Dorothy Morlan in the 1920s – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 3

Expressions in Blue – Dorothy Morlan in the 1920s 

Lucille Morehouse, in her Indianapolis Star art column on March 8, 1920, covering the current Indiana Artists exhibit at the Herron Institute, noted that the prize winning works that year were mostly smaller in size than in past years. The two main winners were both small watercolors; William Forsyth's Woods in Autumn and Francis F. Brown's A Cloudy Day.   Three artists were noted as Honorable Mentions including Dorothy Morlan for her small in size canvas, about 9 by 12 inches, Winter Evening. Morehouse notes the picture's small size, but large vision, depicting “...a wide stretch of blue-shadowed snowy field.” 

A lingering post war thrift and rationing hangover may explain, in part, the downsized art.

A Meeting of Kindred Neighbors.

A year and a half later, the current artistic inclinations of Morlan are described in a long July 10, 1921 Star column by Lucille Morehouse titled 'Studio of Local Artists Reveals Treasures – Work of Dorothy Morlan Shows Wealth of Unusual Talent.'

The art critic's fondness and respect for the artist is demonstrated by the lavish attention and poetic prose she used to open the article, which due to its beauty of description and stunning time-capsule effect is quoted in full, as follows:

“An Irvington studio, tucked away among the vines and shrubbery in the vicinity of Pleasant run, forms the workshop of an artist whose career has been one of serious study. Canvases large and canvases small bear evidence of the steps that have been taken, of the periods of change and development that have followed one another in logical order as advancement was made. From the time in girlhood days, with its usual dreams of books to be written, when there was a decision to take a few art lessons in order to make the decorative drawings that would illustrate the printed pages, until the present day, when big Indiana landscapes are being painted on little rectangular pieces of canvas, an art talent whose motive has been subjective, rather than objective, has been seeking to express the individuality of the artist while interpreting the beauty in nature. We are taught that all art is an attempt at self-expression. But we know that all art is not to the same degree stamped with the artist's individuality. 

It was one of those days when the thermometer was said to have registered 110 degrees on the street the middle of last week that I lifted unwilling feet over hot cement sidewalks a distance which, in usual weather, would have meant about a half mile walk, but which seemed immeasurable increased in the immense heat. A short stretch of cinder walk offered an alluring  turn from the glare of the pavement at Lowell avenue. A few steps brought me to number 6031, which marked the studio of Dorothy Morlan.  This two-roomed studio, in the yard, separate from the dwelling house, was built several years ago, but it so happened that this was my first visit to it.”

The article explains to the reader that despite Morlan's recent sparsity of exhibition in local shows, indeed it cites her decision to skip the upcoming Indiana Artists exhibition at Herron, she remained active and busy in her artistic creations, as attested by the many works, large and small, on the walls and in the corners of her studio. 

Her most recent 'period' of work are the smaller canvases along the line of Winter Evening discussed a year prior in The Star. The eight or ten such small pictures of the flat open fields surrounding Irvington, showcase Morlan's unique talent, as Lucille Morehouse describes, “...in the small pictures (Morlan's) representation of the big things in nature impresses with a feeling of vastness not always found in a landscape painting whose dimensions are several times larger.”

Morehouse contrasts the newer work with her earlier solo show some twelve or fourteen years prior, which included “...bright, joyous canvases painted at Hanover  – scenes along the Ohio River, interpretations of morning mists and the sparkle of sunlight on the water and the coming of springtime along wooded hillsides.”

Morehouse cites Dorothy Morlan as giving credit, in part, for her “strong feeling for the big things in nature” to the influence of the painters Edward W. Redfield and Walter Elmer Schofield, both of whom had works represented in the permanent collection of Herron Institute, and both of whom painted “big winter landscapes” with a “broad, vigorous brush.” 

Morehouse lauds Morlan for her determined, experimental approach despite the influence of those and other artists who she held in high esteem. “Be influenced, but do not imitate,” Morehouse proclaims, as a could-be Morlan mantra. 

Lucille Morehouse provides some final insider advise to her readers when she says about visiting an artist's studio as opposed to seeing the work hanging in a gallery or museum. “There is a sort of studio atmosphere, a feeling of intimacy and a charm of companionship with the artist that is wholly  lacking when one views the pictures of many artists in a large exhibition. Try it and see!”

Less Exhibits, More Honors – Morlan's 'December.'

Morlan's hiatus from exhibition continues over the next years. In late summer 1923, she is mentioned in Star coverage of the Indiana State Fair art exhibition, not as an exhibitor, but as one of the many no-shows. Perhaps at that period of time, the State Fair exhibit was just getting established as a serious venue for Indiana's best art and artists.

On January 5, 1924, on the front page of the 'photogravure' section of the Sunday Star, an interesting full-page pictorial, depicting an interesting pastiche of Indiana geography, culture, history and architecture, is presented in a piece tied together by its title, Four Corners of Indiana.

Photogravure was a popular etching and printing method at that time, which resulted in images with subtle gradations in tone and a rich velvety texture distinct from standard photographs of the period. 

Four Corners showed images of the farthest reaches of Indiana, northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast, along with two fine contemporary homes, a photo of the last surviving indigenous people of the Miami tribe, an aerial view of Wabash College and two Indiana artists, Dorothy Morlan and Otto Stark, on opposite sides of the page facing each other, standing at their easels. A map of the Indiana and "the heart of Hoosierdom," Monument Circle,  is shown at the center of the pictorial spread.

In her March 1, 1924 Star column, Lucille Morehouse covers the 17th Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron Institute. Her observations note the distinctions in the show from those of prior years, describing the work as generally smaller, the landscapes generally fewer – with more still lifes, portraits and figure pieces represented – and also an increase in craft works and sculpture.

For the column, Morehouse speaks generally of the landscape work, not noting the names of individual artists or titles, but her words on one picture seem to be  about a Dorothy Morlan picture. 

“Outstanding among the landscapes is a big snowy field,  with an evergreen or two, when early twilight turns the snow to violet-blue.”

Lucille Morehouse was likely describing the large Morlan canvas,  December,  that was exhibited in the Indiana Artists show, and a photo of which appeared on a pictorial page of The Indianapolis Star later that month on March 30.

The picture was an important one for Morlan, and Morehouse, as the critic again describes the piece when it appeared hanging in a prime spot, a “place of honor,”  in an October 1924 exhibit of five women artists at Pettis Gallery, on the fifth floor of the Pettis Dry Goods store in Indianapolis. 

Morehouse reports that the five woman had appeared, some together, some in groups or solo, at various earlier times in venues such as the Indiana Artists at Herron Institute, the Indiana Artists' Club and Woman's Department Club House.

