the Salon. 

Running at the same time and in an adjacent room to the 100th Annual Hoosier Art Salon, The Indiana State Museum presents Stories of the Salon from August 24 through October 20, 2024.

From several impressive, French Salon-scale paintings by Hoosier Group artists such as T.C. Steele, Wayman Adams and William Forsyth, who exhibited in the early years of the annual exhibit when it was still held in Chicago, to recent scenes and visions by this century's artists, the companion show presents a visual narrative of the evolution and variety of many of Indiana's great artworks and artists.

Deliberate Men and Their Noble Vocation.

A massive, even monumental, floral still life by William Forsyth encapsulates the dark, severe and Victorian tastes of the art buying public around the first quarter of last century. It's easy to imagine the painting looming aside a dark dining room table amid thick florid drapery, intricate and ornate carpets and wallpapers, clusters of  bric-a-brac, and the dim glimmer of china and crystal. Lost in an enveloping clutter, the painting itself and its subject floral, vestiges of color and reflection, overwhelmed by a dark palette of background suffocation. 

Brighter, and less time-trapped, but of an equally monumental scale is The Hill Country by T.C. Steele from the 2nd Annual Salon, 1926. A close inspection reveals Steele's use of the entire color wheel spectrum from yellow to violet in the sky, red ochre to green in the pleasing roll of Hoosier hills, orange in the fore to blue in the aft of his stately composition. Steele's abundant and joyful hues are both delirious and delicious, attributes befitting his impressionist ways. 

The famous Art Jury by Wayman Adams, is a near life-size, multi-portrait of huddled, standing men and is included as well. It was also shown in the 2nd Hoosier Salon. In the magnificent picture, he presents the history of his subject in a neighborly way like a Normal Rockwell front porch conversation of sideways glances and under the breath gossips. You sense a dynamism of mischief and competition among the men he portrayed, the titans of Indiana art at the time, as they choose the winners from the others in their art show deliberations.

Pioneer Women of the Morris Scene.

Three artists who all once practiced their craft as pioneers within the confines of the spacious Morris Building artists' enclave on South Meridian Street (later called the Faris Building) can be seen within several feet of each other at the exhibit. Sky Rider, by Lois Main Templeton was in the 67th Salon in 1991. The painting is discernible from her later work in the '90s, in that it is smaller, more buoyantly colorful, and is less purely abstract. It does possess her signature touch of gesture and action, and her bold use of line. The yellowish block in the golden triangle area of the work would become a predominant color in years to come.  

The Leaders by Ellie Siskind from the 1986 Salon, presents the namesake subjects as comic book grim reapers. The simplicity of the overall imagery, the candy-wrap colors and the five figures' deathheads are reminiscent of Mexican Day of the Dead sculpture. Perhaps world leaders they are, as the sole female among them sports a blouse that seems like a nod to Margaret Thatcher, one of the others is dressed in a military outfit and cap that recalls Saddam Hussein, and either of a couple of other wrinkly necks could easily be Ronald Reagan under a mask. Somehow this painting survives its own wiffs of propaganda, as we whistle by its graveyard, maybe due to the allure of the lurid hues and the playfulness of its shock.

The final of the three, is a  sculpture Fragile Shards / PTSD by Clare Hollett from the 99th Salon in 2023.  The work's title alludes to mental health and its stark color contrasts of black porcelain base and white ceramic shards present a bipolar unease of their own. The shards are irregular facets repelled from the core, not ordered and unfolding like blossoms, but adverse like magnetic repulsion and entropic like explosion or flame. Or appearing actually, like a box of Kleenex, sneezed at from within.

The Capture of Mid-Century Escapism.

