The Epic Dramas of Artist Elmer Taflinger – Act Two

Phantasm, Elmer E. Taflinger, pastel, 1928
offered as a prize in costume competition

Experience and Innocence.

That a struggle continued for Elmer Taflinger upon his return to Indianapolis in the 1920s is made evident by one of the earliest prizes his artwork earned upon his return.  Recall that Bridgman warned him to teach no more than a year at a time, to save room in his art life for pure creation. An admonishment to hold dear 'art for art's sake,' as opposed to other more mercantile pursuits. That teeter-totter between commission and creation, plan and serendipity, between Beelzebub and the Bible.

The March 9, 1926 Richmond Item newspaper announced the award winners at the 2nd Annual Hoosier Salon held at Marshall Field galleries in Chicago. Among the creators and winners was Wayman Adams and his masterpiece, the shows outstanding picture, The Art Jury. Also included was T. C. Steele and his beautiful The Hill Country – Brown County.

Elmer Taflinger was represented with the prize winning commission or study, Over Blackboard decoration for European History classroom.  Unfortunately, no description of the work is provided, but its title is as snooze-inducing as a lecture on the Reformation. 

During this time, Taflinger continued to pursue teaching as well. Beginning in 1927, he instructed night classes in figure drawing at the Circle Art Academy in Indianapolis, the teaching atelier of George and Gordon Mess. By 1929, he ended his association the brothers and their art school, as explained in a news article in The Star in June, 1929, although no reason was provided for the separation of ways.

Taf would soon set up his own school, teaching in his studio on the top floor of the Pierce Building, downtown, and then when he changed locations, at his 14th Street studio in the stable house of the Indianapolis Propylaeum.  

Meanwhile, art direction continued to call upon Taflinger's experience and attention as can be noted in in his contribution of decorative figurative pastels for the Indiana Artists' Club Annual Costume Ball at Herron Art Museum in April 1928. 

The first inklings in newsprint of Taflinger's somewhat manipulative and self-promoting inclinations begin to bubble to the surface of public awareness in the late 1920s as he approached the age of thirty. A tabloid persona of sturm und drang began to dominate his coverage in the papers, rather that the beauty or genius of his art.  

Whereas most other local artists would seem content to create art and enter exhibitions, and let the coverage, awards and sales fall where they may, Taflinger began to juggle his creative impulses and esoteric concerns in a very public way, with a  series of wobbly PR stunts, theatrically delivered by a cast of alter egos such as the faux innocent and the learned scribe. 

An example of Taflinger's coy provocation is demonstrated by the mini-firestorm of coverage generated by his attempt to enter nude artworks into the Indiana State Fair art competition in 1927.  An Indianapolis Star article in November recounts an ongoing saga of several months by then. A contest of wills between, on the one hand, an out-of-town juror, a gentleman artist from Chicago, finding the work meritorious, worthy of not only inclusion, but the grand prize. And on the other, the common sense of a local delegation of ladies, the state fair woman's board, upholding the moral decency of the fair-going public, and their children. 

The ladies' ban of the nudes would prevail, which opened the door for Taflinger to kick at a  hornet's nest of his own construction. A war, not on the battlefield of prudishness as Taflinger would have us believe, but on the grounds of a common sense modesty,  entirely justified and predictable for the venue and the time. He would wire a press release from New York, to keep stirring the pot, and to have the last word,

“Elmer E. Taflinger...had a canvas accepted for display in the winter exhibition of the National Academy of Design... New York.   

A telegram received last evening by Mr. Taflinger stated that his oil painting...Studio Interior...has been hung in the first gallery (of the exhibit).

Studio Interior is...an interior with nude figure, full length and about one-third life size.  Half sitting, half reclining, the slender form of a young woman gleams like a pearly-tinted  flower in a dark red calyx, as the round-backed seat on the which the figure is posed is draped with red velvet...

It is of interest to know that...(Studio Interior)...was entered at the state fair this fall and was so much admired by (a) judge (from) Chicago that he decided to give it the prize of $100 as outstanding picture...Acting in opposition to the judge's decision, the woman's board of the state fair...decided that the picture could not be hung because it was a painting of the nude.

...Taflinger...entered four nude subjects at the state fair, two oil paintings and two charcoal drawings, all of which were thrown out, much to the regret of the artist-judge from Chicago.” 

