The Epic Dramas of Artist Elmer Taflinger – Act Six

The Ruins, Holliday Park, Indianapolis, designed by Elmer Taflinger
photo by the author, 2025

 

Puff Breathing Dragons.

For many years, and particularly during the 1960s, Elmer Taflinger was ever-present in a daily human interest Indianapolis Star column penned by Lowell Nussbaum. Nussbaum had a varied career before seeking out work as a journalist, which he pursued in Chicago, Indianapolis, Toledo then back for good in Indianapolis. The homespun column he would be known for, The Things I Hear!, ran in The Star from 1945 through 1971.

It is almost as if there was a direct telephone connection between between Nussbaum and Taflinger during those years. A red phone, hot-line that either man could call the other, when caught in a bind.  Taflinger, when he needed a little shot of dopamine, or Nussbaum, when he was running a little low on material. 

The Taflinger mentions in The Things I Hear! could be categorized as one of several common types;  know-it-all, gadfly, comic or eccentric.

For example, in the comic vein, in a November 1959 column, Nussbaum relays the following for his daily readers,

“Elmer Taflinger tells of the woman who wished a portrait of herself to give her husband. She said she would pay a handsome fee 'if you'll make me look 10 years younger.'

'Tell you what I'll do,' replied the artist, 'I'll paint you as you are today and you can give it to your husband 10 years from now.' ”

And on June 14, 1960, Nussbaum's column contained,

“Everything happened to Artist Elmer Taflinger while he was painting a picture of the Meridian Street Methodist Church last week.

During the painting, he nearly was run over by a woman riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. Then the frame slipped from the easel while Taflinger was leaning over. The heavy frame bopped him in the head, cutting a gash. 

To cap the climax, he learned later he had painted the wrong church.”

Taflinger as an expert on all things is demonstrated on August 8, 1962, when the artist corrects the columnist, as Nussbaum writes,

“Elmer Taflinger straightens out Friday's off-the-cuff quotation, 'All is not gold that glitters.'

The last word is 'glisters', not glitters, Elmer reminds. 'It's from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Act II.'

Can I help it if Shakespeare didn't know how to spell glisten?”

And again in the column, March 1, 1966, when Nussbaum writes,

“An American touring Europe can 'read' the road signs without difficulty, even though he doesn't speak the language. But a foreigner trying to drive here is in for trouble.

Elmer Taflinger, Indianapolis artist, feels European signs are a lot safer than ours because they wordless, and the driver can tell their message at a glance...

How much simpler that is than our multiplicity of verbose signs which take our attention from driving while we read them.”

Taflinger as Lowell-appointed art expert can be seen in the January 16, 1969 column where Nussbaum bumbles his facts,

“Elmer Taflinger, the Indianapolis artist, blew his beret when he heard that Jan van der Marck, Chicago artist, whose 'thing' is wrapping entire buildings in canvas or paper, is to judge the Indiana Artists Exhibit in March.

Elmer's comment: 'Why don't they wrap him in canvas, head and all, and let him choose the winning painting by the touch system?' ”

Nussbaum had to correct himself in a later column, noting that van der Marck was actually director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and it was that museum building that then unknown artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, would wrap in 1969, in what become an international art world sensation.

Despite his glib dismissal of Christo, Jeanne-Claude and van der Marck, and what would be seen by history as their monumental achievement in Chicago, Taflinger, seemingly unfettered by humility or self-awareness, would  continue to plod on and perform the role of a know-it-all and art sage in Indianapolis. It would be his most common persona to appear in the press in his latter days as grand man of local arts.

In June of 1959, he would comment on the semi-circular design of alleyway pavement near the downtown Bankers Trust Building as “not limited to Germans,” but  Parisian as well. He provided pictorial proof and elucidated further regarding why the stones are laid in curves, “(cobblestones are) made by hand of very hard stone, (they) don't break exactly square...one side usually being wider than the other. And they just naturally work out better in a curves line.”

In an equally esoteric proclamation contained in a Nussbaum column in January of 1961, Taflinger, on the occasion of the demolition of the elaborate Marion County Courthouse which had stood since 1876, and was replaced by today's City County Building, lectured on the original building materials of the razed structure. The 'marble' walls of the structure were actually Keene's cement, a white gypsum powder, plaster-like material invented in England around 1840. And the stone pillars on the building's exterior were not granite, but rather something called Scotch marble, whatever that was.

In September 1962, Taflinger's opinion about the then current renovation to the Indianapolis Central Library was quoted. Nussbaum memorializes Taflinger's eye-in-the-sky remark to a workman on the scene, “This is one of most beautiful buildings in town, and it's a shame to spoil its appearance.” The workman's down-to-earth reply, “I don't know about that, Mister. But it has more waste space in it than any building in town.”

Even up to the last year of his life, Taflinger would be sharing an obtuse and mocking observation about a new public sculpture in town, Untitled (L's).  In Marion Garmel's 'Brush Strokes' column in the September 17, 1980, Indianapolis News, she reports what may be Taflinger's final words on art,

“Elmer Taflinger, the city's self-appointed guardian of artistic standards, says he has come up with the hidden secret in the sculpture designed by David von Schlegell, for the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis library.

The work, which went up last week, involves three L-shaped stainless steel pieces placed in a triangular pattern on the library plaza. It is said to be based on the 3-4-5 triangle of Pythagoras with the ratio in the distance from the base of one vertical shaft to the next – in this case 138 feet by 184 feet by 230 feet...

'So what you do,' says Taflinger, 'is divide each figure by 2. Then divide the smallest figure by 3, the next smallest by 4 and the largest by 5. What do you get? 23. And that's the meaning of it. When the sculptor gets his check, he'll be saying 23-skidoo.' ”

 

Curtain Call.