Morehouse says about the five women generally, 

“There are neither insanities nor inanities in this exhibition of paintings...” and further, “ ...in both subject and treatment, the work would hold its own with a like number of pictures by a like number of men...”

In discussing the honored Morlan landscape, confirmed to be December later in her column, Morehouse writes, 

“The fact that the canvas measures 30x42 inches is not the only thing that makes it big. And the fact that the wide, snow-covered field stretches back and back, apparently for miles, is not the chief thing that makes the picture big. But it is the artist's interpretation of a big solemn mood that stamps the canvas as one of the most distinctive, to my way of thinking, that has been painted recently by any Indiana artist, man or woman.”

Morehouse continues, in part,

“There is a beauty in execution...There is a tenderness, a tranquility, moderating its austerity.”

The First Hoosier Salon, The Valley, and Deaths. 

In March 1925, the inaugural Hoosier Salon exhibit opened at the Marshall Field and Co. store in Chicago, Illinois. Dorothy Morlan was represented with a prize winning painting, A Frosty Morning,  which later traveled with other representative works and was displayed at the West Baden Springs Hotel in Indiana. 

Lucille Morehouse details the first Hoosier Salon, the mechanics of its inception and initial patronage, the prize winners and participants over two articles appearing in The Indianapolis Star on March 8 and March 15, 1925. She describes an unnamed Morlan canvas, presumably Frosty Morning, as “a big sober landscape.” The picture won the $50 Nolan prize. 

The Indianapolis Star was running a pictorial series in its paper 'Notable Paintings by Indiana Artists' in 1925. On September 20, No. XIV in the Series was The Valley by Dorothy Morlan. The reproduction image looks almost like a drawing rather than a painting, or perhaps a watercolor, as fine dark lines sketch in the curving flow of river and the roll of hills. There is an etched or hatched quality to the work, a sgraffito of paint marks such that, if oil was used, it appears paint was very sparingly applied, and perhaps in a subtractive manner removed with a palette knife.

Lucille Morehouse reports on the summer activity in the studio of Dorothy Morlan in an October 25, 1925, Star article.  She describes, 

“ (Morlan) defied the heat of summer as she sifted 'snow' to the canvas, working from sketches she had made last winter, but modifying them so that the completed picture will in no wise be a realistic view along Pleasant Run.”

The following year, on January 10, 1926, The Indianapolis Star posted a death notice for Dorothy Moran's father, age 75 years. 

Albert Morlan was husband to Martha, and father to Miss Dorothy, and  to sons Percy and Harold, all of Indianapolis, and to son Ralph of Nashville, Indiana. 

Albert Morlan died at home on Lowell Avenue in Irvington, and funeral services were private.

An August 1927 'In the World of Art' column by Lucille Morehouse, reports that Dorothy Morlan had spent the summer in California, after the death of her mother in April, to tend to an ailing aunt. Morlan's aunt succumbed to her illness and Morlan was set to return to Indiana that fall. She had suffered the death of father, then mother and finally aunt within a year and a half.

The 21st Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron is reviewed by Lucille Morehouse in the March 4, 1928 Indianapolis Star. She describes Morlan's painting Where the Blue Begins, which, from the sound of Morehouse's description,  may have been influenced by Morlan's many close personal losses over the prior months. Morehouse writes, 

“Dorothy Morlan displays the largest landscape canvas, a big sober composition of slow-sloping fields with patches of snow under sullen sky and with distant body of water.”

A Group of Her Own.

The inaugural Irvington Artists exhibit at the Carr Hall automobile salesroom on East Washington Street in Irvington took place from November through December 1928. The event was widely covered in the local press which reported over one thousand visitors to the exhibit. A half page pictorial spread was devoted to the Irvington Artists on November 25 in The Star. It included William Forsyth and daughter Constance Forsyth, Helene Hibben and Thomas Hibben, Frederick Polley, Clifton Wheeler and Dorothy Morlan. 

Simon P. Baus, Robert Craig and Hilah Wheeler were not included in the pictorial, but did exhibit in the show. 

Clifton Wheeler, Hilah Wheeler and Simon P. Baus were all reported to have sold work during the exhibition's run.    

Dorothy Morlan was represented by at least two works, including Ohio River Valley and Valley in Winter.

The Irvington Artists exhibit, sponsored by the Irvington Union of Clubs, was noted in Lucille Morehouse's 1928 'year in review' column that was printed in the January 2, 1929 Indianapolis Star.

And with that, another decade in the career of Dorothy Morlan comes to a close.

Later that fateful year, 1929, a stock market crash would wreak havoc on the economies of the world. The 1930s would bring the Great Depression and worse. The perseverance of Dorothy Morlan and her fellow artists through those turbulent years will follow in Part Four.

Mark Diekhoff,  August 2025

Dorothy Morlan in the 1910s – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 2

Dorothy Morlan in the 1910s

Active Exhibition and Working Holidays.

Dorothy Morlan's active involvement in the contemporary art scene of Indianapolis and wider Indiana continues with the dawn of the new decade in the 1910s. She continued to exhibit regularly in annual exhibits, such as those of the Indiana Artists at John Herron Institute, the Western Society of Artists, and established yearly shows in Richmond and other Indiana cities. She also continued her working art  holidays at Brookville, Indiana and other locations to seek an ever expanding landscape of study for her painting.

In the waning days of winter 1910, as reported in The Indianapolis News, February 26, the 14th Annual Society of Western Artists exhibit would open at Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. The show included work by Dorothy Morlan and had already traveled through St. Louis and Chicago, receiving good reviews in the newspapers of those cities.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette remarks in the March 20, 1910 edition on a traveling exhibit of Indiana artists just ending at the public library that included Hoosier Group artists and Dorothy Morlan, among others.

The Indianapolis News society page, on April 30, notes that Dorothy Morlan will spending the summer in or near Brookville sketching and painting.

The Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram on May 18, 1910, announced in its society column that J. Ottis Adams, at his Brookville home 'The Hermitage,' would be conducting classes in landscape painting over the summer. He was assisted in instruction by Dorothy Morlan, an artist already familiar to many in the Richmond art community.  Ottis explained the allure of the picturesque Brookville area, saying,

“Located on a narrow ridge between the two branches of the Whitewater (River), with quaint old buildings and stone terraces rising from the waters of an old canal, it presents, from many points of view, quite a foreign aspect, furnishing much charming material for the art student; while the streams, rocky ravines, roads and old bridges, in conjunction with splendid groupings of trees, with hills far and near for background, afford unlimited motifs in the immediate neighborhood...from simple door yards and old-fashioned flower gardens to far reaching-views of distant hills or wide stretches of plain such as from the artist's standpoint are unexcelled in the middle west and would be difficult to surpass anywhere.”

