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.

Lucille Morehouse at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette – Oct. 20 1922 to July 2, 2023

image of Lucille Morehouse at entrance of
Lucille Morehouse Exhibit, Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

Art Ghosts Stir in Irvington.

An exhibition at the Bona Thompson Memorial Center  in June of  2023 called The Irvington Group, 1928 – 1937, along with a detailed and informative article by Steven R. Barnett, then executive director of the Irvington Historical Society, would introduce me to the history of these fascinating founding artists, Irvington's original creative spirits. Accompanying the exhibit artworks was a binder packed with Xerox copies of a multitude of articles by an Indianapolis Star art critic of yesteryear. Only later would I understand the herculean efforts of this trailblazing lady, the depth of her impressions, her dedication over many decades. The output of her coverage, the physical heft of the over-stuffed binder, amazed me. And she, like William Forsyth, had lived in Irvington for many years.

Her writings and the exhibition opened me to a yet another new and undiscovered world, like my own art journey thirty years prior, the art journey of Indiana's artists who came before.  Captured with detail and nuance, through astute observation, and with an often poetic and  signature storytelling approach,  this writer, the first great art critic in Indiana, left a posterity memorialized for us all today. So enamored with her, after seeing her collected columns at the show, I searched the web for more.

Then on the first day of July 2023, I  stumbled upon, coincidentally, a relevant  exhibition, soon ending, in fact in a day, at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette. 

A show called simply Lucille Morehouse. 

Installation View Lucille Morehouse
at Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

The World of Lucille Morehouse.

At the exhibitions entrance was a short biography of her life which appeared in The Indianapolis Star, her employer for many decades in the first half of the century, as told by her obituary on February 19, 1961. 

Born in Tippecanoe County, she graduated from Purdue University and became a school teacher. She taught in Kokomo first, an then in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

Other newspaper sources reveal that her love of writing preceded and coincided with her employment as a teacher,  as she was editor for the Purdue student paper, The Exponent, during her college days, and also edited society pages for several newspapers; in Lafayette upon graduation, later in Milwaukee and eventually Indianapolis. 

Shortly after the groundbreaking Armory Show in New York in the spring of 1913 that would introduce the nation to 'modern' art, Lucille Morehouse first appears as an art observer, in print, in the pages of The Indianapolis Star.  Work under her byline would appear in columns of various names over the years in The Star, including, Arts and Artists, In the World of Art and simply Art. 

She established a column with such staying power that the font of its banner began in an elaborate Edwardian Nouveau and eventually settled into a crisp and neat Deco style as the fashion of times and graphic arts evolved.

The poet and critic of modern art at the moment of its genesis in Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire, good friend to Pablo Picasso and associate of many other French artists of the time, wrote many essays on art and artists under the banner The Art World between 1910 and 1913. It reminds us that an art world can be macro and micro, and at the same time. Apollinaire was one among many writers upon whose words our understanding of European art at the turn of the 20th Century is based. Lucille Morehouse was more a singular figure in shaping our understanding of the art world of Indiana. If not for her impulse to see, her compulsion to write, her eagerness to understand, our understanding and awareness of our local art heritage would not be what it is today. And the relation between the French and European trends in art, and the effect on Indiana half a world away, is startling. Indeed, Morehouse's first words on art in The Indianapolis Star (covered elsewhere in this blog) memorialize,  in a humorous way, her reaction to the newfangled thoughts  an out-of-town practitioner of post-impressionism, the East Coast visiting artist, William Emile Schumacher.

From 1913 until shortly before 1950, her comprehensive columns would catalog, in an encyclopedic way,  Indiana's local and visiting artists, its galleries and exhibitions, its institutions and patrons – its gossip even, and goings-on – as nothing, or seemingly very little, as it relates to Indiana art, escaped her unblinking eye.

Already in her middle age by the time of her art writing career, her obituary describes her as demure little lady who was often seen in the galleries and among the artworks she loved.  Dressed always in her recognizable flat hat, and wearing overshoes, carrying an umbrella regardless of weather, hauling a large carpet bag stuffed with her pencils and writing pads. She never fancied the typewriter, so her columns were written longhand on pads, often in newspaper office in the late night and wee hours to meet her deadline.

She lived simply in her Irvington cottage on Beechwood Avenue, an abode that might have lacked furniture and ordinary creature comforts, but was stacked and piled with an accumulation of artworks, many gifted from the artists themselves. A chosen few pictures were anointed the honor of a placement on the wall, most noteworthy, a small nude by Elmer Taflinger. 