Threading through Taflinger's newspaper mentions, despite his showboat tenancies and his obvious affinity for press coverage, is his expertise in the classics, his drive toward preservation, and his Quixotic impossible dreams. 

Those elemental forces would combine and give meaning to the last act of his life, his final artistic statement, and the one that still endures at Holliday Park. 

It would begin in 1958, when Western Electric purchased the St. Paul Building in New York City's financial district as the location for their future modern office headquarters. The St. Paul was historical in several regards, primarily in that it was one of the very first skyscrapers in the city, and also that its facade contained sculptural components by renowned architectural artist, Karl T. Bitter. A preservation committee was established to place the important components of the building's artistry to further use at some other site, putting out a call for proposals. 

And so it was that Elmer Taflinger and Indianapolis architect David V. Burns would design a grotto and reflecting pond at Holliday Park in the city's northwest-side as a submission to the committee. 

According to the March 6, 1959 Indianapolis Star, the  Taflinger/Burns design won out over those by several different cities and universities, and over Idlewild Airport and the United Nations. 

Burns was to leave the project shortly thereafter, and it would be up to Taflinger to fight for money, implement the installation, and ultimately conclude the project, although to his mind, in an abbreviated, unfinished state some fifteen years later.

Perhaps Taflinger was first attracted to the project to preserve the important architectural elements contained in the facade of the St. Paul Building because of the sculpted figures. Arguably, the spectacular three colossi by renowned  artist Karl Bitter, deserved better then the wrecking ball. The three stone behemoths had held up the world on their shoulders for nearly sixty years, after all.

Or maybe because these same sculptural elements portrayed a trilogy of men, mankind as a Vitruvian multiplicity, much like Taflinger had painted as a centerpiece, the Leonardo da Vinci three-faced head, in his Apotheosis of Science mural years before.

A more mysterious fate may have been playing its hand, though, in attracting Taflinger to the project. 

The St. Paul Building, one of New York City's first skyscrapers, was built in 1898. It towered to a height of 22 stories, when nothing else did. As such, it was one of the nation's first buildings to, like Icarus, reach for the sun. That foolish ambition of architect, artist and dreamer alike. 

The building was named for its location near St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Granted, not the mid-town Taflinger knew in his many years in the city with Belasco and his theater, but on Broadway, nonetheless. 

Further, the exact spot of the building was the former location of a tourist trap called Barnum's American Museum, and then, when the Barnum building burned down, the New York Herald newspaper. Much as the St. Paul Building had a foundation built upon prior hucksterism and newsprint, Taflinger himself had created a career hobbled atop a similar footing. 

A March 6, 1959, Indianapolis Star article detailed the progress of the early days of the project,

“A Brooklyn stone firm is readying three 10-ton statues by the late world-famed architect Karl Bitter for their journey by truck to Indianapolis, where they will be installed in splendor at Holliday Park...Made of Indiana limestone, they are valued at more than $150,000...The statues represent workman of the world's three major races.

(Elmer) Taflinger will supervise the project to its completion...”

Just a few months later, the same paper reported a possible delay in the project in their July 24 edition,

“Plans for construction of a reflective pool in Holliday Park to house three famous statues have been delayed because of the artist's insistence that the pool must contain a giant spray splashing a 40-minute message in Morse code.  

Elmer E. Taflinger, world-famed Indianapolis artist, told the park board the 100-foot spray in Morse code is a 'definite must' if the proper setting is to be provided for the 51-year-old figures.

'We can cut down every place else, but if we are to have something distinctive – something different from anything else in the world – we must have these two jet sprays,' Taflinger said.”

The bizarre demand seems a strange sort of personal homage, to Taflinger's boyhood and lifelong love of electronics, as opposed to a universal or aesthetic statement in full service of the project. But who's to know. Most novel thoughts sound crazy at first. 

Whatever Taflinger's rationale, it all came down to money. Taflinger's construction proposal was at $180,000 and the city's budget was no more than $100,000.

Perhaps it was a tempest in a teapot devised by Taflinger to stir up controversy and public interest. Whether or not contrived, the story was carried by the wire service UPI and a blurb went out across the country and was widely reported. The July 25, 1959, Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph is one such example with a small, below the fold, front-page piece as follows,

“Indianapolis, Ind. – City officials today studied a suggestion by artist Elmer Taflinger that the city build a park fountain of 100-foot high columns of water spelling out 'the prayer of the world' in Morse code.”

Lost in the story were the Bitter sculptures, but covered was Taflinger's name and his hair-brained sounding scheme.

A year or so later, the project was still delayed according to the June 12, 1960, Indianapolis Star,

“Three famous statues which have sat in crates at Holliday Park for 14 months probably will stay that way for quite a while... 

...the statues have remained in their crates while a slow-motion debate went on about how elaborate the setting should be. (Artist, designer, installer) Taflinger wanted 'the works,' including colored lights and a fountain that would squirt out the letter 'V' in Morse code.”

The eventual progress of the project was documented in a photograph in the August 17, 1961 Indianapolis News which showed the first statue being lowered into place on the constructed base work, largely complete.

Just two years later, the project would be subject of stark criticism in The Star, when they would report on September 29, 1963, 

“What was once planned as a cultural showplace for Indianapolis, a grotto in Holliday Park for the famous Karl Bitter statues, now is a neglected, barren and meaningless exhibit, serving primarily as a potential death trap for youngsters.”

The photo that accompanied the article contained the warning, “Loose Stones Pose Danger To Adventuresome Children.”  The article further reports that “Records show that at least two legal suits are pending against the city because youngsters  have fallen from the dangerous memorial.”

By 1973, final funding was being arranged for a scaled-back fountain in the hopes of a belated dedication of the site soon to follow.