A September 23, 1910 front page column in the (Richmond, Indiana) Evening Item newspaper advises that the annual exhibit by the Richmond Art Association will be delayed indefinitely due the fact that the electricity has not yet been installed in the show's location, the new high school building. The lights and other materials having been shipped were en-route,  but their later installation would delay, at best, or at worst, postpone the exhibit to contain works by J. Ottis Adams, Dorothy Morlan and many others.

The show did go on, once the lights were installed, and eventually opened and was reviewed by an anonymous writer in the same Richmond newspaper on October 24.  The writer raves on the newly furnished galleries, perfect for viewing art with gray carpet background walls, natural sky lighting and work that was hanging at a comfortable eye-level. 

The show contained only strong works, the writer opined,  including the “remarkable excellence” of a Dorothy Morlan canvas, The Ohio in June.

An exhibit which was shown in the Marion, Indiana Carnegie Library was covered by their Chronicle paper,  February 3, 1911. J. L. Messena writes that Dorothy Morlan's picture, A Bit of Canal,  “is an interesting bit of work for the freedom and individuality of treatment.” 

As can be gathered by her newspaper write-ups, works by Morlan continued to intrigue and surprise with their skillful and spontaneous execution, effective moody coloration, and simplified compositions and designs – all characteristics distinguishing  her from her seniors and fellows at the time in Indiana. These characteristics, to varying extents, were shared by the so-called burgeoning schools of 'expressionist' artists, among the first 'modernists,' around the world.

The 5th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron Institute was reviewed in a long article in the Art & Artists column on the Sunday Indianapolis Star on April 14, 1912. The column was anonymous, but well written and thorough. The time frame was about a year before the appearance of Lucille E. Morehouse as the by-line critic in the Art & Artists column.

The article contained illustrations of three stand-out works, one each by by J.E. Bundy, William Forsyth and Dorothy Morlan.  Morlan's  was the “...bold, well-executed winter picture, Old Mills – West Philadelphia.” 

Although the newspapers at the time were silent on the matter, perhaps the additional instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, at Philadelphia, that Morlan cites in later years occurred around this time and resulted in the Old Mills painting.

As promised, a year later, Lucille E. Morehouse is on the art beat, and pens her first thoughtful words on Dorothy Morlan in the March 9, 1913, Indianapolis Star.

Her study of Morlan's pictures Approaching Storm and Winter compels the Star's new art writer to contrast the strange repulsive allure of Morlan's somber colored works of dark and chilling subjects. Paintings that could be misperceived and dismissed as glumly uninteresting by average art eyes more keen for the bright colors of flowers or gardens. But Lucille Morehouse had patient eyes and an inquisitive mind,  and she took her own sweet time in front of interesting artworks. Her long study of Morlan's work results in a poetic epiphany in the writer, as she is driven to quote Longfellow in the aftermath of her reflection on the pictures.

Oh, the long and dreary winter,

Oh, the cold and cruel winter – 

As Morehouse writes,  Longfellow's lines “seemed so to harmonize with the spirit of the picture. If you have never felt...with its big icy power, the oncoming winter storm, then Miss Morlan's picture will help you enter altogether into the spirit of it.” 

Morehouse implores the reader again with her suggestion, “But you must take time to see all that is there for you, just as you would take time to read a wonderfully gripping story in the pages of a book – and perhaps to the lay the book down and cry a little...”

Clearly moved, Morehouse writes, “If you take a half hour to study it, to follow that wagon track across a snowy field toward the sheltering home far in the distance, to see the sky grow darker and darker until the whole earth seems to take on a sullen blackness, and then the big white flakes come cutting sharp lines through the gloom – oh, it is all a wonderful representation of nature's somber mood!”  

An anonymous review of the same paintings in The Indianapolis News on March 15, says of Morlan's pictures, “...two large winter landscapes wrapped in deep melancholy, a style which this talented young artist affects just now.”

Modern Art in America, and Indiana.

The Armory Show in New York, officially called the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was just happening on the East Coast of the U.S. 

America was awakening to the shock of not only cubist and futurist visions, but also the first expressions of more natural subjects not enlivened by the play of light and spontaneity like the impressionists, but endowed by emotion and enhanced by obsession. Among them, Morlan and other progressive artists of her generation, the emerging expressionists.   

On June 29, 1913, Lucille Morehouse, in her Star column, detailed the summer goings-on of various Indianapolis art personalities, including Dorothy Morlan. 

Miss Morlan, she writes, “...has opened a studio at her home 6030 Lowell Avenue, Irvington. The studio is built apart from the house and occupies a place under large beeches on the lawn. Miss Morlan will remain in Indianapolis during the summer, making studies for landscape work along the streams and in the fields and woodlands near Irvington.”

The following year, in February 1914, an exhibition and a tea for Dorothy Morlan was hosted by the Art Center Studio, on 142 East Market Street, Indianapolis. Perhaps the Studio was associated with or inspired by the artist Miss Emma King who had hosted a show and tea for Dorothy Morlan on Market Street a prior time. 

An unnamed critical review of this show is carried in a column to the February 3, 1914 Indianapolis News. Morlan's unique meld of impression and expression, spontaneity of execution and deliberative design are noticed and haggled about by the writer, who says, perhaps too critically,

“Miss Morlan's well-known preference for the quieter moods of nature is here illustrated with two large canvases...Nocturne and...Winter Evening... They are feelingly done and colorful, but too thin as to paint....”

And, 

“(in other works) Miss Morlan uses another style, that of palette knife persuasion in painting the sunshine effects...Her color is clean and interesting in harmony, yet we feel too strong a 'family resemblance' in color scheme with all the pictures, as though the artist painted with a  preconceived idea rather than being open to the impressions of the day.”

The critic follows the 'yes, but' observations on a more solely positive note,  

Miss Morlan's dash and vigor of expression engages the attention, and her impetuous handling proves her of artistic metal...”   

The column sums up with biographical information about the artist. It reports that Morlan paints near her studio in Irvington, where “...she finds the simple motives that she loves best.”   It also indicates the artist has painted on the Maine coast, noting the maritime example included in the show. Her Herron and local instruction has been supplemented by then at the Pennsylvania Academy under Daniel Garber, and in New York under Robert Henri.  

Additional coverage of the show, along with a seated profile photo of Morlan at her drawing table appears in the February 8, 1914, Indianapolis Star. New information contained in the column indicates that the show consisted of oils, pastels and crayons. The crayons primarily depicted the vicinity of Hanover, Indiana along the Ohio River.  

