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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