In an Indianapolis News article dated December 3, an unnamed writer reports Taflinger's Studio Interior and its inclusion in the current National Academy of Design show in New York, along with Indianapolis sculptor Myra R. Richards. The column contains a large photograph of Richard's slightly cubist, clearly modernist, portrait bust, titled Judge Napoleon Taylor. Again, no surprise, Hoosier modesty prevailed, an no photograph of Studio Interior is printed. 

A first impression of another trick up Taflinger's sleeve is rolled out in the same art column. His alter ego, as not only purist-pretending provocateur,  but as learned sage. Over time, it would also be a recurring trope, as we shall see.

The anonymous News writer dutifully reports to the Fine Arts page readers that,  

“At present Mr. Taflinger is carrying out researches in perspective begun during his trips to Europe.  He is convinced that the Greeks and Romans knew laws of perspective that have been lost, and that some of the early Italian masters had an inkling of the forgotten methods. His work for several years has been devoted to experimentation along original lines.”

Taflinger on the verge of turning common lead to elusive gold. If we buy into his words – hook, like and sinker – he's privy, or nearly so, to a long lost DaVinci code. But alas, the Bible says, a tree is known by its fruit. 

Art Milieu Multi-Tasking.

As the the 1920s would wind down, as the stock market would crash, Elmer Taflinger continued his multifaceted art career. 

That he continued to toil and perfect his touch at nude drawings is documented in Lucille Morehouse's remarks on his works as displayed in the 22nd Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron Museum.  Her column in The Indianapolis Star on March 17, 1929, observes,

“Elmer E. Taflinger is represented with two admirable studies in charcoal of the nude figure.  One is a female figure, reclining on a couch, the pose one of graceful relaxation. The other is a male figure, also in reclining posture but posed so that muscles are tense, while legs and arms are flexed,  so there are difficult problems of foreshortening, all of which have been skillfully solved by Mr. Taflinger.

If all painters of the figure had Mr. Taflinger's knowledge of anatomy and his skills as a draughtsman, I am guessing that there would not be so much resorting to distortion of the human figure under the plea of allying one's self with the modernistic school.” 

Taflinger was teaching drawing and painting out of his studio and presenting at least one public exhibition that September, Original Drawings by George B. Bridgman, as verified by a newspaper ad dated August 31, 1929. 

That Taflinger continued to make phone calls or whip out press releases to keep his name in the papers seems possible, when he was mentioned in passing in an Indianapolis Times front page bleed-leading snippet, 'Lives Periled When Storm Sweeps City – Scaffolding is Hurled from Circle Tower.'  A harrowing storm is reported to have blown through downtown Indianapolis on November 27, 1929,

“(A) storm...endangered hundreds of downtown pre-holiday shoppers...as it toppled a section of elevator shaft scaffolding from the new Circle Tower, under construction at Market street at Monument Circle...

One timber fell into the studio of Elmer Taflinger, on top of the Vinton-Pierce building east of the circle tower. Another shattered a plate glass window in a neighboring candy shop.”

During roughly the same period, Taflinger was art director for a local costume ball, as reported in the March 22, 1930 Indianapolis News, 

“ A gay Chinese setting will greet members of the Indiana Artists Club and others attending the seventh annual artists' ball to be given March 29 on the roof garden of the Hotel Severin.  The elaborate decorations planned by Elmer Taflinger, former theater art director, will call for almost 10,000 square feet of paper, which will be used to decorate the walls and ceiling of the roof garden and transform it into a Chinese ballroom.” 

 

Shame and Stigmata – The Thomas Hart Benton Affair.

Deciphering the Taflinger Code, a numerologist may expect the number 33 to reign significant as a clue. And so it was,  in the first month of 1933, on the ninth day (3 times 3), on a front page that announced in bold headline,  'McNutt to Become 33rd Governor Today,' that Elmer E. Taflinger would land himself, above the fold, on page one, section one, of The Indianapolis Star. 

He shared the honor with not only Indiana's new governor, but a swindling young banker from Rushville, who embezzled thousands from his employer and fled, only to be caught cross the state line in Kentucky. Also on the front page were the Chinese, having been bombed by the Japanese at their Jehol province. And below the fold, but still page one, a former alley cat, Big Boy, who bested all the other pedigree pussycats to win the blue ribbon at the 12th Annual Heart of America Cat Society show.