It is mentioned that Morlan's earliest creative interest was in writing, but was supplanted by her art ambitions due to the influence of her father Albert Morlan (1850-1926), who was an artist himself, and associated with William Forsyth and others of the Hoosier Group. Indeed an ink drawing by her father is now in the collection of Newfields, titled House at Corner of East Street and North Liberty, 1895.

In the July 5, 1914 edition of the Indianapolis Star, amid a page of news of terrible tragedies and injuries to children as a result of fires and fireworks, it is announced a group of local artists will be decorating the new Burdsal Units of City Hospital in Indianapolis under the supervision of William Forsyth. The women's ward area to be decorated by artists Dorothy Morlan and Lucy Taggart. 

That fall in October, an exhibition of paintings by local artists opened at the (Indianapolis) Propelaeum. Morlan exhibited, as well as William Forsyth, Simon P. Baus, Waymon Adams, T.C. Steele, Emma King, Frederick Polley, Otto Stark and Clifton Wheeler.

On November 14, 1914, Morlan had a painting in the Society of Western Artists exhibit described by an anonymous writer in The Indianapolis News as a  “...picture of Ohio River foothills, with the river far below the level of the eye....charming in its high keyed color scheme, the bare tree in the foreground and patches of snow give a beautiful interpretation of winter.”  

By February 3, 2015, the decorations were complete in the children's ward of City Hospital, as reported on the society page of The Indianapolis Star.  A tea in honor of the contributing artists was given, and it was noted that their efforts were largely offered free of any charge for the benefit of the city, as the limited budget for the project was taken up almost entirely with the purchase of artists materials. 

With war in Europe, local artists would occupy more and more of their time in the following years with  volunteer efforts, and by providing art works for auction to raise money, in service of the armed forces and the like.

The 8th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron was reported in the March 6, 1915 Indianapolis Star. Dorothy Morlan's contribution to the show was “an unusual picture,” Nocturne.  The painting also described in the Indianapolis News the same day as “a composition of houses and an icy stream and a snow-covered landscape in moonlight, beautiful in quality and feeling.”

A year later, in an April 1916 Indianapolis News article reports that the 9th Annual of the same show, again at Herron, contained a Morlan picture , described as “of exceptionally good quality” and “a really distinguished work.”  Winter – Coast of Maine is described more specifically as “beautiful in quaint gray green coloring and structural in composition, with hills and evergreen trees in the foreground and expanse of sea in the distance.” 

On Women Artists – A Man's World and a Woman's Words

In a September 30, 1916 Art in Indiana column to The Indianapolis News, called  'Fifteenth Article. Women Artists.', William Forsyth provides a survey of practicing female artists in Indiana at the time, both professional and semi-pro. Artists include but are not limited to Susan Ketcham, Winifred Adams, Janet Scudder, Caroline Peddle Ball (a sculptor born in Terre Haute, who studied under Saint Gaudens, and was then living in New York) , Olive Rush, Lucy Taggart and Dorothy Morlan.

Forsyth describes Morlan as “a landscape painter of talent” and “one of our best known women painters.”

Forsyth concludes his article with somewhat pithy and Darwinian remarks about art generally, and not specific to women artists, when he states, 

“Art is not an adventure undertaken by the few for the gratification of natural instincts, but a part of the complete expression of a people; not, as is mistakenly supposed, an exotic to be carefully pampered to preserve its life for a select few, but it speaks for its race in a language of its own. It is as sane a natural expression as literature or music. It desires no coddling, but its life is appreciation; without that it must inevitable die...only the strong persist, for they must feel and speak for all.” 

Perhaps I'm reading into it with 20/20 hindsight, but Forsyth comes across as a bit of passive-aggressive, a bit side-eyed,  a bit 'mansplaining,' as it's called today. 

Forsyth beckons backward, perhaps unknowingly, to a classicism of worthy beauty, recognizable by all –  man, woman and gods alike – rather the actual and unfolding individual visions that were then sweeping away all  prior commandments on art. He understands the concept of expression as a vital component of art, its undisputed indispensability – he drops the word twice – but without recognizing the very real and modern 'expressionism' blossoming the world over, including by an Indiana women in his own backyard – namely, Dorothy Morlan, his student and  Irvington neighbor. 

Perhaps an age old wisdom explains Forsyth's nearsightedness in this regard. Quoting the New Testament, Matthew 13:57, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town...”

In the October 28, 1916, Indianapolis News, it was reported that the Herron Art Institute had a Centennial Exhibition in honor of 100 years of Indiana statehood. Relics and antiques were shown as well as a gallery of Indiana artists. Dorothy Morlan's submission was a somber-colored picture called March, which was described as “poetic in feeling.”

On January 20, 1917, The Indianapolis News society page ran a lengthy column, “Many Indianapolis Women Have Gained Fame in State and Station with Brush and Chisel.” Perhaps it was inspired by or written in  response to Forsyth's article of a few months prior, to set the record straight, so to speak, or at least provide a female perspective on the  milieu of local women artists. 

The column is without by-line, and the identity of the editor, whether male or female is not readily known. But the mere fact that the article allows for the women to speak in their own words acts as a counter-point the Forsyth professorial tome.

Morlan's words provide an argument against Forsyth's notions of a generalized, communal and victorious art.

“Art is merely one kind of language for the expression of ideas. When we look at pictures or other works of art, we know something about the artist. If he is a landscape painter we know at once what he likes – the sort of thing that expresses, however imperfectly, his own temperament and outlook, for we are really seeking ourselves in nature, and we are bound to see unconsciously the thing that best expresses our own personal feeling.”

Morlan continues along the same lines, with an example, 

“The more intensely the artist feels, the more likely he is, as he approaches maturity, to seek expression by means of some one definite type. Take Rembrandt for example. Can anyone think of Rembrandt without immediately without recalling the wonderful concentration of light that is peculiar to him, and the atmosphere of mystery that permeates all his work? Why Rembrandt wouldn't be Rembrandt at all if he had followed fads and fashions in painting. Rembrandt expressed himself forcibly in one particular way, just as every great artist must – a powerful way that commands attention.”

About her particular obsessions, singularly revolving around the landscape, Morlan says,

“I am in love with the meeting place of earth and sky. I like best the kind of picture that suggests to me the bigness of the earth – that the sky has no boundary.  I love large and simple spaces. What could be finer than a deep shadow in the foreground, in fact spreading far over the landscape, simplifying everything within close range – then a gleam of sunlight illuminating the distant fields.  This is the sort of thing that makes me wild to paint – the sort of thing that I must attempt if I am to paint at all.”

Uncle Sam (and Lucille Morehouse) Says 'I Want You.'

