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| seated Helen Hibben, standing left to right, Dr. S.J. Carr, Simon Baus, Clifton Wheeler and Dorothy Morlan |
Dorothy Morlan in the 1940s and Beyond
By the beginning of the 1940s, Dorothy Morlan was approaching her mid-fifties in age. She had been painting and exhibiting continuously for over three decades, ever since her debut while yet a student at Herron Art School in 1906. She had been honored with several solo shows over that span of time, admirable, as a trailblazing woman artist, when such shows were still called 'one-man' exhibitions, even by Indianapolis' well-known female art critic, a trail-blazer herself, Lucille Morehouse.
Morlan had thoroughly studied the local landscape through her tireless painting in the Whitewater River region south of Richmond and the Ohio River area near Hanover. She returned over and over again to studies of the flatland fields, the treelines and creeks and the endless skies near her Irvington home. The area was still rustic around the edges and a rural idyll on the outskirts eastern Indianapolis at that time. She had painted more distant sights during extended painting sojourns along the coast of Maine and high country in Colorado. Her travels, whatever the reason – educational or personal – resulted in additional artworks around Indiana depicting the Wabash River valley at the border to Illinois, and around the country, from the Philadelphia mill country in the east and all the way to California.
She had exhibited with the Society of Western Artists in Chicago and around the Midwest, at the Indiana Artists at Herron Institute, at the Hoosier Salon, the Irvington Artists and countless regional shows in Richmond, Muncie, Lafayette and Evansville, to name just a few. Morlan had also been chosen to participate in national shows in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
Expressive themes such as solitude and expansiveness – the order and splendor of nature – were core forces at the root of her pictures and permeated her work throughout her career. She painted only the landscape. The color blue especially, and the variations of its color wheel neighbors; grays and greens and slates – and winter, that most solemn of seasons – captivated her artistic impulse. Nature's was the voice that spoke to her.
She learned from influential masters of the Hoosier Group, primarily J. Ottis Adams, in her early years, and William Forsyth, as teacher, neighbor and fellow exhibitor. She learned the noble task of humble artist, with bent knee, before the wonder of the world.
Palm Beach and New York City.
In 1940, Dorothy Morlan would spend the winter season in Palm Beach, Florida with friend and fellow artist Miss Bertha Lacey. According to the Palm Beach Post, February 15, Miss Lacey had just completed her work on a portion of Indiana State House mural depicting a Civil War theme. However, a later Indianapolis Star article dated May 29, 1940, reports that the mural project was in the Fountain County (Indiana) Courthouse, where Miss Lacey assisted mural painter Eugene Savage in the project. Both Dorothy Morlan and Indianapolis Star art critic Lucille Morehouse attended the dedication ceremony for the completed mural with a keynote address by Wilbur Peat of the John Herron Art Museum.
Around 1941, a new art gallery would be launched in New York City, headed by longtime New York sculptor and teacher, Naum Michel Los. According to the Brooklyn Eagle paper, December 21, 1941, the enterprise was called Sixtieth Street Gallery.
A year later in December 1942, the Courier and Press (Evansville, Indiana) reported That Dorothy Morlan had a show of thirteen paintings at Sixtieth Street Gallery in New York from November 30 through December 12. The show consisted primarily of her out-of-doors views of the Colorado Rockies and Ohio River in Southern Indiana.
After the New York show in 1943, select paintings from the exhibit traveled to locations in Ohio, the state of her birth. Locations including Youngstown and Springfield, according to various news reports, including her hometown paper, The Salem News, in the April 27, 1943 edition.
October of Her Years.
As the mid-1940s approached, men in uniform appeared more and more in the papers as America was once again at world war.
The exhibition schedule of Dorothy Morlan decreased, at least to the extent that it was reported in the reviews. She was showing, by this time, only in the Hoosier Salon, which was held in the Wm. H. Block store in Indianapolis.
Perhaps her snub by the annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron a few years prior had soured her on that event, or perhaps she had submitted work, but it had either not been accepted or not remarked upon by the critics. The scant evidence is, more than likely, her travels and time spent for long periods in Colorado had affected her ability to exhibit in Indiana over those years.