On another section of wall are three works which hang well together. All offer mid-century views of one type or another. Harley W. Rhodehamell III, by Marie Goth, was created and shown in 1964 at the 40th Hoosier Salon. The delightful child's portrait shows a polite young cowboy, sitting up straight, attentive, hands crossed in his lap and dressed for a gunfight if given permission. He wears a getup of suede riding pants and vest, baby blue stetson, and pink button-down shirt peaking from a dark gray longsleeve v-neck like a rakish bandanna around his neck. His trusty cap-gun hangs by the ready, its belt and holster slung over the back of chair at his side. With the passage of time, the artwork operates on dual levels. The painting itself is impeccable, the relaxed handling perfect for the portrait of child.  But looking at its innocence with the jaded focus of modern eyes now raises questions. At what cost, all this wish-fulfilled excess of the TV age generation? And how on earth did it come to pass that the endearing picture of this boy escaped from the family's collection? 

The Barber's Chair by William Burton Lawson was included in the 2007 exhibition. The painting appears a time capsule the artist stumbled upon. A composition, through storefront plate-glass, that is worth more than a passing glance. A tan leather barber's chair at the center, rubbed shiny on its edges from wear. It has a massive chrome footrest, that, like the grill on a '50s Buick, seems a menacing grin or grimace. It's not really a stretch to say that the chair is endowed with an air of personage. It holds court with a surrounding overflow of interesting sidekicks and characters. Barstools from the Happy Days with foot rings for the tired feet of jazzy drinkers, a rocket age pedestal ashtray, linoleum floor and enamel cabinetry from a color-blind era in yellow and brown. Some Polaroids and a massive taxidermied fish on the gray paneled back wall.  A leaning broom, a Fedora hat. The carefully painted items are endless and intrinsic. A familiar red gumball machine, but empty.  The ashtray, the chairs, a trash can, all empty. A modern cheap plastic fan, its blades stopped.  Is that a reflection in the ornate mirror behind the barber's chair...? Maybe not. But a few clumps of hair on the floor hint at the quiet humanity of it all. The artist knows a composition and color scheme when he sees them. And in this time-trapped tableau, his meticulous hand preserves all of the colorful details for those who didn't take time to notice in real time. 

In an entry from 2001, Angel Mercado presents a sunsoaked fishing cottage that is reminiscent of the the East Coast lights of Edward Hopper. But only in the sunshine they share. Hopper was a post-war existentialist despite the occasional glow, but his early colorful row house pictures have the feeling you feel in Mercado's picture. We seek isolation as a tonic for the stress of city life. And Mercado's scene is splendid in that way. Pure sunlight and cool shadow in a harmony of mutual compliment. Primary color fields of blue sky, red roof and yellow grass are equally as melodious in their equitable distribution over the picture plane. The verve of the paintbrush, dashes out a row boat with minimal strain, a couple of blocks of black shadow, and a sweeping curve of white. The glee of existentialism, hold my beer.  

The Mysterious Amberson Age.

Booth Tarkington's coming-of-age novel Seventeen preserves an Indiana long gone, but contemporary to the times that spawned the first Hoosier Art Salon, one hundred years ago.   Before all the widespread store bought snacks, there was bread with butter and sprinkled sugar. Before there were several cars in every driveway, there were trolleys that linked far flung places like Irvington to the city, and at a conversational, leisurely pace. 

A magnificent seated Portrait of Booth Tarkington is included in the show. It presents the imposing man with trademark leather gloves and cigarette. Unfortunately, I did not note the artist or the year during my visit to the show. An online search revealed a photograph in the W. H. Bass Photo Collection with a similar pose. Different Tarkington portraits are in the collections of Smithsonian and Newfields. The bravura handling of the piece in the Stories of the Salon show is in the manner of  William Merritt Chase or Robert Henri, so perhaps it was  Wayman Adams, but he's already represented in the aforementioned Art Jury. But he did present a Tarkington portrait in the first Hoosier Salon in 1925. So perhaps it's an Adams, or a student of Adams or of William Forsyth, who also painting with a similar skill and abandon. Simon Paul Baus comes to mind, but perhaps his brush is looser yet.