Within a few months, the United States would join a world at war. 

Over the course of the year Morlan would continue to participate in local exhibitions, but would increasingly volunteer in support of war efforts; helping the U.S. Navy by knitting socks and scarves for sailors, and by donating art for auctions and designing  posters for the Red Cross.

As the holidays approached toward the end of the year, The Indianapolis Star on October 28, 1917, reported that local artists were holding a benefit exhibition with proceeds, in part, to support Indiana artillerymen. Artists contributing to the effort included Otto Stark, Carl Graf, William Forsyth and Dorothy Morlan, among others. 

 The following spring, the 11th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron is previewed in The Indianapolis News on March 9, 1918. New for that year, the exhibit would feature the grouped hanging of works by individual artists to facilitate better comprehension of the artists aims and style, etc.

Dorothy Morlan was only represented by only one large canvas in a side gallery according to a follow-up News review of the exhibit on March 16. The anonymous reviewer describes the picture as “one of her big open spaced landscapes, with a restful color scheme that is satisfying.”  Two days later in a review of the show by Lucille Morehouse of The Indianapolis Star on March 18, 1918, the critic highlights two noteworthy paintings by T.C. Steele, Christ Church, the Deep Snow and The Soldiers' Monument, Mid-Winter Afternoon.  She mentions many other artists and works, but is silent on Morlan, other than by mentioning her participation. 

It can be noted that the columns of Lucille Morehouse in The Star around this time begin with pleas for active patriotism. Such as in the same March 18 column, 'Woman Artists of Indiana are Urged to Aid Liberty Loan,' which begins with somewhat extreme propagandist jingoism as follows, 

“War work comes first. You women artists of Indiana who are busy with landscapes and portraits, with still life and flower studies, put aside your canvases for a brief time. You sculptors lay down your chisels... Your country calls...Your talents are in demand and you are called upon to help win the war.”  

And on on March 31, with a softer touch, but no less government-sponsored tone, Morehouse writes, 

“Here's a new way, and a commendable one, to sell Liberty bonds for Uncle Sam...Will you help? You who are public-spirited and have a few extra dollars in the bank, or dollars coming to you in your next pay envelope.” 

Morehouse goes on to describe that many artists at the 11th Indiana Artists exhibit have agreed to donate all sales proceeds to the Liberty bond effort, and she names then, one by one. Dorothy Morlan's name is not among them. 

It seems a tricky and unseemly business of Lucille Morehouse –  her list of patriots, and as a result the omission of others – which she tries to rectify by writing, “ ...the absence of a name from the above list does not mean that some other exhibiting artist may not be just as patriotic.”  

But such were the war times, when battle lines were drawn not only only on the fields of conflict, but between home-front factions as well.

The April 13, 1918 Indianapolis News reports that Morlan has traveled to New York for two weeks to attend two art shows; an Albert Ryder retrospective for the painter – deceased a year prior, and an exhibit of one hundred works by Rembrandt. 

We all know Rembrandt and Morlan's affinity for him by her direct remarks cited earlier, but it is interesting to study the work of Albert Ryder to ponder the crux of Morlan's appreciation for his work, and discover the threads that are woven between the tapestries of their visions – a subdued, yet dramatic, effect of light, the grand romance of an immense landscape and a personified approach to design and technique.

On April 21, Lucille Morehouse reports in her art column to The Indianapolis Star that local artists raised $500 for the purchase of Liberty bonds for the aid to “ many a returned soldier's comfort.” Dorothy Morlan's name was now among the lengthy 'who's who' of patriots.

Perhaps war efforts were prioritized by Dorothy Morlan, as documentation in the papers of her exhibitions and artworks was noticeably less over the following weeks and months. 

In a January 22, 1919, society page column in The Richmond Item,  'Work of Women Artists Constantly Gains Favor,' reports Dorothy Morlan's absence from a current Indiana Artists show. Esther Griffin White begins her article, 

“ The landscape phases of the current exhibit of Indiana art in the public art galleries are less interesting than the showing of portraits...due, perhaps, to the fact that some of the leading Indiana landscapists are not represented. Among those notable for their absence are...T. C. Steele, J. Ottis Adams...Dorothy Morlan...and others.”

On May 4, 1919, Lucille Morehouse, in a full page illustrated column in The Indianapolis Star reports on a new project utilizing local art talent to decorate several public schools in Indianapolis. Here again, Dorothy Morlan is noteworthy, not in her participation in the current project, but in her absence, only as a footnote, mentioned as one of many participants in the earlier City Hospital project from years prior.

Morlan's active exhibition and travel schedule of the 1910s had slowed by the end of the decade. The lapse would continue over the next few years as will be seen in the next installment of Dorothy Morlan's story in Part Three. 

Mark Diekhoff, July 2025

See Also

Irvington Historical Society

The Hermitage - Brookville, Indiana

Dorothy Morlan – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 1

Her Place in Time.

A trailblazing painter came of artistic age at the turn of a century, 125 years ago in Central Indiana. In the 1900s, the 1910s and into the Roaring Twenties and beyond, Dorothy Morlan tirelessly pursued a unique and evolving inspiration and nurtured a personal artistic vision that set her apart and ahead of even the most talented artists in Indiana during those times. Her paintings were expressionist, by both design and color, simultaneous with the formation of that 'official' artistic movement half the world away in Berlin and Paris. 

To place Dorothy Morlan in time, arguably the world's most famous and first modernist, Pablo Picasso, was almost an exact contemporary. He was born in 1881 and she in 1882.  Two American mavericks that also shared the year, plus or minus, of Morlan's birth are Arthur Dove and Rockwell Kent. The works of all these rogue and wandering personalities were expressive distillates of experimentation, innovation and ambition.  Their artworks were evocations of their individual psychologies made accessible and more generally relatable by some strange alchemic process of refined sensorial emphasis. In Morlan's specific case,  the visual simplification and enhanced colorization of something experiential and personal and overwhelming.   

These contemporaries were born at the tail end of the Civil War in America, and in the Europe, the Franco-Prussian War. Children of  battle scarred parents, coming of age  just before the Lost Generation would coalesce. They shared a momentous world unfolding with shocking events.  Buffeted by a series of cultural eruptions that affected society at large, yet burnished in an individual way by their own localized milieus of routine and  adventure, culture and life. 

Even if a world or a continent apart,  these artists shared a hectic and harrowing timeline, with careers beginning with the dawn of the 20th Century and its mechanized metamorphosis. Careers that would grow and be molded amid a sustained barrage of cataclysmic events, political chaos and revolutionary change. The death of empires, the globe's maps redrawn. In American, women's suffrage and an experiment in  Prohibition.  Then a planetary stock market crash, the birth of a cascading totalitarianism and great wars, over and over again. 