Finally, in November 1974, with only landscaping yet to be completed, Elmer Taflinger, along with Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar, and U.S Representative William Hudnut participated in a tree-planting ceremony at The Ruins at Holliday Park. The three trees planted possessed a symbolic and esoteric meaning for Taflinger, which he tried to explain, but sort of failed, in the accompanying Indianapolis Star article on November 4, 1974. 

Deus Ex Machina.

Elmer Taflinger turned from art to words his last decade or so. His late life's work, The Ruins, were nearly complete by the 1970s, and since he was in his eighties, chances were, so was his life. A last straw came along that broke something in him that explained his change in course. Leave it to Lowell Nussbaum to score the scoop, when he wrote in his January 23, 1969, The Things I Hear! column,

“Something which Elmer Taflinger, prominent artist and art instructor, said the other day puzzled me...

'Elmer,' I said, 'what did you mean when you said to refer to you as a writer rather than an artist?'

'It's like this,' he explained. 'In a long career as an artist, I have won some prizes, but never a top prize. The nearest I ever came was in Chicago. The judges selected my painting – a nude – as best but the show manager rejected the award because he didn't think he could get a picture of a nude reproduced in a newspaper. So they gave me a special award and hung my picture behind a potted palm.'

And then Elmer got down to the point of his story:

'Last summer, my sister (retired Manual High School history teacher, Mrs. Robt. L Black), entered one of her paintings in the State Fair art show. She won the sweepstakes award in the amateur division.

They gave her a silver tray and a rosette almost as large as the picture. That did it. I decided right then to forget art and stick to writing my autobiography.'

The postscript to his lament:

'And I framed the picture for her.' ”  

So words it was, from there on out.

In his interviews and the articles written about him, even those quoting him directly, words were rarely adequate to express the depth of Taflinger's mind, the breadth of his insight. 

Elmer Taflinger was to struggle in the last years of his life to complete his memoir, a gargantuan 1600 page manuscript called Revolting Hoosier. Sadly, he was apparently unable to rein in and organize his overflowing thoughts and ideas during his lifetime, and the manuscript remains unpublished.

Perhaps his last great regret was not finishing the book. Or maybe, as he was to suggest in several late interviews, that the city did not fund The Ruins to the perfection in his mind's eye. The bizarre perfection on the outer limits of his hazy vision for a prayer in stone, trees and water, for the people of the world, broadcast in perpetuity from our Circle City crossroads, from Holliday Park on Earth, as it is in heaven. 

Epitaf.

In the August 30, 1970, Indianapolis Star interview by Lloyd B. Walton, the lifelong Taflinger mystery is described,

“Since boyhood Taflinger has pursued a will-o'-the-wisp idea – something he wanted but couldn't quite figure out. Something he needed, but couldn't define.” 

Taflinger alludes to the hidden secret of his life with scattered clues in his many newspaper articles over the many decades.

A love of three, his epitaph, yearning for the fourth. A trinity of ruined giants, that only you, a human soul, can perfect.

Taflinger was no lone wolf, nor was he a team player. It was always he and the other. 

The other of his model. Of his students. 

The other of a group of friends at the restaurant. The crowd at the fair. A mob lining the streets at a Christmas parade. 

The other of his public, his newspaper readers.  The reporters with their notepads and tape recorders, and the Morse code he played like a fiddle. 

Always he and his other.

Ever-changing, ever-complex – like abalone –possessing and reflecting an iridescent beauty from inside out.   

His Ruins  –  a graveyard – not of sorrow or regret, or even wary sadness.  But a park of wonder, and respite, of inspiration and admiration. For all men and women who carry the world on their shoulders and aspire for the sky. 

Amen.

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025

Dedicated to Edward John Diekhoff, Jr.  1938 - 2025

See Also:

Dawn Mitchell, Indy Star, How 'The Ruins' at Holliday Park took decades to complete

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.

The Epic Dramas of Artist Elmer Taflinger – Act Four

A Gallery By Any Other Name.

The November 11, 1933 Indianapolis Star introduced a new gallery to the Indianapolis art scene. It was a gallery to play a small, but not insignificant, part in the Elmer Taflinger drama. Lucille Morehouse explains in her column that day,

“An exhibition of William Forsyth has been selected to open the newly established art gallery on Monument circle that is to be conducted in connection with the Lyman Brothers art store. Damian Lyman and Carl Lyman, sons of members of the original art firm, are co-directors of the gallery, which has been opened on the fourth floor, over the store. The fact that the room was used as a studio by T. C. Steele, many years ago, seems to dedicate it, in an endearing way, as a gallery in which to display Indiana art.

The dignified and gentle nature of the artist who had his studio in the same room in the early days of Indianapolis seems, in some indefinable way, in an outstanding feature of the room, an early fireplace whose mantel of classic design suggests a stateliness and elegance of an earlier period.

The fireplace, it might be said, is apt to give a permanent name to Lyman's new gallery. 'The Fireplace gallery' has been suggested as a name by Elmer Taflinger. And it seems especially appropriate.”

Indeed Taf's suggestion of a name would stick, and within a few weeks time he would displaying his first one-man show at Lyman's Fireplace Gallery. Again, always the intrepid reporter, Lucille Morehouse provides the coverage in her In the World of Art  column in The Star on January 14, 1934,

“The one-man show of fifty-seven drawings by Elmer E. Taflinger at Lyman's Fireplace Gallery on Monument circle enters its second and final week tomorrow. This statement of itself should be enough to crowd the gallery throughout the entire week. But when it is said that each one of the drawings was selected by a different person, as a means of assembling the exhibit, the show takes on additional interest. When these selections were made, chiefly by artists, students and models, although the list also includes names of Indianapolis architects, photographers, sign painters, lawyers, insurance men, laboratory dentists and others who from time to time visited the studio, there were no price marks to add their silent influence on the selection.”