In the gilded heyday of Hollywood, as Tarkington's Ambersons brightened cinema screens, Cecil Head was painting a meek and sober lamplight on a depression streetscape in our city. Street Corner at Midnight was exhibited in the 1942 Salon. A red brick corner store or bar, second floor apartments, sidewalks empty, all but rolled up. One parked automobile blends into the shadows of everything outside the lamp's midnight glow. The darkest shadows reserved for what lies beyond windows and door.

 

Mark Diekhoff,  June 21, 2025

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

A Cecil Head Scrapbook

“If there is one thing I'm good at, it's keeping a scrapbook.”  Cecil F. Head , April 1988

AI image by Gemini for illustrative purposes only

Cecil Head Looks Back.

One imagines the first leaves of Spring pushing the fading show of fluttering blossoms,  pink on the redbud, white on the dogwood. And either a clear blue sky or a grayer wind─your choice, your imagination. And  the weather being so fickle in April Indiana.

You might not have to imagine at all, but just open your eyes and see... 

A plain little house, modest but sturdy, and well kept,  just off a rural crossroads. It's a part of town clear near the outskirts, almost country, but then, oh clock,  sparsely industrial with gravel dust and the sound of big wood chopping, until finally now, engulfed in the commercial noise and glut of southside suburban sprawl. It's a moving picture, a changing scene, on the edge of every city, but this one Whiteland, Indiana, and this humble little place the home of artist Cecil Head. 

Cecil Head, in his early eighties, sat for an interview, with his local paper in April of 1988. One imagines, in that house. 

Michael Aldrich's Daily Journal article “Whiteland painter speaks out on art” appeared in the Franklin, Indiana paper on  April 27, 1988. He spoke to Head

about the exhibition of two of his paintings in the 20th Joslyn Biennial, at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska from April 2 through May 15, 1988. The paintings, 'A Real Bee on Sunflower' and 'Sweet Indiana Corn' both depicted the artist's Indiana scene, perhaps right outside his door.

Head explained that on the Sunflower picture, which he was painting away at in his studio, a bee flew in, buzzing around. The bee paid the ultimate price for being too attracted to the spiraling disc flowers of Head's huge sunflower bloom and was caught by the artist and stuck right on the wet paint, then and there.

Cecil Head  A Real Bee on Sunflower

By there, I mean the location of Head's art journey, most all in central Indiana, from birth in Lebanon, to art school in Indianapolis and then home and gallery association in Whiteland and Greenwood in Johnson County. By then, Head had been for sixty years making art, although a little off and on, as he was to explain, looking back, and looking up large from a large black-bound album, his artist scrapbook. 

The flow of art preserved as brittle columns of newsprint,  photos, awards and exhibitions, clipped and pasted like specimens in a way, like the bee to the sunflower. The oldest entries taking on the yellow varnish of the patina of passing time. A fresher new sadness followed by a reawakened art, and a philanthropy, and the inevitable death of art friends in the bright, white latest pages. 

The artist's fingers, tracing his path through the pages of the book, the arc of his arrow of time, grounded so near his Indiana scene, yet also once so near to the sun.

A Tall and Dark Young Man.

Page one of Head's scrapbook is a large photograph, an 8 x 10, showing a John Herron classroom with five students and an instructor, among easels.

The identities and the date are not noted on the Bass Company photo of four men and two women, and five visible artworks (three of which share the same subject of a standing uniformed man, either military or police, speaking to a group of women  in a kitchen-like setting.)

John Herron Art School ca. 1929

A tall young man, impeccably dressed in suit and tie with a thick shock of Clark Gable hair, stands in profile far to the side of the other students and their instructor. The dark stranger is leaning  back on his heals, holding paint brushes before a painting, listening on. The composition of the photograph and its grouping of figures mirrors the composition of the artworks in their midst.

The scrapbook was his own, with no need to annotate for himself. His memories could fill in the gaps. But as he is gone some many years ago, the scrapbook contains mysterious to be unraveled or conclusions to be inferred.

A Depression Era Golden Age.

Likely in his own handwriting, page two of the scrapbook is Head's curriculum vitae.

He writes that he studied art at the John Herron Art School.