In the case of Picasso and Morlan, they both had painter fathers who introduced them to a creative world at an early age and were prodigies as a result. They each were equipped to perceive their times with a trained talent from the get-go. Quickly eclipsing their fathers and moving beyond their elders, and would push the limits of local traditions and forge a path forward and modern, into an age when tradition and boundary would cease to be. Picasso, the modernist in Europe, in Paris, the world's art capital, was among many fellow travelers. Dorothy Morlan, arguable the first modernist in Indianapolis, seemingly by herself.

Dorothy Morlan's Midwest and America was dominated by men. The Hoosier Group of painters, all men, reigned supreme in Indiana at the time. Their works were impressionist and naturalist and inspired by the European art of the mid to late 1800s, the 'in vogue' art of their youthful training. Dorothy Morlan's early study at her father's side, and then more formally, by two of these same Hoosier Group of men, seemed to combine the tried and true impressionist approach to the natural landscape as a foundation for her open and searching soul.  

Pioneering American women changed society as Morlan was to do with her art and her community. Simpatico, by all record, with the truly American notions of modernism, in the age of Henry Ford –  new ways to see, new was to express, new ways to be.

Inception of her modernist inclination.

Born in Salem, Ohio in 1882, Dorothy Morlan's family moved to Indiana in 1894 and settled eventually into a home in the 6000 block of Lowell Avenue in Irvington. 

In a biographical statement provided to Indianapolis Star art writer, Lucille Morehouse, in 1933, Miss Morlan indicates she aspired to paint pictures to follow in the footsteps of her father, an amateur artist, who had an art for art's sake love of  outdoor painting. She also credits her mother's artistic sensibilities of color and design as instrumental in her development. 

The artist's first landscape experiments were paintings on site of the fields of Irvington, among its beech trees and woodlands and aside Pleasant Run Creek. 

Her love of landscape would remain her artistic obsession throughout her career. It was an adoration within her from the start. The first public inklings of this devotion can be observed in newsprint rather than paint. In a remarkable written piece on the front page of Section 2 of the Sunday Indianapolis Journal dated  March 9, 1902,  Dorothy Morlan expresses poetically about 'The Last Day of February.' 

Her first published lines read,

“The morning has been dark. The sky lowering, with great cloud billows rolling onward like the waves of a restless sea.”

She continues to describe the transformation of the morning, as a  microcosm of the turn from winter to spring,

“...the wind grew less angry and a clear patch of blue appeared in the sky bound by folds of the purest white. In less than an hour the mighty wind was converted into a gentle south breeze and the clouds had all vanished except a few, white and rosy-tinted, which sailed like peaceful barks through a sky as clear and calm as a summer sea.”

For her readers, the minds' eyes are drawn from sky to earth, as Dorothy Morlan continues her painterly words,

“The meadows are rich with tones of brown. There stretches away in dim perspective a soft gray 

line of woods, which gradually becomes more faint until it almost merges into the horizon. Nearer, in a little grove, stand several rugged beeches, like sentinels, clad in last year's foliage.” 

At twenty years old, Dorothy Morlan was already a sensitive seer. And a published one at that! 

An art career was encouraged by both parents and she would ultimately receive training at John Herron Art School, c. 1906, instructed, most notably, by two Hoosier Group artists, as noted prior. 

Several autumns around this time were spent in Brookville, Indiana, known for its scenic river views, painting in vicinity of  J. Ottis Adams and his Hermitage retreat. Her crucial Herron painting teacher was William Forsyth, also her Irvington neighbor.  

Morlan would credit both Adams and Forsyth for the vital instruction and criticism they provided during her formative years.

She would further her art education with later instruction at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art at Philadelphia, and under famed artist Robert Henri in New York City. 

Active Progression – Dorothy Morlan in the 1900s.

It is said that Vincent van Gogh sold but one painting during his life. His 'Red Vineyard,' in a Brussels Belgium exhibit in 1890, toward the end of his life, was sold to artist/collector Anna Boch. It was the only documented sale of his work while he lived.

The Dorothy Morlan paper trail of sales and notoriety begins at the beginning of her career. In an early mention of her as an artist, just out of school,  J. W. Fox (the Herron Institute of Art Director) in the The Indianapolis News reports in his June 9, 1906 article on 'Three Important Art Exhibits of Summer.' He writes that Dorothy Morlan, among others, sold a landscape painting in the annual Herron exhibit. He went on to describe the the overall success of the school that year and the upcoming expansion into a new Herron classroom building for the fall. The name or the price of Morlan's artwork was not reported.

In an October, 15, 1906  society column in The Indianapolis News, it is noted that Dorothy Morlan will be spending several weeks in October and November in Brookville, Indiana, sketching and painting its environs. The same column, the following spring, advised on April 26, 1907, that Morlan would be spending two weeks in Plainfield, Indiana, sketching along White Lick Creek.

Opening June 11, 1907 in Richmond, Indiana, was an annual exhibit sponsored by the Richmond Art Association. Dorothy Morlan was one of many artists to participate and compete for prizes with her painting Bit of Whitewater Valley possibly painted the prior fall in Brookville.

The first art criticism of Dorothy Morlan's work is by, again, W. H. Fox in The Indianapolis News. On June 6, 1907, he comments on her landscape work exhibited at the most recent Herron exhibit, and also at shows in Vincennes, Indiana and Richmond. Presumable he is speaking of Bit of Whitewater Valley and another unnamed work when he says her paintings are “strongly individual compositions to which an excellent color sense is manifest.”

An anonymous art review in the June 21, 1907 edition of The Vincennes Commercial notes two Dorothy Morlan submissions, October and Summer in a first ever annual exhibit in that town. Saying October is  “...a painting that is felt and well drawn. The sky is a little cold and should be more sympathetic, but it has a lot of good atmosphere.” 

The annual Indiana Artists exhibit was held at Herron, in the new classroom building, and Dorothy Morlan had a painting included called The Willows  according to a December 1907 Indianapolis Star article. 

In a January 25, 1908, Indianapolis News anonymous article on the society page, Morlan's continuing success as an artist is reported in detail. 'Irvington Woman Wins Honor as an Artist' reports that Dorothy Morlan's aforementioned canvas The Willows had been accepted for inclusion in the 103rd Annual Exhibit of American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, at Philadelphia. The painting is described in detail by the unnamed writer. “It is marked by its composition and breadth of treatment. It was painted directly, and shows the spontaneity and charm of work thus produced. No doubt the style brought it favor in the eyes of the Philadelphia jury, as much of the work of leading artists  in the East is being done in this manner.” 