As Lucille Morehouse reports in her art column on January 23, 1944, in The Indianapolis Star, in which she was covering the 20th Annual Hoosier Salon held at Block's,
“In a gallery hung with oils there's a medium-sized vertical landscape design, founded on realism, in which the light gray-green of foreground field and its clumps a dark green pines and white-trunked birches, its distant deep blue mountain range, beyond which is a glimpse of snow-clad peaks, all combine to produce an effect of serenity, of dignified calm.”
Morehouse reveals that the painting is by Dorothy Morlan, in a picture called Glade in the Rockies in May.
The description sounds familiar to a painting described earlier in this series by Morehouse in a past column, which may indicate Morlan's unrelenting efforts to capture the ephemeral moods of the mountains. She had been returning to Colorado and the Rockies again and again. Her dogged fixation on a place and a theme, much as Cezanne and his Mont Sainte-Victoire some fifty years prior. Indeed, Morehouse further reports that Morlan had just returned to her Irvington home after living two years in Colorado.
The art critic reports further that, the previous year, Morlan had her first solo show in the East at a New York City gallery which received favorable reviews in New York papers and Art Review magazine, presumably the Sixtieth Street Gallery show.
One year following, Morehouse again discusses Dorothy Morlan in the context of the Hoosier Salon at Block's, the 21st annual, in her January 28, 1945 review. In discussing the artist's picture October, she writes,
“Miss Morlan's creative landscape is red-orange...also red-brown that blacken in the depth of shadows far back under closely placed trees. The foreground is a mass of deep, rich green. Level fields reach far into the distance – on a vary narrow strip of canvas – under a lowering sky, blue-gray and portentous.”
Lucille Morehouse may be describing a painting now called Mood of Autumn in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. If not the same painting, then nearly so.
Morehouse concludes her remarks on this picture, and the last noted Hoosier Salon of Morlan's career, with additional words on Dorothy Morlan herself, the seasoned artist, her longtime Irvington neighbor, and her fellow female trailblazing spirit, with this acclamation,
“Dorothy Morlan has been regarded as one of Indiana's most gifted women artists. October proves her ability to interpret a wild mood of autumn.”
Requiem for Singing Skies.
A young girl at her father's side. She sees him draw – marks upon the paper – a scene stolen from the world – its earth and air, its lines, its exquisite design – enshrined in the leaves of a treasured sketchbook, to pour over later in amazement.
Dorothy Morlan was to enjoy a last major exhibit in Indianapolis in 1946. The John Herron Art Museum, along with the Art Association of Indianapolis and the Indiana Artists' Club was presenting a series of two-person shows from spring to fall that year.
Once chosen by the museum and a committee, the artist was free to act as juror and select their own works for the show. Morlan's show was scheduled, along with Muncie artist Hill Sharp, for the second iteration of the spring line-up, following Clifton Wheeler and Marie Goth.
Always an attentive observer of Dorothy Morlan's work, Lucille Morehouse would write a final time about the artist's pictures in her March 2, 1946, Indianapolis Star column about the two-person show.
“Dorothy Morlan's work as a landscape painter might be classified into several periods that include both grave and gay. Her latest painting, included in the seven richly colored oils on display, approached a type of imaginative design that borders on fantasy, and yet is linked to 'the good red earth' by its solidity of construction, its truth to natural forms in mountain peaks, meadow slopes and winding streams.”
About another picture, perhaps an even deeper foray into the realm of fantasy, Morehouse says of The Hound of Heaven,
"The artist said she was not trying to interpret the poem by Francis Thompson which has the same name, but that his 'strangely beautiful' poem stimulated her as she developed the design. As the 'hound' leaps through the sky, farm animals flee frantically across the green meadow slopes. The black tree masses of the foreground have been treated in a fantastically decorative manner by thin curving white lines – suggestive of trunks and branches – that might have been made with an ancestral quill pen in the early Spencerian handwriting.”
Morehouse discusses another canvas, smaller, again fantastic in theme, The Afternoon of a Faun, which continues the new theme of adding creatures to her landscape by adding the mythological faun beneath the writhing branches of a musical willow in the fore. Additional works include Autumn Sweeps Out to Sea and The Burning Bush.
Morehouse describes in more detail the two final contributions to the show by Dorothy Morlan.