He lists a number of his important awards and exhibitions from what looks to be his most productive and successful period, 1933 through 1941.

In 1933, Lucille E. Morehouse in her Indianapolis Star column 'In the World of Art', discusses Cecil Head's still life winner of the J. I. Holcomb Prize at the 26th Annual 'Indiana Artists' exhibit at the John Herron Institute of Art.

Cecil Head, Holcomb Prize Winner 1933

“While there is nothing especially original or unusual in the objects selected for this composition...” referring to the pots and jars and vegetables depicted in the painting,  “...the work has that indefinable something that makes it art. There are no mannerisms, no straining after technical effects. The young artist won his prize with honest work on a picture whose style is straightforward and convincing in its simplicity.”

A year later in 1934, in the 27th Annual 'Indiana Artists' exhibit, Head was awarded Honorable Mention in the figure composition category for his ambitious painting, 'Builders'.  Again, Ms. Morehouse covered the work in her art review column, saying the painting is “...a figure composition full of life and vigor.”  She continues, “Cecil Head  not only did good figure work in his group of seven men, busied with different tasks, but he used fresh, beautiful color, and well-balanced masses of lights and darks, that help to make his canvas an outstanding one.”

Cecil Head  The Builders

The same painting won the prize for best figure painting later that year at the Indiana State Fair art competition. To put the State Fair win in proper perspective, Hoosier Group legend William Forsyth won the outstanding landscape award in the same show. It was a showcase of the best and the brightest in those days.

Her column remarks favorably on not only Head's industrial and urban landscapes, but also winter and water scenes, in watercolor or oil, as well as his handling of portraits, complimenting the artist's beauty of color and form, and deft mastery of light and shadow.

In 1937, Cecil Head's painting 'A Winter Day' split a landscape prize at the Hoosier Salon annual exhibit held in Chicago.

But a bigger prize was coming later that year in the 'Indiana Artists' annual at the John Herron gallery, when 'Indiana Potato Planters' received the Meritorious Work of Art award.

Cecil Head  Indiana Potato Planters

Covered by Lucille Morehouse in her 'In the World of Art' column, she says of the Head painting, “ It is not altogether the depth of color, but the depth of emotional feeling, as well, that gives intensity in the blue sky back of the big red barn...”  And further, “...two tall lank-bodied farmers are walking down the potato patch...their simple work clothes take on a beauty of color, the small deep-furrowed lot takes on a luminosity under the bright sun...” 

In 1939, Head was included in the exhibit 'American Art Today' at the Contemporary Art Pavilion at The New York World's Fair. (It is not noted in the scrapbook the artwork Head displayed.)

A final glimpse of the type of work described enthusiastically by Morehouse in numerous columns in the 30's can be seen in his painting 'Along Fall Creek' which was exhibited in the 33rd Annual 'Indiana Artists' show at John Herron. The urban winter scene is presumably circa 1940, although the clipping is not dated.

The meritorious 'Indiana Potato Planters' was later exhibited as part of the 'Directions in American Painting' exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1941. 

Cecil Head's Indiana Potato Planters at the Carnegie Institute  1941

And with that, a gap, the scrapbook pages from 16 to 23 are missing.

A Hiatus of Years and a Late Life Renewal.

According to various interviews many pages later in the scrapbook, the Great Depression and a commercial art career curtailed Cecil Head's fine art output for the middle forty years of his life.  But after the death of his wife, Leverna, and an illness of his own, and after the urging of friends, he found himself more active before the easel once again.

He renewed his association with his fellow 'Market Street Artists', Floyd Hopper and William Kaeser. (They had run a studio gallery in the Union Trust Building on Market Street in Indianapolis for about ten years in the '30s.)

In July 1977, Head along with  newly christened 'Hoosier Five' artists, Hopper, Kaeser, Wilbur Meese and Adolph Wolter presented works of various media at the IUPUI Student Union in Indianapolis.

Head, again along with Kaeser and the addition of Louise Johnson  exhibited as three members of the same 'Five' group at the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce on North Meridian Street in October 1979.