She would never exhibit her collection during her life.

In her last decade, Lucille Morehouse became invalid, and lived out her final years in a private nursing home on Central Avenue. 

The lady, Indiana's first great art columnist, although having died, bestowed a living spirit that endures to this day. Bequeathed to all Indiana lovers of art and history and writing. Her gift to us, her life's work, was the subject of the Lafayette exhibition.

Back Where She Started, Tippecanoe County, Indiana.

The Lucille Morehouse exhibit was presented in a medium-sized gallery room of the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette in Lafayette, Indiana. Also on display at the time of my visit was a contemporary regional show of colorful and varied artworks in a large main display area and a solo room of largish decorative paintings by Cindy Wingo in a show called It's Not All Black and White.

At the entrance to Lucille Morehouse was the curator's statement as follows,

“For this exhibition, thirty-two paintings from the Permanent Collection are paired with articles by Lucille. Some essays speak of specific artworks in the collection, while others refer more generally to the artist and their work.  Lucille's words provide a treasure trove of insight into the work and thinking during the times they were created.” 

Through her eyes, amid her thoughts...her words.

French Village at Night, George Ames Aldrich
in Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

The exhibit contained French Village at Night by George Ames Aldrich. A March 27, 1932 column by Lucille Morehouse discusses a Lieber Gallery showing of Aldrich paintings,   

“Mr. Aldrich has studied widely, under eminent masters, both in this country and in Europe. He is represented in many museums and galleries as well as in private collections over the country. The present exhibit includes paintings made in France and in Maine, Massachusetts and Indiana. Some of his finest accomplishments are the big canvases that picture winter streams, with snowy tree-lined banks.

He is especially happy in getting realistic effects of sunlit snow – although these are scarcely less beautiful than his representation of shadowed snow. As an example, his beautiful Winter Night – Quimperie, with church dominating in the composition, might be cited.”

In a May 20, 1928 column, Morehouse introduces Kokomo artist, Geraldine Armstrong Scott, with a mischievous story based on the critic's observations of the 3rd Annual Hoosier Salon exhibit, then held at Marshall Field in Chicago,

“Visitors...will recall a portrait by Simon P. Baus, life-size, three-quarters length and in standing pose of a slender, dark-eyed woman in a striking black costume whose distinctive headdress at once caught the eye....Viewers of paintings in the Marshall Field galleries soon marked the presence of a tall young woman who frequently wore a black costume identically like the one in the Baus painting. It was not long until it became generally known that the Geraldine of the portrait was in reality Mrs. Geraldine Armstrong Scott of Kokomo, herself an exhibitor.”

Mrs. Scott is represented in the Morehouse exhibit with the collection's 1928 canvas Autumn Scene.  

Landscape scenes of changing colors have become a common theme for the young artist as noted by Morehouse in discussing Mrs. Scott's works; Glorious Autumn in the Hoosier Salon and Autumn Shadows displayed at both Robertson Galleries in South Bend and finally Pettis Gallery in Indianapolis at the time of the article.  

In her December 27, 1931 article on a solo show by George H. Baker at the Women's Department Club in Indianapolis, Morehouse describes the artist as “one of the most forceful of the landscape painters in the Richmond group of artists.” She further observes his landscape style is characterized by his vigorous brushwork and ability to infuse mood into the realism of his pictures.

A tranquil and bright spring lakeside landscape from the the museum's collection, Untitled by Dale Bessire, hangs with Lucille Morehouse's description of the Brown County Art Colony artist's solo show at H. Lieber in Indianapolis in December 1944. Speaking of a different picture of a similar mood, Spring Comes, Morehouse writes, perhaps quoting the artist,

“Mr. Bessire has put upon canvas a rarely beautiful interpretation of that fleeting period of the early season when the soft green of opening buds has a pearly quality.”

Orrin Draven in Lucille Morehouse exhibit
Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

A remarkable painting by Nebraska native and Richmond resident, self-taught painter Orrin Draver, depicts what I can only guess is a landscape with stream capturing an early season snow, as the white-covered ground is surrounded by the dazzling fall colors of bushes and trees still full of leaves that range in color from yellow-green to brick red. The painting also depicts a bright blue, nearly cloudless, winter sky, which glows above and is reflected in the tranquil water of the foreground. The accompanying Morehouse column does not mention this unusual picture, but does note the artist often painted landscape scenes with water as in Still Water and Mirrored Pool, both on display at an H. Lieber show in July 1944. Of Still Water she says, and it would also be true of the collection's picture, 

“The picture is restful to look upon when the mercury soars, and it would be quite as satisfying during the zero days of mid-winter.”  