Taflinger explained to Morehouse that he had preserved about 200 drawings in total from which to choose the exhibit. Most of those 200 produced during the prior five years, although a grand total  of between 5,000 to 6,000 had been made. The vast majority of the larger number have been lost due to wear and tear over the many years of running his school.

Morehouse describes a few selections in the show as follows,

“Clifton Wheeler choice of a feminine nude, seated, in charcoal, is one of the best all round drawings of the nude. Because it is a more difficult pose with more problems of foreshortening, the reclining male figure, also in charcoal, selected by Paul Jones, would probably be placed first as a skillful accomplishment in study of the nude.

Theodore Steele, called Ted by his friends, son of...Brandt...and grandson of T. C. Steele...selected a drawing in sanguine of an old man with a humped back. Cornet Wood selected a sanguine drawing, two figures, a boy and a girl, wearing everyday clothes and resting on a divan.

Wallace Richards selected a delicately penciled nude group on a gold background. Jean Messick's choice is an inspirational figure, a Juno type of woman.”

Morehouse described the her overall impression when entering the gallery room filled with Taflinger's work,

“The sense of color is so very definite as one enters the gallery that it takes a second look to bring a realization that the work is largely in black and white. Of course there is a generous sprinkling of pastel drawing – gloriously colorful, never gay an flashing, but with a glowing brilliancy and satisfying contrast and depth of tone.” 

It seems appropriate that Taflinger's first solo show would be of the drawing studies that were part and parcel to his teaching methods and his art school. It is unclear how many paintings of the Green Goddess or My Body is Weary variety that he had produced, or how often, to that point I his career. His specialty was life drawing, almost exclusively, rather than landscape, or still life. He was certainly able to whip out figure painting and portraits, as was seen in his flash painting duo-portrait performance at the state fair the prior year.  But again, figure drawings would be his bread and butter. 

Taflinger possessed a looming and larger ambition. The creation of a mural of his own.  Perhaps the lingering sting of the Thomas Hart Benton matter, or maybe his own grandiose impulses would propel him toward its impending creation. Maybe Taf's first thoughts on the project were more about what it ought not be, as opposed to a clear idea of what it would be. The March 21, 1936, Indianapolis Times sheds light on his thoughts on the regionalist and social realist Benton proteges at the time, when it reports, “Elmer Taflinger calls the Roosevelt mural painters the Depressionists.” It can be inferred that Taflinger's mocking quip is aimed at artists working with the government's Section of Fine Arts program to place art work in federal buildings, most notable post offices.  

Social realism would not be his goal, apparently, as he planned a more class-neutral work of more timeless and universal appeal.  His plans would evolve and coalesce into a tripartite series of large canvases, designed to hang snugly side by side, carefully drawn, and balanced beautifully in color and tone.

Utilizing a similar broad and collaborative input, as he did for selections for the Lyman show, Taflinger would again amass a list of fanboy favorites, this time from a survey of science experts, for inclusion in an encyclopedic Rosetta Stone, his mural of mind, man and nature. The project would capture his attention and harness his creative talents in the years to come. 

Apotheosis of Science by Elmer Taflinger, central panel
appearing in Science Monthly, 1940

Taflinger's Vitruvian Show-Stopper.

The finished mural, Apotheosis of Science, was complete and ready for its debut in the fall of 1939. The Star art writer, Lucille Morehouse, covered the unveiling with her long an thorough review on September 21,

“The painting framed as three panels, is in reality one continuous design, executed in oils on canvas...”

The overall subject matter of the mural can be simplified to say that it contains a central symbolic figure amid an array of many secondary human figures, animals and plants that represent a broad swath of natural and scientific creation and classification. Morehouse goes into more detail regarding the works appearance and design, 

“In the figure groups the color is kept rich and dark. But in the design...concerned with the lower animals and the plants...the color is light-toned and luminous....

...the artist...constructed his design on the Greek basis of the circle and the square. And it was upon this basis of geometrical lines that the whole composition was worked out with mathematical precision.”

Morehouse first elaborates on the stunning central figure of the composition, Taflinger's take on Vitruvian Man. The four-legged, four-armed man thus becomes a basis for design and proportion for the entire work as Taflinger utilizes the knowledge of the Greeks and as immortalized by Leonardo da Vince. Taflinger's universal man has three faces, if not three heads entirely, representing the anthropological divide of race among human beings. About the three-faced head, Morehouse writes,

“There need be no explanation...to see that the central and larger head is a carefully painted portrait of Leonardo da Vinci...well along in years, with piercing eyes beneath shaggy brows and with long hair and beard.”

The central placement of da Vinci, as Morehouse quotes Taflinger, is because “he holds his place as the outstanding man of all time.”

A latent, perhaps coincidental, misogyny in the work is observed by Morehouse when she notes that nary a woman is included in the plethora of scientific notables portrayed in the mural. Taflinger and his brother-in-law, Robert L. Black, the Manual High School science teacher who commissioned the mural for his classroom, worked together on the project. Taflinger created and executed the design and painting, while Black, in the early days of preparation and research, submitted a questionnaire to over 100 of the country's eminent scientists for their input as to who should be included in the work. Perhaps the intention was to solicit a wide range of suggestions, but the male echo chamber that sought and suggested names, came up empty on the feminine, whether mythological, historical or contemporary.   

The Indianapolis News on September 23 also provides a review of Apotheosis of Science, less detailed and more as a summary of essential features,

“The Apotheosis of Science, the latest mural of Elmer Taflinger, was hung today in the biology classroom of Robert Lovell Black, for whom it was painted, at Emmerich Manual Training High School. The mural, 21 x 5 feet in size, has attracted attention in the field of art and science which the artist has combined in the symbolical presentation of the foremost scientists of all ages.