The writer goes on the explain Morlan's apparent method of finishing a work on site, and in one go, with no successive finishing sessions or retouching of the work. 

“The result is strength and vigor such as is striven for by the impressionist, yet obtained by an entirely different method.”  

According to the writer, Morlan's work is exclusively landscapes in oil, unusual for a woman at the time. 

In a February 8, 1908 review of the 12th Annual Society of Western Artists exhibit, in The Indianapolis News, W. H Fox once again writes about Dorothy Morlan, “...Sunny Morning in November deepens the impression made by her admirable Willows...” 

Fox adds about her technique, “...with a good color sense, original in composition, strong and free in her brush work, there is more than promise in this young artist.”   

Fox continues his words of admiration for Morlan, in a spirit of pride and boosterism befitting the director of the local art institute. He notes her rapid rise and heralds her 'arrival' on the local scene.

In what may have been a traveling exhibit of works by the Society of Western Artists members, Morlan showed her landscape painting A By Way – Brookville at the Brazil, Indiana High School Building in mid-February, 1908. Other artists included Hoosier Group artists T. C. Steele, Otto Stark, J.O. Adams, R. B. Gruelle and fellow female Emma King to name a few. 

Around this same time, the same Miss Emma King, artist, held a tea in her studio in downtown Indianapolis on East Market Street in honor of Dorothy Morlan. In the studio, bedecked with the paintings by Morlan and decorated with vases of daffodils, many guests, including Mrs. Ottis Adams, were in attendance.

A hyperactive and exuberant Indianapolis art scene can be imagined as reported in a March 1, 1908 Indianapolis Star article 'Society of Fakers Stirs Art Circles.' The column chronicles the burlesque exhibition of mad cap art students calling themselves The Western Society of Fakers.  In the show, Herron students mocked, pilloried and/or trolled their artistic elders by creating a wild variety of slapdash, slapstick visual artwork jokes.  Just to name a few outlandish examples from the very detailed article that mentions an exhaustive list, young Simon P. Baus, (and later Irvington Group member) created Winter Morning by J. Otiss Adams, 'a bunch of cotton pasted on a landscape.'  Cobb Shinn created  Sunny Brook by William Forsyth, showing a muddy pool with frogs and snakes. 

The fact of Morlan's 'arrival' as announced previously by W. H Fox  is further confirmed by the fact that her painting style was already a known commodity, like her well-established Hoosier Group forebears, and subject to the fakery of Sunday Morning in November by student Robert Collins.

The Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram reported on June 10, 1908 that Dorothy Morlan's painting Winter Wheat won an Honorable Mention prize in the 4th Annual Exhibit of the Richmond Art Association. 

In the July 4, 1908, edition of The Indianapolis News, Dorothy Morlan is discussed at length in an article with the lengthy headline 'Group of Young Artists Has Sprung Up Recently Whose Work Succeeds Along Individual Lines.' The column by Ruth Braden, reports that Morlan is one of few women who paint the landscape in oil, seconding an earlier observation about Morlan by a different writer. 

Braden writes that the wide out-of-doors is Morlan's preferred studio, year round, and that Morlan has had particular success in capturing winter moods on her canvases.  

About painting the natural scene close to home, Braden quotes Morlan, “The sky is always here – and always changing.”

In February 1909, an exhibit of paintings by Indiana artists was shown in the Columbus, Indiana Public Library. Dorothy Morlan submitted four works; 1. Spring, 2. Summer Sky, 3. The Hill and the Cloud, 4.  A Summer Landscape. Her prices ranged from  $35 to $50 and placed her asking price at about one-quarter to one-third of the going rate for works by the Hoosier Group artists also showing.  

Traveling exhibits of Morlan's work was reported in newspapers in Evansville, Lafayette and Muncie in the spring of 1909. 

Dorothy Morlan's first one-person show was anonymously announced and detailed in The Indianapolis News on November 9, 1909. The exhibit as described in the column “Work of Dorothy Morlan”  included twenty-two paintings, created over the prior two years, and was being shown at  the art gallery of B. H. Herman and Co. on North Pennsylvania Street in Indianapolis. 

Two paintings, Autumn Willows (aka The Willows) and The Ohio River in December had been recently exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, at Philadelphia. Four scenes of the Irvington area were captured in The Melting Snow, The Edge of the Village, The Winter Field and The Hill Road.

There was also a north-looking sketch of the canal at Thirteenth Street, in Indianapolis.

Two paintings created near Hanover, Indiana, were The  Valley and Across the Valley. 

Further paintings included were of Kentucky hills as seen from the Indiana shore of the Ohio River, winter fields, sky studies, and a not-to-be-missed canvas, A Hazy Afternoon in June.

The same show is reviewed in The Indianapolis Star by Roderick S. Munford in the Art and Artists column on November 18, 1909. He says of Morlan's work, generally, “...there is scarcely a picture of them all that is not done in a different manner that that of its fellows.” The overall impression from studying  her paintings “...all represent an intimate communion with nature.”

About the several Irvington scenes and mainly the more numerous studies of Southern Indiana along the Ohio River “with much sky and water in evidence”, Munford says, “Originality is a characteristic in the artist's method of handling.”  

The writer provides so much care and detail in his description of specific paintings in Morlan's show, that he will quoted at length as follows:

Melting Snow has been done with a sure hand, the patches of white over earth and the broken surface of a road being the chief points of interest in an interesting picture. The same bit of road appears again in The Hill Road. The latter is not as admirably balanced a piece of composition as the former, but it makes up by its charm of color, which is in harmony from the high sky line down to the foreground edge.

Indiana Fields and Sky Study are filled with air and sunlight and flying clouds and breathe throughout of the out-of-doors. These are only a few of Miss Morlan's pictures. Some are full of high color, some are lower in key; all are thoughtful and display the student as well as the artist.

And with that, the first decade of the 20th Century comes to a close. 

The New York Armory Show is still several years away. The modern art of Europe has not yet landed on American shores, but for Dorothy Morlan and the most adventurous of her artistic generation, the modern art moment had arrived.

Mark Diekhoff,  July 2025

Upcoming –  Part Two – Dorothy Morlan; Jazz Age Gem and the Turbulent Years

Indianapolis Painter Ed Sanders in the 1980s

Evening, Ed Sanders, oil on board
AWI Collection, orig. acquired from the exhibit Ed Sanders - New Works, FLUX,
October 2006

A Thousand Words on Ed Sanders, Indiana Artist

An Indy artist, par excellence.