In her March 8, 1931 column accompanying  the smallish pastel,  Portrait of Richard B. Gruelle (1910), by Glenn Cooper Henshaw, Lucille Morehouse provides historical information about the training and early days of the artist,  

“...Glenn Cooper Henshaw was born in Tipton County, Indiana...he began his art training with a few month's study in the Herron art school when J. Ottis Adams was at the head... he studies for one year in Munich and later in Paris at both the Beaux Arts and the Julian academy. There were portrait commissions in London for one summer and a winter following the study in Paris, and while a student in Munich sketches of foreign scenes were sent home.” 

She also writes about Henshaw's recent portrait-painting “vacation” in Indiana, a homecoming period of sorts, between time at his long-established New York studio and an impending visit to California in anticipation of the establishment of an additional studio on the West Coast. She writes that the artist came back to Indiana,

“... (to) paint portraits of old friends, to study the character of new friends in terms of line and color, and to bring baby faces out from the white paper, their soft cheeks rounding like a delicate pink rose, their eyes full of wonder at the big new world...”

 As a side note, there is a permanent room dedicated to the art of Glenn Cooper Henshaw at the Brown County Art Gallery in Nashville, Indiana. The works there include many portraits similar to those described in Morehouse's column, including a full length society portrait and smaller, more casually executed, paintings of children. A very large night scene in oil of a large cityscape also hangs in the room, a magnus opus in the style of the smaller pastel work for which Henshaw is most known today (an most appearing at auction).

It is not certain that Morehouse's remarks regarding a Henshaw pastel Portrait of Richard Gruell mentioned in her column is one in the same as the work in the exhibit. She says about a portrait in her 1931 column,

“ It is also of local interest to know that a pastel portrait that was awarded honorable mention in the exhibition of the New York Water Color Society, and was later reproduced in art publications, represented Richard Gruelle, one of the five Indianapolis artists who constituted the first 'Hoosier group' of artists.

Mr. Henshaw still owns that early portrait of Mr. Gruelle, posed with his palette and brush and canvas, and it is now on view, along with many other examples of work, both early and recent, at the family home of the late Dr. A. W. Brayton...”

The collection's pastel contains Mr. Gruelle's likeness and his palette and brushes, but no canvas. There could be any number of reasons for the discrepancy between the critic's description and the collection's actual picture;  a mistaken description, or memory by the critic if the works are indeed one in the same, or the collection's piece could be a related study, or alternative pose of the pastel referenced by Morehouse. 

The painter Edmund Brucker, perhaps most known today for his portraits and industrial scenes in the social realist style, also painted landscapes that appear inspired by realism and post-impressionism. One such picture, View of Nashville, is mentioned by Lucille Morehouse in her March 2, 1941 column and is exhibited in Lucille Morehouse show of works from the museum's collection.

Morehouse writes of the artistic treatment of surface textures in a November 18, 1951 article,

“Half the battle is won when a painter of still life works skillfully with surface textures. The artist may use all the color on his palette to paint the still life, but if velvet does not have the 'feel' of velvet,  and metal does not have the 'feel' of metal, and wood the 'feel' of wood – and so on – then the still life painting is only partly finished. William F. Kaeser is a skillful painter of surface textures. No Hoosier artist – nor any other, it is my firm belief – can excel him.”

 The collection's Kaeser still life of three contrasting house plants on a hexagonal wooden table illustrate the critic's observations about the artist's surface textures. The waxy, chalky and fuzzy leafs of the distinct plants are expertly rendered in oil paint, as well as the polished sheen of the tabletop.

Kaethe Kollwitz, Folge Tod
Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

The international artist Kaethe Kollwitz is represented in the show by the unsettling charcoal drawing of a mother and child, accosted by a terrifying figure: Folge Tod.  The title is roughly translated as “Death Follows.” In the adjacent column by Lucille Morehouse, her observations of a November 1946 exhibition of the artist at Herron Art Museum, where she writes about the artist's life and influences. 

Kollwitz lost a son in the First World War, and her attention was turned to themes of poverty, degeneracy and suffering. Morehouse writes about works in the Herron show by the artist of a similar type to the collection's drawing, noting works called  Death Recognized as Friend and Death Seizes the Children,  

“The mother-and-child theme, handled in an entirely different way than the subject is usually pictured in church art, afforded the artist an opportunity for interpretation of deep feeling among (the) destitute and suffering.”