Five years of research and study went into the making of the mural, with more than 100 scientists being consulted in selection of the figures in the composition.

Frames as three panels, the painting is one continuous design. In the central panel, the complete classification of plants and animals are represented. The panels on each side  of the central are grouped with outstanding men of success.” 

Lucille Morehouse writes a second major article on Apotheosis... with a summary of a long and detailed interview with Taflinger in his studio where he offers a minutia of details regarding the subject matter, design and creation of the piece.  Included this Star piece dated September 24, is a photograph of Taflinger painting on the canvas, on what appears to be the left of the three panels.

An article penned by Robert L. Black would appear in The Scientific Monthly magazine in February of 1940. The article contains photographs of all three panels of the mural. The most cohesive explanation of the mural's composition and intentions are provided in the article, when Black writes, in part,

“The center panel portrays  representative plants and animals of each of the main classes...the center portion of the central panel contains four Greek scientists of the ancient world, two on either side, each symbolical of one of the four ancient elements, fire water, earth and air. They are placed in defensive positions, guarding life...

In the side panels are shown forty-eight of the great scientists of all ages...and arranged according to their field of work rather than the period in which they lived. The men in the left panel  were interested in living things...botany, zoology...genetics and medicine...while those on the right panel dealt mainly with pure science...mathematics, physics, astronomy and chemistry.

Each scientist has reached a summit...and is portrayed as standing on a mountain top...each...holds in his hand a symbol of his accomplishment.

The foreground of the picture  shows the remains of great periods of civilization, which have risen and fallen while the search for truth...has continued...”

  

The Black article is also useful in that it provides a complete list of the scientific figures included in the work.

Apotheosis of Science was to gain notoriety as it began a tour of cities in the eastern U.S. in the fall of 1940 and spring of 1941. The mural was displayed at scientific conferences held in Philadelphia and New York, as reported in The Indianapolis Star at the time. 

In his old age, Taflinger was to relay the subsequent history of the mural to Indianapolis News writer 

Marion Garmel. In her December 18, 1974 article, she writes,

“The Apotheosis of Science...has hung in Manual and Shortridge High Schools, been on display in the Museum of Arts and Science at Rockefeller Center in New York, and now hangs on one of the gigantic walls of Taflinger's carriage house studio.”

And that is the story of Taflinger's revenge, his Apotheosis...

A  broad salvo of a summation. A declaration of riposte and rebuttal. A crucible of wonder and riddles.

 

A mural of his own.

Wasted Talent or Wonder Years?

The war years and-post war decade, for Elmer Taflinger, were filled with an array of activity memorialized in the press. Taflinger's PR machine would not stop, nor would it slow, even as his production of fine art did.  In this period, Taflinger, the man of art usually played second fiddle to Ol' Taf the trickster, the raconteur, the sooth-seer or the odd ball.

Elmer Taflinger creating pastel portrait of DePauw coed
source The Indianapolis Star

In January and February of 1945, as the war in Europe was grinding toward a close, Elmer Taflinger made the papers by participating in an art event that seemed a riff off his earlier stunt of painting the winning state fair dress-making beauty (and the prize calf) of a few years prior. As reported in the January 3, 1945, South Bend Tribune,

 

“Five prominent Hoosier artists will come to DePauw university Saturday to choose the most pulchritudinous of DePauw's campus and paint a coed of their choice, it was announced ...by Prof. A. Reid Winsey, head of the art department...

DePauw beauty winners will have their photographs and pictures of the artist' portraits published in the 1945 Mirage, student yearbook...”

A few weeks later on February 16, in The Indianapolis Star, a photograph appeared showing Taflinger at work at his easel, painting a pastel portrait of his chosen coed, junior Miss Helen Davidson, of Kirkwood, Missouri.  The photograph also notes the other participating artists as Earl Beyer, Randolph Coats, Ruth Pratt Bobbs and Edmund Brucker. 

On the same day, in the same paper, there was an article about a pageant in honor of the 50-Year anniversary of Emmerich Manual Training High School. The gala would include dining, dancing, a double-header basketball game, and music including a special march, Our Golden Heritage, written by Charles Henzie, the manual band director.

The article referenced an art exhibit, as part of the festivities, to include both former and current artists and art students, and highlighted the recollections of former student Elmer Taflinger,

“Elmer Taflinger, local artist and mural painter, is one of those represented in the exhibit. Taflinger 

wanted to study art, so he enrolled in one art class for a double period, and one cooking class – also a double period – to keep the record straight – and slipped away from pans to pencils so that he could spend four hours a day  with the master (presumably the late Otto Stark, of Hoosier Group fame and former Manual art instructor).  

In the days surrounding this event, Taflinger was mentioned in another article and pictured in a photograph of related interest in the same newspaper. On February 17, he was pictured in a photographed with a pretty Manual senior art student, Miss Thelma Williams, installing the the portrait of Otto Stark in the anniversary exhibit. And on February 19, an article reported that Taflinger was to paint a portrait of the late Milo Stuart, one of three principals in the school's history. The first principal, Charles Emmerich, was painted by T. C. Steele and the second principal, E. H. Kemper McComb, was painted by Marie Goth. It is noted that all three painters were Manual graduates.    

During the same period, Taflinger was a regular source of gee-whiz material to Indianapolis Star columnist, Lowell Nussbaum, and his The Things I Hear! column. A torrent of offbeat, human interest and comic material was most certainly required for the sustenance of a daily column by the writer. Taflinger was such a source, judging from his mentions by Nussbaum, whose fire hose of offbeat antics just didn't run dry.