Taflinger's news, though, was not your run-of-the-mill political, crime, war or underdog reporting. It was more I the vein of man bites dog. 

as appearing in the Indianapolis Star, January 9, 1933

The prominent article in the center of of page one includes a photograph of Taf, splattered in paint, about to pounce at a banal-looking portrait canvas, locked-and-loaded paintbrush in his hand. The piece is sub-headed with an info-dump teaser, 'Prominent Local Artist Brands Awarding to New Yorker of State's World Fair Work as Disgrace to Hoosiers,' and reads, direct from a court petition filing penned by Elmer Taflinger, 

“Indiana artist is a term recognized as identifying Hoosiers of the brush and easel as nationally eminent in their profession, but in their own commonwealth of Indiana it amounts only to a stigma as far as state officials are concerned.”

The article goes on in further explanation,

“Elmer Taflinger, noted Indiana artist, makes this charge in an unusual petition which will be filed in the Marion Circuit court this morning. 

He asks that the court 'change the place of his nativity.'  In other words, he believes he can get further in his profession, at least in Indiana, if no one is able to prove that he was born here.

He offers in evidence the fact that Thomas Hart Benton of New York was given the contract by Richard Lieber, director of the state conversation department and head of the Indiana world's fair commission, to paint the murals at the Chicago fair depicting the history of this state.”

Taflinger goes on to argue that countless Indiana artists possess all the necessary and various talent needed to be awarded and to complete the world's fair project in an exemplary manner. He complains that the commission's decision was not an open process, and the result is similar to when local artists were shut out of the running for the World War Memorial plaza in Indianapolis and the George Rogers Clark memorial in Vincennes. Both those projects lacked Hoosier artist participation, which drew Taflinger's observation that “the only thing provided by Indiana was the dirt.”  

A couple of weeks later, Thomas Hart Benton offers a good-humored reply, from the busy workshop of his makeshift mural studio at Germania Hall on Delaware Street. The front page of the second section of the Indianapolis Times, January 25, 1933, begs in its headline 'Let's Have an Artists' Truce.' In the pictorial article with several photos of the artist and his preparatory work, a sub-headline declares 'Indiana's World Fair Muralist Prefers Work to War.'

Thomas Hart Benton, as appearing in The Indianapolis Times, January 25, 1933

The article by Times writer Arch Steinel plays up the controversy instigated by Taflinger's lawsuit stunt, and reports in part as follows,

“Benton waved the olive branch today at other Indiana artists. They have criticised his appointment by the department of conversation to the post of mural decorator for the Indiana building at the Chicago world's fair. 

...Benton tried to put all of the green apples of envy back into the barrel, offering to use students of his chief critic, Elmer E. Taflinger, to aid him in squaring up and doing preliminary work on his murals. Sure, I'm going to use some of Taft's pupils. Why not? He's a good fellow, even if he does want to change his birthplace through a court suit just because I was awarded the job. He can come down and help me himself if he wants to.”

Steinel writes about Benton's worries about the hubbub surrounding his assignment,

“His main worry is not the envy or the criticism clouding the state over his appointment, but the time he's got to do it in.”

Other local critics and artists joined Taflinger in complaining in the papers about Thomas Hart Benton, the carpet-bagging, out-of-town expert, who would have the last laugh as the masterpiece of his monumental mural-making would make him a household name and take the world by storm. 

We shall see in Part Three of this series, that like Thomas Hart Benton, Taflinger would create his own mural one day, and plan another one grander in scheme, but left undone.  

Finally, though, near the end of his life, he would tirelessly pursue a three-dimensional mural of sorts – a grand assemblage of earth art, found object and landscape. A massive and towering final work. With the mathematical precision  of its symmetry and the romantic splendor of its titans in stone, we see a culmination of Taflinger's artistic impulses resolved finally, and at rest.   

Both his stigma and his badge of honor – his Ruins at Holliday Park.

Mark Diekhoff, October 2025

The Epic Dramas of Artist Elmer Taflinger – Act One

Elmer E. Taflinger at his Ruins at Holliday Park, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1976

Overture  –  The Riddle of Elmer Taflinger.

It's not often that an artist makes the front pages of the newspaper. Perhaps the front page of the Living section, or Arts and Entertainment or even the Sunday Magazine insert, but not the front page of a city daily paper.