Many other works were included in the show, including canvases by  Brown County Art Colony artists Carl Graf and Will Vawter.  

Additional Irvington Artists, besides William Kaeser, included Frederick Polley, Clifton Wheeler  and Charles G. Yeager are also exhibited. Yeager's modernist landscape watercolor is very similar to, and perhaps from the same series as a work shown in the accompanying Morehouse column from February 4, 1940, called Lakes on Mountain Side. 

Finally, Indianapolis area artists such as Gordon Mess, Elmer Taflinger and  Florence Bartley Smithburn have pictures in the show. Bartley Smithburn's picture, Meal Preparation, is an exotic figurative landscape inspired by her world travels. Taflinger is represented by a stunningly vulnerable portrait of a female nude. The woman seems almost frightened, clutching a thin red cover in her hands at her lap, that drapes to the floor between her legs. 

Nakedness of Thought.

That Lucille Morehouse displayed a Taflinger nude in her home in a place of honor speaks perhaps to her recognition of the nakedness of thought she herself possessed and shared for all those years. The critic's stand, like the artists', in black and white, and all the colors. The courage of a bare statement for all the art world to see.

Mark Diekhoff, September 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.

William F. Kaeser – His Many Art Exhibitions in 1935

Near Irvington, William F. Kaeser, 1934  
source The Edge of Town  - Painting the Indiana Scene 1932-1948, Indianapolis Art League, 1989

Every Show, Everywhere, All at Once.

One cannot really imagine  a busier year for a young and unknown artist than that of 1935 for William F. Kaeser (pr. KAY-zer). The sheer continuity and multitude of his exhibitions that year is a testament to the hard work, talent, and enthusiasm of his eager youth. Kaeser was an immigrant, from post hyper-inflation,Weimar Germany, who, over the three years previous to 1935, had earned degrees from Herron Art School and Indiana University, and founded, through New Deal works projects funding, the Indianapolis Art Students League and became its founding instructor.

His first exhibition in 1935 was the 28th Annual Indiana Artists show at Herron Art Institute. One of two jurors that year was none other than Grant Wood of Iowa, the sensational new 'regionalist' painter whose American Gothic brought him nationwide fame in 1930.

According to Lucille Morehouse's In the World of Art column in The Indianapolis Star on March 17, 1935, William Kaeser's contribution to the show was a picture called Hawthorne Yards. She categorized the Kaeser work as among a group of  

“Pictures of buildings, either of industrial type that have interest in pattern and color, or of old houses of the 'shabby genteel,' Victorian type or those that are otherwise appropriate to the popular style of today.”  

Morehouse seems to be referring to the  'popular' style referred to variously as American Scene, Social Realism or Regionalist manner employed by Kaeser, and other local artists of late, or more importantly at the time, Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, its leading and founding members.

The title of Kaeser's work, Hawthorne Yards, the first picture of his career to receive critical comment, must refer to the railroad interchange yards bounded by English Avenue to the north, Ritter Avenue to the east, Prospect Avenue to the south and Sherman Drive to the West on the east side of Indianapolis. The area remains to this day as the CSX Hawthorne Yard, and was, then and now, in close proximity to Kaeser's Irvington neighborhood home. 

A Many Splendored Rubber Plant.

A scant week or so later, William Kaeser had a one-man show at Lieber Gallery in Indianapolis that was covered by the competing art critics for The Indianapolis Star and The Indianapolis Times.  On March 15, in the Notes on Canvas in the Art World column, John W. Thompson of The Times, commented on the novelty and talent of a new artist on the scene, William Kaeser, 

“Every so often a young artist pops up from seemingly nowhere and shows promise of doing something just a little bit different from the way 'it's being done.' Just such an artist is William F. Kaeser , who will open a two-week show at H. Lieber galleries Monday...(He) did not make his pastel drawings of Irvington scenes. He went out along White River where people live in most anything they can throw together.

His pastel work is new. It has a new color aspect, a new feeling and a new depth. 

His Matisse-like backgrounds, his broad strokes of sunlight are unusually pleasing.”

Hooverville - Curtisville, William F. Kaeser, 1934
source - The Edge of Town, Indianapolis Art League, 1989

It's not all rainbows and unicorns for Thompson, though, when he offers mild criticism of Kaeser's composition choices, at times, and figures,

“He has a tendency to crowd a bit too much into one drawing...(and) Although Mr. Kaeser has one or two figures in his show, he had better stick to other types of drawing. He hasn't nearly the mastery of body composition and graceful lines in his figure drawings as are beautifully evident in the others.”