 

Nussbaum was to cover Taflinger, the artist, countless times from the '40s through the '60s, but particular noteworthy were a couple of episodic stretches where he was to present humorous bits about Taflinger and his cats, and Taflinger and his search for nude models, over several columns each, at a time. An example, shown almost in its entirety to demonstrate the homespun inanity of the coverage, and because it is a typical example of many such mentions of Taf by Nussbaum over those years,  in the September 17, 1945, Indianapolis Star reads as follows, 

“Elmer Taflinger, the artist, doesn't know which is worse – cats or rats. Sometimes he thinks maybe it's the cats. No rats, he theorizes, ever brought a cat into his studio, but his cats – well....

Some time back, the cats dragged in what looked like a mouse. Much to Elmer's disgust, the well fed cats just played with the mouse, but didn't kill it.  The 'mouse' stayed around and eventually grew into a full-grown rat. The cats wouldn't bother it. One day Elmer discovered the rat had eaten the insulation off the wiring in his expensive electronic recording device.  

Then he saw red. From the nearby Propylaeum, he borrowed a mouse trap. Nothing happened. He lectured the cats about their duties, but they just yawned. 

So Elmer went to the dime store and bought four big rat traps. That did the trick. But Elmer's still mad at his cats.” 

  

During the 1940s, Taflinger continued teaching his large classes in figure drawing and portraits at his school, and he developed a relation as a visiting teacher and lecturer at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. 

Regarding his stint at DePauw, a clipping from what may be the student newspaper describes a lecture 

Taflinger gave entitled “Painful Acquisition of Knowledge without the Blessing of Academic Guidance.” The talk, which concerned the turning points of his art career between the rags and not so rich ages of 12 and 35, was subtitled in chapters with competitive titles; Episode One - Beautiful Teacher or Raggedy Man Reward,  second – Murat Shoebox or What Happened to the Landlady's Cat, third – The Falling Quarter or David Belasco's Perfect Memory... and so on, through six episodes.  

The scattered and haphazard talk was summed up by Taflinger himself, when he is quoted as saying his humorous lecture “lopped off the flamboyant fixtures to my conception of art.”  Whatever that is supposed to mean. 

Taf could not settle for one title for his turning  points, so he gave each one of them two. The dueling  nature of his dual titles, reveal a warring psyche in flux. On display, his thoughts battle their competing interests and betray a lack of focus, an inability to make a decision or stick with a single 'thing.' 

It seems an understanding Taflinger had of himself, as we shall soon see, this push and pull, this teeter totter of a life and career he lived.

Taflinger's frenetic multitasking was the subject of a detailed biographical sketch of Taflinger appearing in the December 28, 1947, Indianapolis Star. The article by Joseph K. Shepard titled, He Works at his Hobby and Plays at his Work – If He has the Time, begins with a question, “Wasted talent?”

It may be more a conclusion drawn by the writer upon the evidence he gathered through the course of his interview.  Shepard arrives for the interview at Taflinger's residence in the Golden Hills neighborhood of Indianapolis. Taflinger busied himself with various tasks, both tedious and menial, 'antiquing' of bricks for an addition to his home, feeding his many cats, tinkering with his ham radio gear. Meticulous in his procrastination from producing fine art, the bricks when he finished were a perfect match for the existing construction on his home, his cats remained fat and purring, and as an example of the fruits of his electronics bug, the writer relayed the following story,

“(Taf) recorded from the radio Shelbyville's complete basketball career in the state finals last season and sold eight sets of the records to Shelbyville basketball fanatics. It took 30 hours of continuous recording, 14 sides to each set, to complete the order.”

The state of disunion of Taflinger's art career is further addressed in the article,

“...Taf works harder at his hobby than he does at his natural gift.

That's why Taflinger masterpieces are hard to find. They are crumpled in waste-baskets, they are used as kitten bibs, napkins and tablecloths...

...Taflinger admits that he has done little serious work since the mural, Apotheosis of Science...10 years ago.”

Accompanying the article, which again relays Taf's biography a rollicking and vivid way, is a cartoon sketch of the teacher. The teacher Taflinger, as remembered by his student Mickey Thurgood.  With Delilah, a favorite cat, perched clawing to his back. Taf barking criticisms and getting sidetracked with his storytelling while his brushes wait.

Elmer Taflinger drawing by student Micky Thurgood
appearing in Indianapolis Star, 1947

Mark Diekhoff October 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.

The Epic Dramas of Artist Elmer Taflinger – Act Three

Stigma, any way you slice it.

For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism – either a man emerges determined to be better, pure, kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. This last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.        

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, 1945

Stigma was Taflinger's chosen word to most fully express the reality of his feelings after Thomas Hart Benton was chosen, over himself and all other local artists, for the creation of the prestigious Indiana murals for the Chicago's world's fair in 1933-4. 

Stigma has either of two major meanings; first, a mark of divine favor, and second, a mark of disgrace. 

Perhaps as alluded to by John Steinbeck in Cannery Row, in our world of modern men, the latter definition will rule the day. But what pain was Taflinger feeling when he took the very extraordinary and public action of filing suit to change the “nativity” of his birth, to wipe the Indiana dust from the soles of his feet? Was it the pain, even shame, of his own shortcoming, or the pain, and perhaps bitterness, of his being slighted by the powers that be? Again, as we shall see, a tree is known by its own fruit.

Full Spectrum Dominance – Taflinger's PR Totalitarianism in 1933.

Posterity records that Thomas Hart Benton was to win the media art war in Indiana in 1933, with his supreme victory on display in the Indiana pavilion at the world's fair. But an amazing array of skirmishes and small-scale battles were waged by Elmer Taflinger, on the battlefield of the newspaper pages, as he endlessly tilted at windmills that year. 