Of Requiem, Lucille Morehouse writes these fitting lines about a Dorothy Morlan painting,
“...inspired by an unusual light on a mountain peak in Colorado...the glory of silver and rose tones transfigures the blackness of middle-distant ranges and foreground pines so that the depths become reddened and enriched with deep dark color."
And about Here Where the World is Quiet she writes,
“The first line of Swinburne's poem 'The Garden of Proserpine' suggested the name – has gently rolling hills, a deep blue stream that widens into a pool, guarded by fantastic trees, and, in the far distance, above the long horizontal line of level country, is another shorter horizontal line of silvery smoke from a passing train that is not in sight.”
At that moment in time, the latest war over, a new era for America was set to begin. A moment when European artist refugees, having traveled to our shores, brought even newer modernist ideas of surrealism and abstraction. Those latest modes of painting, reactive, birthed as a defense mechanism to the raw horrors of wars and crimes too terrible to conceive, let alone portray head-on in art. It was a neurotic moment infused with angst and anxiety that would change the direction of art forever, and establish for the the first time, with the emergence of the New York School, the preeminence of America in art.
And at that same moment, Dorothy Morlan paints an evolution to the expressive modernism she had always pursued. Her expressive interpretation of music and sight, feeling and color, mythos and nature. She seemed at a crossroads, an existential predicament shared by everyone on earth since the invention and use of the atomic bomb.
Not long after the 1946 show, Dorothy Morlan was to suffer a debilitating stroke that left her unable to paint. The details are lacking, but it is mentioned in two books covering Morlan; The Irvington Group, 1928-1937 in a piece by Sheri A. Patterson, and Skirting the Issue by Judith Vale Newton and Carol Ann Weiss.
It is somewhat surprising that Dorothy Morlan's condition was never mentioned by Lucille Morehouse in her Indianapolis Star columns in the years that followed. The careers of the two women intertwined to an amazing degree, and the fact that they were Irvington neighbors for fifty years or more would lead one to believe that Morehouse knew intimately the details of Miss Morlan's medical case. But any knowledge along those lines seems to have remained private.
Dorothy Morlan was to die in October of 1967.
(It is noted that that neither Dorothy Morlan's notice of death or her obituary in the Indianapolis newspapers mentioned any prior medical emergency from years past or details about her final years.)
A last photograph of Dorothy Morlan appeared in the September 24, 1951, Indianapolis News. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Irvington Union of Clubs, a pictorial spread was printed. The undated photograph shows past participants of the Irvington Artists exhibitions sponsored by the Club. Miss Morlan, and fellow artists Simon Baus and Clifton Wheeler, are admiring Helen Hibben holding an artwork, while longtime exhibition host and sponsor Dr. S. J Carr looks on.
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Morlan first appeared in print at age twenty with her impressions of the last day of February, 1902. In particular, her astute observation of a winter morning giving way to spring. Her writing, infused with poetry, sang of the movement of clouds and the mood of a changing wind.
Her last words appeared fifty-five years later in an October 2, 1957, 'letter to the editor' of The Indianapolis Star.
There is no poetry to be found, unfortunately, in her well-reasoned remarks about the meaning of democracy versus republic as she weighed-in obliquely on the Little Rock segregation debate. Her mind seems rational and coherent, but in a topical manner absent any expression of dream, any feeling of solemnity, any awe. Her medical condition seemed to have sapped her introspective spirit by then. These last public remarks come across as shouting at the clouds, clouds that sang to her their beauty for so long.
Postscript.
Printed July 21, 1947, Lafayette Journal and Courier
50 Years Ago Today (in the Lafayette Morning Journal)
“Miss Lucille E. Morehouse, a graduate of Purdue, has taken a position on the Lafayette Journal staff, and will devote most of her time to society and literary work. She is regarded as a young lady of more than ordinary ability.”
Printed January 28, 1958, Indianapolis News
Fifty Years Ago (1908)
“A painting by Miss Dorothy Morlan of Irvington was accepted for the exhibition of the work of American artists at Philadelphia.”
Mark Diekhoff, August 2025
See Also:
The Irvington Group, 1928-1937
Skirting the Issue by Judith Vale Newton and Carol Ann Weiss.
both books available at the Irvington Historical Society