The Indianapolis artist, Elmer E. Taflinger, was to accomplish this rare feat, not once but twice, mirrored at both ends of his long career, once above the fold, and once below – a comedy at the beginning, a tragedy at the end. 

In between the bookends of his page one coverage, Taflinger developed a persona as a rollicking genius and an outspoken provocateur, acting the part in the local art cosmos of know-it-all, of spoilsport, of jester.  Even while speaking truth to power, and earning, eventually, the title of grand old man of arts, there was a bit of P.T. Barnum to his guru.  His showy burlesque, his public apotheosis, seemingly his every word, a proclamation, or a riddle. In his later years Taflinger was covered by the press in a series of articles, snippets and lengthy spreads, crossing the genres of straight news, society reporting, art world and human interest. 

A life story told in newsprint, with the symbolic depth of a holy book or fairy tale, recited in a series of satyr plays  (to belabor the Greek drama metaphor),  of a man who had seen it all, and lived most of it too. The many exploits of Elmer Taflinger, starring Taf or Taffy, depending on the episode.

E.T. was often photographed, in character, wielding a cane or umbrella like a scepter, the magic power of pointing and prodding. With ever-present French beret askew upon his head, a bundle of out-of-this-world ideas wrapped in a bulky Columbo overcoat.  His omnipresent image, accompanied by his omnivorous quotes –  his dialog proclaiming secret revolutions and revelations to come.  He spins a lop-sided yarn – his gravitas teeters with mischief.  He plays the king's fool – teasing, mocking, trolling and throwing shade.  

Of his crowning glory, Taflinger says in old age, not his Ruins, his concept made real in the 1970s, but his Green Goddess, his painting perfected, decades before. Which begs the not so serious, yet mysterious questions, perhaps befitting a lengthy Sunday magazine newspaper pictorial; which came first, the salad dressing or Taflinger's self-important painting? And what became of either, in the end? 

Both may have been inspired by The Green Goddess, a popular stage play (and later silent movie), in the early 1920s. The delightful condiment was conceived and born at San Francisco's Palace Hotel in 1924 in honor of the play's starring actor, George Arliss. It gained nationwide popularity and was eventually sold coast to coast on grocery shelves. When Kraft bought Seven Seas in 1987, it was lost in the merger, disappeared, and has been largely forgotten. 

And what of Taflinger's painting of the same name, his Green Goddess? He mentions its preeminence in his ouervre in a late interview in 1970. At that time the painting was still in his possession, in a place of honor, in his spacious studio in the carriage house on the Indianapolis Propylaeum grounds.  Now, it is mentioned obliquely in the artist's personal papers, housed in the archive rooms of the Smithsonian Institute. Studies for the elusive masterpiece are cataloged, locked away and gathering dust, according to the museum's index. But his prized picture, the canvas itself?  Whereabouts unknown. Lost in a black hole of phased-out mid-century flavors. 

In late life, Taf spoke of a newfound obsession – writing – his love of sentences and words. He spoke  of an autobiography he was completing to contain his findings and his methods. But his alchemic recipe book remained unpublished. He took those secrets to his grave. 

To unravel his mystery,  maybe, is to look at the life of Elmer Taflinger, his grand tableau of ruins. The haphazard and often comical clues of his paper trail. The actor in a mirror – as reflected in the papers.  His stage, both regal and wrecked.  His performance, idiosyncratic yet always in-character. His fabled tale, an epic, Quixotic, mumbo jumbo of a quest, that spanned the globe.  From Indiana to Florence, Italy.  New York to Mexico. Minneapolis to, well, back to Indiana for the final act.

His back home again deus ex machina, curtain call, and final bow. His three colossi. The enduring epitaph of his philosophy in stone at Holliday Park. 

Curiosity of Beelzebub, Take One.

Elmer Edward Taflinger was born in Indianapolis in 1891. He describes his early years in several lengthy newspaper articles beginning in 1970 when he was 79 years old.