Taflinger refused to capitulate in the wake of his all too public shaming in the wake of the Benton affair. He did not lay down his brushes, and quit. There is no surrender in his bones as he fought on in the many trenches he would excavate that year. No capitulation or armistice in the man, as we begin to sense a cause for Taflinger much greater than revenge. His enemy was more formidable than Thomas Hart Benton. More unpredictable, unformed and, at times, downright crazy. The enemy of Elmer Taflinger was himself.

The word salad of Taflinger's scattered ideas was offered up in a public speech called 'The Business of Art' that he presented for the Indianapolis Business and Professional Women's Club on January 26, 1933. Reported in the January 27 Indianapolis Star, the talk was briefly summarized as follows,

“(Taflinger) sketched some ideas of Michelangelo applicable to art today and stressed the fact that the public...thinks that an artist is a peculiar person, but that in reality he must be as sane and sensible as the successful business man.

Artists are tending to make their work more human to get away from the influence of the mechanical age, and beauty as well as mechanical perfection is being achieved by fore-sighted manufacturers of today, he said. 

The speaker said it was a mistaken idea of the public that an artist excels in only one field of art. He said that a good portrait painter could paint a miniature as well as a 1000-foot painting and that the power of drawing gives him understanding and knowledge of all art.”

The work-in-process aspect of Taflinger's art psyche is hinted at in the his award winning picture he displayed at the 9th Annual Hoosier Salon in Chicago.  The January 29, 1933 Indianapolis Star reports the name  of his oil painting, which won an honorable mention in the outstanding picture category – Unfinished Picture.

(As we shall see, the painting was to transfix Indianapolis Star art critic, Lucille Morehouse, who will write about it, and its eventual name change, several times over the coming years.)

The spring and summer was filled with articles all over the state revolving around the Benton – Taflinger mural controversy. As summer gave way to fall, a new offensive was launched by Taflinger, his battle for the hearts and minds continued.

Taflinger would flood the pages of the local papers in what must be one of most bizarre public relations weeks for any Indiana artist in history. 

In early September, 1933,  during the run of the state fair, Taflinger articles and photographs appeared at the snap of a finger. 

The magic of his copy, of Taf just being Taf. 

Taf paints Calf and prize winning girl
Indiana State Fair, 1933

Over several consecutive days of coverage, the local papers reported that Taflinger would help judge the dress-making contest at the fair, but that's not all. He would paint the girl wearing the winning dress in a public display of his flash sketching technique, the same techniques taught at his art school. But that's not all. He would also paint the the fair's prize-winning calf, also while-you-wait and open to the public. But here's the real kicker.  He would paint the calf and the girl together, in one canvas, because...well...just because.  And he pulls off the high stake gambit, as documented in the photograph appearing in the November 7, Indianapolis Times. The photo shows Taf painting away, like a bullfighter in the ring, his canvas capturing both the beauty and the beast. The hilarious painting looks amazingly good.

Taf quaffs beer at Turnverein Hall
Indianapolis' 1933

His photo appeared again in The Indianapolis Times again, just two days later,on September 9. The Times and other papers picked up on Taflinger's selection as one of the judges of an Oktoberfest beer drinking contest held at the Turnverein Hall on the city' south side.  Taf's attention-seeking and performance art instincts were second to none, as he decided, once more, to not only judge the contest, but to get all up and involved. He drank from a large and ornate stein of beer, as cameras clicked, declaring,  “This is real art.”

His vaudevillian follies were likely informed by his many years in and around show business, first in Indianapolis and then New York.  He portrayed a canny ability to give 'em what they want. All of 'em, the papers, the public, the inebriated.

Taf's showmanship, or maybe some other local flagpole sitter, seems to have inspired a longtime student of his. A fledgling paint performer with a name of remarkable synchronicity and symbolism –  Isaac Lane Muse. 

The relationship between the two seems broader than teacher and student. Taf's Abraham and Isaac's Isaac seems more inexorably linked to some occult awareness of the machinations of mass media. The provocateur and the protegee, brought together at the tree by water's edge, in a fateful meeting.  

Lucille Morehouse devoted a long and tortured  column to Mr. Muse in the September 10, 1933 Indianapolis Star.  The connection of Muse to Taflinger is explained in a convoluted way, in great detail by Miss Morehouse,

"Elmer Taflinger first heard of (Muse) when he was living in a tree at Warfleigh while a life guard at the beach”

Morehouse is referring to the Broad Ripple neighborhood nestled between White River and the Central Canal. 

“(Mr. Muse) kept this up,  cooking his meals and sleeping with birds from May to September. Mr. Taflinger employed him to pose for his life class and found him so talented – judging from the compositions that he volunteered to hand in for criticism – that he gave him his tuition to pose for the second year. Another year he acted as class monitor for his tuition.”

Isaac Muse “began a serious study of art in the Taflinger life class,” Morehouse writes, at the start of her wild read. 

Isaac Lane Muse painting under water
Broad Ripple municipal pool, 1933

If you are a reader who understood Neal Cassady after drinking Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid..., perhaps you can make sense of the Morehouse portrait of Muse as a young artist. Suffice to say, in picking random tidbits from her coverage, exposure to Taflingerism should just as well come with a warning label,

“(Isaac Lane Muse) painted three pictures under water. And he did not go down in a diving bell to do it.  Each time he remained under water about three-quarters of an hour and each time he painted a full-length figure on a canvas about 12 by 15 inches. 

The municipal pool at Broad Ripple park was selected...Three Sunday mornings, around 10 o'clock...when the pool was less frequented and the artist could work unobserved and unmolested from swimmers and divers who approached him out of curiosity...

When painting under water, everything appears higher in key...A very fair skin becomes so luminous under water that it is almost phosphorescent. Sunburned skin takes on a purplish hue...Shadows are very luminous. You can see right through them.” 