The writer's main praise is directed at Kaeser's still lifes, when he writes,

"...his Corn Plant, and his Rubber Plant are two of the loveliest still lifes seen lately.”

Rubber Plant, William F. Kaeser, 1935
source The Irvington Group - 1928 - 1937, Irvington Historical Society, 1984

For her part, Lucille Morehouse comments about Kaeser's sixteen large pastels, and two watercolors showing at Lieber in her March 24 Star column. Of the work, she says,

“Suburban views, river front scenes, shacks in the slums districts and some very carefully-thought-out flower and still life subjects, together with a lively portrait of a farm girl and a study of the nude have been painted with a careful consideration of design and as artistic a regard for color harmony and contrast.”

Morehouse lists some of the artworks displayed as: At the Edge of Town, House on the Hill, Along the Canal, Suburban Church, Loafing in the Shade, Red School House, Corn Plant, Rubber Plant and Narcissus.  

She also mentions Kaeser and his wife will drive to New Orleans for a summer sketching holiday (the resulting artworks of which will figure into Kaeser's busy exhibition schedule later in the year, as we shall see).

During the following months, selections from the 38th Indiana Artists Exhibit, including Kaeser's Hawthorne Yards, would be traveling to Richmond and then Muncie. In April, the first stop was presented by the Richmond Art Association at the city's Morton High School. Then on May 9, The Muncie Morning Star announced that the show would be presented at the art galleries of Ball State College. The Muncie newspaper column reported that some of the paintings in the show were criticized by the exhibit's co-juror, Grant Wood, as being “exponents of localism” as opposed to the 'regionalism' he championed by his own practice.

A May 10, Indianapolis News article announces the concurrent showing of William Kaeser's work in a one-man exhibit in the Hoosier gallery at John Herron Art Institute and as part of the 42nd Annual American Art Exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum. 

The Herron solo show is described in two Indianapolis Times articles. The first on May 17, describes the showstopper, at least to the reviewer John Thompson's eyes,

“Mr. Kaeser, whose greatest talent is the application of color, has one outstanding piece, Rubber Plant, a lovely still life depicting the rubber plant, potted, standing on a table on which there are several fruits and a drinking mug. The strong colors, the perspective, the naturalness of the placing of the objects used, these make the picture more than just another still life.”

The second Times coverage appears on May 24, in which a photograph of the pastel The Gravel Pit is shown. In the short accompanying blurb, the artwork of Kaeser in the Herron show is described,

 “Daring and striking use of color is the high point of pastels by William Kaeser now on view at Herron Art Museum. This one, The Gravel Pit, contains the broad strokes, the patches of bright color, and the strength of good drawing necessary for a successful pastel.” 

The Gravel Pit, William F. Kaeser, 1935
source - The Indianapolis Times

The Indianapolis Star reports that a large oil still life, unnamed and not described, is the picture by Kaeser included in the American Art Exhibit in Cincinnati. It mentions other artists chosen for the exhibit, including Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Edward Hopper and Wayman Adams.

Three articles in The Indianapolis News and The Indianapolis Star, from August 29 through September 3, cover the award winners and entries in the arts competition in various categories at the Indiana State Fair that year. William Kaeser was to win the still life oil painting category with his, by now somewhat locally famous, Rubber Plant. He is a winner as well, in the pastel category, but it is unknown whether it is for one of his pictures of the Louisiana coast (from his summer holiday, presumably) or his shacks – both of  which were included in the show, according to Lucille Morehouse, in her September 3 column.

William Kaeser was a participating artist in the novel public art event the first two weeks of October, in downtown Indianapolis, in celebration of National Arts Week. A large section of Pennsylvania Street, between Washington Street to the south and 16th Street to the north was set up as an outdoor strolling gallery with the street window exhibition of work by Indiana artists. 

Once Upon A Time in New Orleans.

Often a great storyteller, Indianapolis' great art critic, Lucille Morehouse, covered William Kaeser's solo show of New Orleans vacation work that appeared at Lyman's Fireplace Gallery for two weeks in mid-October, 1935. Her wonderful narrative begins,

“Watermelon boats on Lake Pontchartrain and river steamers on the Mississippi were transferred to paper in short order, with all their interest of colorful setting and picturesque groups of workmen, as soon as the young Indianapolis artist, William F. Kaeser, unpacked his painter's kit and got to work with his pastels, early last June, at the end of a journey to New Orleans for two week's painting vacation.”  