Taflinger would wax on endlessly, well not poetic,  more like chaotic, first with Lloyd B. Walton in a flashy pictorial article in the Sunday magazine supplement to The Indianapolis Star titled “Tradition Arts Advocate” on August 3, 1970. He would elaborate, obfuscate and simply repeat himself in additional articles over the next few years.  Marion Garmel's Indianapolis News two-pager “A Man of All Arts” on December 18, 1974. And then Thomas E. Ketchum's “...Long Illustrious Career,” an Indianapolis Star piece dated April 4, 1976, that included the rare, at the time, color photo in the paper, and the artist's large fanciful autograph as banner to the column. And finally Lloyd B. Walton, taking a second bite of the Taflinger, in a bizarre and confusing magazine spread called “Solving the Mystery of the Murat” in the October 27, 1979 Sunday Star.

Taflinger tells us, as a boy, he survived innumerable close calls to death, including two near drownings and an attack from a scythe-wielding gypsy. Of the water mishaps he explained to Thomas Ketchum, succinctly, as if obvious to all, “once I followed a duck down and once I slipped on a sewer pipe.” 

One will come to recognize Taflinger's signature verbal sleight-of-hand of his story telling.  Look here, sensational, the rabbit from the hat. All the while, something crucial, not noticed, out of focus, left unsaid. A wink or a nod that suggests maybe it's all bullshit.  

About the gypsy-slashing, in the same Ketchum article, Taflinger tells a bloody tale sure to leave readers scratching their heads, and maybe clutching their ankles, 

“My mother scolded me one day when I was four for trampling her flower garden. A few days later I saw a gypsy cutting flowers at a neighbor's house and I started cussing him out because I knew he wasn't supposed to do that.”

Elmer in his own words – a quick-learner at the blame game – a busybody – a dirty-mouthed four-year-old – blaming the down-the-street hired help.

“He nearly cut my ankle off with a scythe, then I almost lost it to gangrene, and I had to learn to walk all over again.”   

Ahhh the magic of Taflinger's tongue...losing his foot twice and a divine miracle in the span of one  sentence. 

It's no wonder that such an excitable boy would find himself in trouble come around Christmas time, as he recalled in a December 25, 1975 column called 'Thoughts of Christmas Past' in The Indianapolis Star.  Taflinger remembers his Christmas morning from 81 years prior, again in that magic fourth year of life,

“They (his parents, Santa Claus, whoever) removed every piece of furniture from the parlor except the stove, and in the middle of the room they left a bundle of switches. Back then, you had to accumulate a lot of good deeds or you wouldn't get anything you wanted for Christmas and that year I got good too late.”

About his first forays into art, Taflinger tells the same basic story over and over among the various articles.

His family owned a beautiful Bible, an 18 pound marvel, full of illustrations by Gustav Dore. 

As a child, he would lay flat on the floor on his stomach and pore over the amazing images. He's quoted in the Ketchum story, about the pictures he'd see at school and the pictures in the family Bible,

“I didn't like the pictures they had at school. I didn't understand a lot of the Bible pictures. Some of them even scared me, but they intrigued me. I'd lie on the floor with my pet cat Beelzebub curled up next to me and stare at them. That Bible had everything but pink lemonade.”

Beelzebub and pink lemonade.  Ol' Taf strikes again.

He learned to think in pictures, as a result of that Bible.  But where did he learn to talk in riddles? 

He had an eighth-grade teacher, Katherine McLaughlin. She recognized his talent and boosted his interest in art. 'His downfall,' he said, about either McLaughlin or art.  

About Mclaughlin, Taflinger recalls in the Ketchum piece,

“I won (an) art contest because my teacher was good-looking. The prettier my teacher, the better my grades.”

Miss McLaughlin suggested Otto Stark's art class at Manual High School. Once enrolled, Mr. Stark  also noticed young Elmer's talent and dissuaded the boy's planned math studies at Purdue with the strong suggestion that he attend the Art Students League in New York. The young Taflinger took Stark's advice, as Marion Garmel writes in the fore-mentioned column,

“(Taf)...boarded a train at Union Station with his mother's fried chicken in a George J. Marott shoe box and carried the chicken uneaten all the way to New York. He was 16 ½ years old.” 

The moral of our hero's early story – a clever boy does not live on chicken alone.

Elmer Taflinger at 21 years old

Show Biz Years, Brush with the Greats.

Elmer Taflinger's first taste of the theater business happened while he was still a boy studying drawing in high school and delivering papers for the Indianapolis News. A young man of many interests, he was 'enthralled' with the theater, as he is quoted in The Star's Ketchum interview in 1976.  Taf took on a second job as a stage hand at English's Opera House on the Circle in Indianapolis, and was paid 50 cents a show. 