Around this time he donated his favorite painting, 'Indiana Potato Planters' to the Franklin (IN) Public Library where it remains to this day.

Cecil Head   Indiana Potato Planters  Franklin Public Library

Head continued to enter works in the Indiana State Fair art competition and won a third place in the professional oil painting category in 1982.

A solo show of the artist's work was presented at the Southside Art League Gallery in September 1984. He donated one of his paintings on display, a winter landscape, for the benefit of the Art League's building fund. 

Two months later at the Irvington Historical Society, Head displayed a portrait of  William Kaeser as a young man. Kaeser, a resident of Irvington and Head's friend since art school and the Union Building days, was being honored by the Society. 

Head actually exhibited both the Kaeser portrait and a self portrait, side by side, both created in the late '20s, early '30s era.  A scrapbook image of the men and the paintings reveal little due to poor resolution of the image, however, a thick shock of hair atop the self portrait painting does seem to indicate the tall dark student on page one of the scrapbook is Cecil Head.  

In addition to the two classmate portraits, Head's seated portrait, 'The Nun' created fifty years prior as well, was also on display. 

An Overdue Acclaim and His Continuing Philanthropy.

Cecil Head attained a newfound appreciation upon reaching the grand age of eighty.

For his birthday in 1986, the Southside Art League Gallery honored Head with an exhibition and a buffet supper on July 1. 

In a Perry Weekly article dated June 26, Head explains what he paints─“the Indiana scene.” 

His Herron instructors, including William Forsyth, Clifton Wheeler, Oakley Richey, Paul Hadley and Frank Schoonover instilled the appreciation for what is near to be dear.  Head explains that he never traveled much, that there was no need to go a thousand miles.

“There's plenty to paint right here.”

The Art League birthday retrospective called 'The Cecil Head Show' was also covered by art writer Marion Garmel in her 'Brush Strokes' column in the Indianapolis News. Garmel writes, “Head...would have been called an American regionalist. His strong, blocky composition is reminiscent of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. But (it was)...his color sense...(that) intrigued the critics. You can see that... in 'The Builders', a 1934 painting of bricklayers and masons that sparkles as though it were painted yesterday.”

Newer paintings she describes in the column include 'Sweet Indiana Corn' and 'Light on My Wood Pile', both in acrylic and pastel.

A few months later, on October 26, a slide lecture was presented by Patricia and Frank Owings of Pleasant Run Gallery, on behalf of the Irvington Historical Society.  The lecture was called 'Painting the American Scene in Indiana'  and featured the 1930s art of Cecil Head, Floyd Hopper, William Kaeser and George Jo Mess. The lecture also compared these artists' work with other American regionalists of the time; Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Burchfield, Edward Hopper and Grant Wood.

Cecil Head  Evening Meal  discussed in 'Painting the American Scene in Indiana' lecture

The renewed interest in Head's early works resulted in almost all of the '30s works being sold.

In this period of late success, Head's scrapbook pages contain, one after another, the clipping of obituaries of his instructors and fellow artists.  First Oakley Richey. Then Floyd Hopper, followed by William Kaeser. 

The sad pages, though, are interspersed with the smiling face of Cecil Head, announcing the formation of a fine arts scholarship to be awarded annually to a Johnson County high school senior to pay toward art school tuition. Cecil Head provided the initial $1000 donation to the fund in January 1988.  

Head was to live to see the the scholarship awarded.  A local community paper The Gazette on May 24, 1989, shows recipient Stephanie McWilliams, a senior from Center Grove High School, receiving the honor at his side. A young artist at the start, and an old one near his end.

Having already taken classes at John Herron and studied a summer in Paris, Ms. McWilliams would be attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, that fall. Her early art journey already taking her further afield than Cecil Head from his humble home.  

But his dream was to paint his Indiana scene. And he did that. And in the photo, almost his last, they both smile the same smile.

The smile of joy, a creation awaits.

Cecil Head's self portrait as an art student?  ca. 1929

Mark Diekhoff, May 2025

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.