Morehouse continues to weave a playful yarn about the long drive of Mr. and Mrs. Kaeser from Indianapolis to the Crescent City as an introduction to the Lyman show in her thorough October 13 art column. 

The exhibition contained fourteen pastels from the recent New Orleans series, with the addition of one large local scene, Old Power Plant, Kentucky Avenue and West Street, that was completed over the summer after the artist's return from Louisiana.

As way of recent background, Morehouse writes of Kaeser,

 “In was in his pictures of tumble-down shacks in the outskirts of Indianapolis, as well as the vigorously painted still-life compositions...within the past year or two...that his individualism in work with color and design asserted itself and gave promise for future accomplishment.”  

Morehouse then provides her observations about various of the individual works in the show. She begins with a pastel that is reproduced in black and white in the paper, Fisherman's Paradise. It shows a ramshackle fisherman's cottage built upon stilts, amid the zigzag of wooden boardwalks, all necessary due to the marshy conditions of coastal region a few miles north of New Orleans. Menacing conical clouds hover on high, and thrust toward the viewer, as they did the artist as he raced to finish his picture before the approaching storm.

Fisherman's Paradise, William F. Kaeser, 1935
source - The Indianapolis Star

Mississippi Levee: On Road to Baton Rouge (now revealed as) a recent first-place winner in the pastel misc. category at the Indiana State Fair. Set in bayou country, the picture showed a curving 20 foot levee and more distant houses of a nearby fishing village.

About Roof-Tops and St. Patrick's Tower, Morehouse writes, “(The work) was painted from the hotel window.” and looked out over a balcony and patio. Banana Conveyor, she writes, is an industrial composition “illustrating the industrial method of unloading the fruit that comes from the tropics.”

“Dock, harbor and boat” themes dominate the compositions, Morehouse writes.  Remaining works  in the show,  she lists in part as; Melon Boat with Side-Boards, Dredge and Train Ferry on Mississippi, The El-Lago, Steamship Sixola,  Yachts - Lake Pontchartrain Harbor, Ferry Boat at Landing and Boats Near the Drawbridge. 

The month following the Lyman's show, an exhibit of Indiana artists was organized in honor of the 20th birthday of the Indiana Artists Club. The show was to include about 200 works by about 100 hundred artists and would shown in the eight-floor galleries of L. S. Ayers & Company in Indianapolis.

An Indianapolis Times review by John W. Thompson under the rather dubiously-intentioned headline 'Indiana Artists Club Exhibit Isn't Bore It Used To Be,' begins by bemoaning the predominance of the  Brown County style in recent prior shows, which he describes as “...beech trees...autumn landscapes swathed in sunlight, or a tumble down...shack with tinted trees in the background and a soft haze over all.”  The writer may have just been piling on, as a year before Grant Wood had dismissed much of Indiana's art as "local color." Nevertheless, Thompson, writes that since about that time, and perhaps as a result, “it's all different now.”

Kaeser's contribution to the show was Watermelon Boats, the best of the pastels, according to Thompson, who described Kaeser as “an Irvington artist whose work has become increasingly popular the last few years.”

Labor + Love = William Kaeser.

William Kaeser's final exhibit of 1935 took place in his home community in Irvington, at the 8th Irvington Artists Exhibition on the second floor of of Carr Hall on Washington Street. The show was covered by Lucille Morehouse in her art column of December 9, 1935 in The Indianapolis Star. 

Kaeser displayed five pieces which summed up his busy year. First, probably by popular demand, was Rubber Plant, for a final encore (at least that year). He also showed an oil landscape Farmers, and the New Orleans pieces Fisherman's Paradise, and presumably renamed Mississippi Levee and Mississippi Dredge.

The Irvington Artists show, the final show of 1935, had a keynote talk by director of the museum at John Herron Art Institute, Wilbur Peat. He talked about 'Forgotton Relationships,' and called for a closer union between “the beautiful in art and everyday objects of utility.”  It was a credo shared by artists such as the tireless and hard-working William Kaeser – with his great love of labor that year – he was able to document the toil and sweat of his fellow man, with his gravel pits, his power plants, his river dredges, his banana conveyor lines. 

His work was a homage to labor, a depression-era vision of the American scene, the social reality – whatever you want to call it. A self portrait, in a way, the vision of an artist for whom work was both an ultimate ideal and a way of life. 

Mark Diekhoff, September 2025 (Labor Day)

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