By 1910, when the newly constructed Murat Theatre in Indianapolis opened and presented its first show, Havana, on February 28, he was 18 years old, and employed there as a prop assistant.

Taflinger was assigned the odd job of running an errand for the play's star, James T. Powers, after the comedian appeared pale and hung-over after the show's first matinee, and needed a hot meal shuttled over from a nearby restaurant. The episode would eventually take on mythic proportions as a mystery in Taf's mind, that he would mull over and finally solve some seventy years later. 

Taf's Holy Grail was that the pale hang-over was a result of the beginning of what would evolve into a several decade's long series of practical jokes, back and forth, between James Powers and Booth Tarkington, as revealed in Powers' memoir. Taf had stumbled upon the book in the library as an old man. 

Taflinger declares his enlightenment regarding the affair over several pages of a Sunday magazine spread in The Indianapolis Star authored by Lloyd B. Walton. Frankly, it comes across as 'much ado...,' at worst, or 'you had to be there,' at best.

On November 10,1912, in a short news notice in The Indianapolis Star,  Elmer Taflinger is shown in a photograph. He appears handsome and emotionless above the news about his studies in New York,

“Elmer Taflinger, 21 years old...was one of the winners in the students' art exhibit held in the Wanamaker galleries in Philadelphia last week. Mr. Taflinger was reared in Indianapolis and received his first instruction in drawing under Otto Stark, drawing instructor at Manual Training High School. He is entering on his second year in the Students' Art League in New York, preparing as an illustrator. His work, Pen Se, which won in the Eastern exhibit, was the subject of much comment among the critics.”    

Rekindling his employment in show business, in New York City, Taflinger's burgeoning career in theater art direction is detailed by Marion Garmel in her December 18, 1974 column in The News,

“For more than six years Taf studied at the Art Students League and maintained a succession of studios that became home to every Indiana artist visiting New York City . Then in 1914 he fell into a job as Belasco's art director...”

David Belasco had a popular theater in New York in his name, Belasco Theater. He is remembered for the innovative lighting effects of his productions.

“Taflinger designed costumes and sets for Belasco, scouted plays, collected props...even designed some of the elaborate effects....”

For eight years, without a vacation, Taflinger worked for Belasco. He fled to Europe for a much needed  and overdue escape from the grind. He would eventually return to New York, not to his job at Belasco, but for continuing studies at the Art Students League, where he would meet George Bridgman. 

Given the direction of Taflinger's subsequent painting and drawing, Bridgman's influence on him seems to have been immense. 

About Bridgman, Garmel quotes Taflinger, 

“When Bridgman had taught me all he could he said, okay, I was ready to go out and teach but I shouldn't teach more than one year at a time if I wanted to stay a producing artist.”  

It appears, we shall see, in Act Two, that this was advice Taf chose to ignore.

Taflinger as an art director, c. 1930

Mark Diekhoff, September 2025

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.

Constance Coleman Richardson – Indiana's Edward Hopper?

Street Light (now called Streetlight), Constance Coleman Richardson, 1930
collection Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields

A  Painting with Staying Power.

During recent deep-dive research into the artistic life and times of Irvington's Dorothy Morlan, the painter I believe to be Indiana's first modernist painter, I came across another artist, also a modernist,  also from Irvington, a female as well, but from the next generation, and a mesmerizing painting by her hand. While in the book Skirting the Issue by Newton and Weiss, the most comprehensive source on Indiana's women artists, and learning about some artists associated with Morlan's career, namely Emma B. King, Lucy Taggart, Helene Hibben and Winifred Adams, I came across this uniquely captivating picture by Constance Coleman Richardson, Street Light. 

It was only later I recalled a conversation with Irvington landscape painter William B. Lawson, who some months or perhaps a year prior had mentioned an interesting painting he had enjoyed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.  He spoke of the same painting, Street Light, which depicted a nocturnal street scene in northside Indianapolis.  

Edward Hopper's name comes up when Constance Coleman Richards is mentioned online.  They hang together in the Newfields collection in the American Painting  room. I was familiar with his work, but not hers. Street Light would be my starting place. 