My research into a trilogy of Indianapolis art topics led me to a dusty manila folder in the newspaper archive section of the Indiana State Library downtown. I was looking into the origins of the Indianapolis art scene I had joined in the 1990s. Specifically the Faris Building art enclave at 546 S Meridian Street, and its precedent boom on Mass Ave, and the larger context of the overall contemporary scene that gave birth to both.  

Cursory and initial research into these topics at the State Library revealed three articles relevant to my study, and a common thread among them. 

Nan Hoffman's October 19, 1986 Indianapolis Star 'Art World' column, “Downtown studios ideal work space, say artists” contains resident and founding artist interviews and is accompanied by a photo of the east-facing entrance of the massive Morris Building as it was known in the '80s along with artists in their studio spaces.

Steve Mannheimer's Indianapolis Star 'Art & Leisure' section front page column February 26, 1989, “A sharing of art, but not a school” opines about a group of local painters, who share a Herron training and an association with the by then established Massachusetts Avenue gallery scene. Exceptional talent, if not a cohesive artistic sensibility or creed, was a common feature of the group Mannheimer discussed.

Finally, Marion Garmel's Indianapolis News 'Free Time' section front page article “Critic likes what he sees in Indiana art” provides enthusiastic coverage of the current scene and specifically the 1990 Indiana Arts Competition hosted by American States Insurance at 500 North Meridian. Theodore F. Wolff, art critic for the Christian Science Monitor judged the competition. 

Ed Sanders looms large in all three write-ups.

Serious meat.

Ed Sanders was slightly apologetic about the small studio space he rented in the Morris Building in 1986. He tells Indianapolis Star writer Nan Hoffman he needed a bigger place but can't afford it. “Maybe one day I'll move into a place with more room, but what I like about this place is that it's very private and lets me go about my work very seriously.” 

Sanders talks about his art materials to Hoffman. Huge oil paintings on plywood, combined with spray paint, caulking materials and more exotic items.  One work contained a real fish. Sanders explanation?

“I coated it with a lot of varnish so it doesn't rot.  I hope it works. It didn't with my last meat painting.” 

Something in the way he painted.

Ed Sanders' 1989 solo show at 431 Gallery was something. Something of a pinnacle of artistic achievement for the painter. Something of the soon to be global zeitgeist of grunge. Something of an almost tornado spinning in a circles attempting to form. Something of a cautionary tale. Whatever its something, it inspired Steve Mannheimer to write a column among his very best.

Mannheimer writes about what he sees as the show's most successful work Torso.  

“Tradition figure studies delineate bold musculature or delicate curve, express the vitality of gesture or sensuous grace. None of that for Sanders. He topples the torso...truncating the trunk, chopping the arms and spilling its guts out on the table.”

The strange workings of the light in Sanders' Torso (and other paintings) bedevils Mannheimer. He thinks out loud when he tries to explain the disconcerting effect. 

“Sanders paints a shrouded world, drenched in night or ashes. And the mass of shapes is too thickly painted and repainted, colored and recolored to allow any simple specific reading.”  

Mannheimer imagines an alternate read of the painting, if rolled on its side 90 degrees (like Sanders has  toppled his Torso).

“...the viscera bloom as flowers in a char-broiled Chagall. And like Chagall, Sanders' compositions float in a fog of melancholy...”

Mannheimer continues to reason with the dark and weight-less peculiarity of Sanders' work.

“As palpable and heavy, as grossly physical as these subjects are...no innate sense of gravity anchors them...Buoyed by the darkness, these subjects float across a range of interpretations.”  

And further, “These paintings hit the viewer like a punch in the face. The piled-up and scraped-down paint coagulates in oily, polychromed scabs.  If anything weighs upon these subjects, it is moral exhaustion. They collapse, not so much in defeat as in deflation.”    

The destabilizing impact and power of the paintings unleashes in Mannheimer thoughts beyond Sanders, his subjects, or his paintings. Mannheimer's thoughts are drawn to a negligent Indianapolis, careless or blindingly unaware of art treasures in its midst. Despite the anguished and existential screams of its best talents, despite a purported bridge to somewhere, a land-locked city sleeps.

“Indianapolis may not exactly be oblivion, although it has too often appeared oblivious to artists like Sanders.” 

A Two for Won.

Although Steve Mannheimer was reticent to declare a contemporary 'school' or identifiable movement in the Indianapolis art scene of a little over a year prior, Indianapolis News columnist Marion Garmel declared such an arrival in her column in the summer of 1990. Her remarks were based on the critical success and growing reputation of group of working artists, mostly Herron grads from the early '80s, who had exhibited at a by then defunct Lyman & Snodgrass Gallery, and the artist-operated 431 Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue. Their new association was the recently formed Indiana Artists' Forum which had a show of work at the new Hindman Gallery at Geist.

The best among them were represented in the exposition '1990 Indiana Arts Competition' at the American States Insurance Company headquarters downtown. 

About the Indiana art he chose,  the show's judge, Thomas F. Wolff of the Christian Science Monitor, said that the work “would hold up well almost anywhere.” The resulting exhibition he describes as “of very real quality, range and depth. I am particularly pleased with the award winners.”

In a personal conversation with Wolff, Garmel quotes the the judge about his unusual selection of not one, but two paintings, as best of  show. Both were by Ed Sanders.  Wolff said simply, “he's a cut above.”  It is an interesting way to describe an artist, head above the rest, one of whose winning paintings was the infamous, dismembered Torso. 

Through a desert in a school with no name.

Marion Garmel seems intent on naming the unifying feature of the high and rising Indy art movement she proclaims in 1990. She seems at a loss for words though. She names not what its members share, but what they avoid. No easy, no cutesy, no bland, she sums up, about those invited to Wolff's party. It's almost a punch line about the prior movements of Kelly, Warhol and Judd or the future AI photoshop age, but she makes the point.  

Suffice to say, it's a difficult business – the discovery, the elucidation and the coining of 'schools.'

Steve Mannheimer wrestled with the same damned predicament in his Ed Sander's Torso column. It's like he yearned for the perfect word to describe all the great Sanders-like artists around.  He did a good job wondering about their “gritty edge of despair,” their “hands-in approach to the paint,” their “sense of hooded light in cramped spaces,” and their “grappling with uncertain personal metaphors.”  Mannheimer is brilliant here, and unparalleled, in his writing on this subject. 

The searching words of his fretful dissertation could  end with the maxim he used at the start of the column. His early words say it perfectly.

“Before there is history and before there are styles, there are individual artists like Ed Sanders mucking about with that oily aroma on their clothes and canvases.”  

And whether or not history will recall, or for how long, oil paint always smells the same.  

Mark Diekhoff,  July 2025

See also: Ed Sanders - Life and Art  - partial catalogue of 2014 posthumous retrospective at Herron School of Art and Design 

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