Mr. Muse explained his rationale to the critic,

“I had listened to stories of deep sea diving...by a friend...he was in the South seas with a millionaire whose hobby was sea life...”

Muse's rich friend of a friend was actually the innovator of underwater painting, as the article explains. But the exotic stories of the life aquatic inspired Taf's student to don flippers and follow in the under water flapping.

The article goes on, perhaps too long, as by the end, the under water adventure of Muse has lost steam. He meets the girl, gets married, and moves to the big city to follow a new and different dream. The cliffhanger, if any, is if there was a happily ever after, or at least a relative peace for Mr. and Mrs. Muse in their life after Taflinger.

All this being said, Taflinger may come across as a self-promoter to the casual observer at first glance. But a deeper look reveals several threads weaving together his various publicity stunts. The threads of a desire to connect with and participate in the larger real world outside his everyday art world. To invite outside thoughts in, to join ranks with the thoughts in his everyday head. 

These threads can be seen in his many public talks, his judging of contests, his spontaneous participation in all aspects of society, high and low.

He was to offer a life drawing class at his studio to a couple of dozen young men, members of the American Business Club. By bringing in a group of unlikely artists, he was forced to find words and methods to teach them, to open them up to the idea and rationale of drawing naked bodies. As reported in the November 17, Indianapolis Star, he began his session, 

“Attention please!  If you were about to build a skyscraper, would you begin by building the penthouse?

It is so with drawing a suit of clothes or a dress. One does not begin with a dress.”

At the moment a model sat before the group on a stand in stark nakedness and any drawing of a dress would have to have been pure fantasy. 

“To attempt to draw a dress first would be a serious mistake...”

On the December 17, 1933 front page of The Star, Taflinger supplied a drawing of a young girl clutching at a doll while giving thanks in the lamplight of an empty room. The illustration was to draw attention to the newspaper's Santa Claus Fund that provided toys for the city's needy children. 

Holiday toy drive drawing by Elmer E. Taflinger, 1933

Taflinger  not only supplied the drawing, but he also volunteered to be on the festive Santa wagon to help deliver the toys to children, as was noted in a later article and photograph.

Finally, so beloved was Taflinger becoming to his friends and local community by this time, that a holiday present to him, made the The Star on Christmas day, as an elaborate and farcical send-up. The story was shortened and clarified as a newswire, feel-good  story and was printed in the Lafayette Journal and Courier, also on December 25, as follows,

“One Christmas present here today caused the whole town to chuckle. It was a new hat for Elmer Taflinger, Hoosier artist. The gift replaced a 17-year-old headpiece, the pride of Taflinger's existence, but the dismay of all of his friends, who for years had declared it a blot on the landscape....because of attempts of friends to snatch it...(Taf) had formed the habit of sitting on it when eating in a downtown restaurant...his friends had set up a cigar box...to take up  collection...for a new lid...The collection amounted to $2.50.”  

It would seem, judging him by his fruit, that his antics in the spotlight did not serve to alienate Taf from his friends, but rather to endear. The tree of his  stigma would only draw deeper into the soil, and spread wider the branches of his Hoosier soul.

Making a Masterpiece of the Nude.

As Indianapolis Star art critic, Lucille Morehouse, noted in her review of his two nude drawings in a 1929 show, Elmer Taflinger was exemplary in his knowledge of anatomy and rendering skills. His many years associated with George Bridgman and countless drawing sessions before the disrobed model, both while in school and then teaching, only strengthened these skills over time. That he could create drawings bordering on perfection cannot be seriously questioned. The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields collection contains many examples including Standing Female Academy, Standing Male Academy and Seated Nude. But it can also be noticed, arguably, that even today, in art learning institutions centered in traditional academic training, there is usually a teacher or a student, perhaps a few, perhaps many, at any given time, possessing such amazing skills.  

The key with the nude, again as an argument, is for the artist to make good use of the foundational skills honed by mind, eye and hand to create the image or object that transcends the sterile stage of the life drawing exercise.  

The transcendence of Elmer Taflinger is saved for posterity in an early nude masterpiece, the oil painting of an African-American woman, first called Unfinished Picture, and in later years, My Body is Weary.

The picture would haunt Lucille Morehouse for many years, as it would come back to mind, and she would vividly recall its details, long after she first saw it.  On February 5, 1933, in The Indianapolis Star, she writes,

“Elmer Taflinger displays his skillfully painted full length of a seated nude...It receives an honorable mention. If the jury hat rated it as highly as I do, they would have given it a leading prize. Brilliantly painted, it is one of the finest handlings of flesh textures that I have ever see...”   

Then again, in a January 13, 1935 review of a traveling show of American artists at Herron Institute, Morehouse recalls the Taflinger picture,

 "The local artist, Elmer Taflinger, painted a nude...a few years ago that was little less than a masterpiece. The brown flesh fairly quivered with life. When it was told me that the picture had been considered a the jury for a $500 prize, it did not surprise me.”  

Finally, in her review of the 13th Annual Indiana Artists exhibition at L. S. Ayres & Co. in Indianapolis, Morehouse writes on October 29, 1944,

"When Elmer E. Taflinger exhibited his full length nude...holding a scant length of red scarf in an earlier exhibition, I gave it unstinted praise for its skillful drawing and meritorious painting of flesh textures. I have not changed my opinion about it but I am still just as enthusiastic. I hope that it will some day be added to the permanent collection of the Herron Art Museum.”

My Body is Weary is now in the permanent collection of the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette, and was included in the exhibition, Lucille Morehouse in 2023. 

Taflinger would transition in the following years to teaching a generation of students, to conceiving of grand projects, several of which he would accomplish, and some of which remained out of reach. The next part of this series will cover Taflinger's final act in Indiana, his final moments on the stage.

Mark Diekhoff, October 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.