She painted the early work in 1930, and it was appreciated immediately upon its initial exhibition in 1931 at the Indiana Artists exhibition at Herron. The picture remains perhaps the most celebrated canvas of the artist's long career. It was also to demonstrate Coleman Richardson's affinity toward a soothing, grounding light or environment, in particular focus in Street Light, that would anchor her figures to their place in the world, even if the place was dark or even if they were alone. It was a signature characteristic in many of her works throughout the 1930s and beyond.

Coleman's Early Life and Irvington.

Constance Coleman was born in 1905 in Berlin, Germany, to mother Juliet Brown Coleman and father Christopher B. Coleman.

Her mother, Juliet, was granddaughter to Jacob B. Julian, one of the founders of Irvington as a village on the eastern outskirts of Indianapolis in the 1870s. The town was named after Washington Irving, a favorite author of Mr. Julian. The initial residence he had built there, one of the first in the area, was a Second Empire gem at 29 S. Audubon. Unfortunately, the stately period piece was razed in the 1950s to make way for an apartment building.   

Her father, Christoper B. Coleman, was educated at Yale, the University of Chicago and Columbia, earning degrees from all three including a PhD in history. He was employed in the history department and then as a vice president at Butler University from 1900 through 1919, when the college was still in Irvington. During that time, Mr. Coleman furthered his education with studies in Germany, at which time Constance, his first child, was born. The family would return to Irvington in 1906 where they would remain until 1920 at which time Mr. Coleman took a job heading the history and political science department at Allegheny College, presumably in Pennsylvania.

Constance Coleman would be educated at the Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, around the time of her fathers stint at Allegheny, and then at Vassar College in New York and finally at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art. While she was at Vassar, her father and family had returned to Indiana when he accepted the first of several positions with the State of Indiana from 1924 through 1942; director of the State Historical Bureau, secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, and director of the Indiana State Library. 

Mr. Coleman would publish several books and give many public lectures over the years demonstrating a wide-ranging interest in local, national and world history. Subjects included archaeology of Indian mounds, the history of Sunday School in the United States and the 'spurious,' his description, Constantine the Great. 

Miss Constance Coleman would be noted in the society pages of the Indianapolis papers often during the time of her education, artistic debut and marriage in the early 1930s.  Indeed, in 1925, an AP wire story reported that while at Vassar, Coleman was among twenty-four beautiful sophomores taking part in an annual commencement day ritual at the college. She, and the other girls, would bear a 300-foot daisy chain of woven flowers and mountain laurel in a decorative procession to escort graduates on their special day.

By 1930, with school behind her, she would have her first major exhibit, in Philadelphia, and create her first major painting, Street Light.

A Transformative and Festive Period (Despite the Market Crash).

Constance Coleman began a remarkable period of personal and artistic change just months after the great stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.  The times were anything but depressing for Miss Coleman though, if you read her news clippings from 1930, the year the artist and her art debuted to the wider world.  Her personal life was filled with festivities and travel, and as her courtship deepened with a young art historian from Detroit, Michigan, Edgar Richardson, who she had met while she studied in Philadelphia.

The January 31, 1930, Indianapolis News reported that Miss Coleman had two paintings accepted for display at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The pictures included were Crescendo and The Bridge Party. The next day, The Indianapolis Times ran a similar news item that provided the detail of Miss Coleman's current studio at the D.A.R. chapter house (Daughters of the American Revolution) at 824 N. Meridian in Indianapolis, and mentioned the submitted work The Bridge Party had been on display at the prior Indiana Artists show at Herron Art Institute. It also described the other picture, Crescendo, as depicting gladiolas in the various states of unfolding.

Miss Coleman attended a lavish costume ball on the rooftop garden of the Hotel Severin in downtown  Indianapolis on March 29th. The annual event was sponsored by the Indiana Artists Club and required fancy dress, and had décor designed by artist Elmer Taflinger with an Asian theme that year. Two art students, Miss Margaret Cornell and Miss Katheryn Peden, were photographed in their opulent outfits for a preview of the event on the society page of The Indianapolis News on March 15, in a demonstration of glamorous extravagance, despite any economic slowdown or tough times. 

Over the summer, Miss Coleman spent a few weeks at Rock Point on Vermont's Lake Champlain  according to an August 7, Indianapolis News society notice. 

Both Miss Coleman and her future husband Mr. Richardson attended a dinner party to honor Spanish artist, Jose Drudis-Biada, who was traveling from an exhibition of his paintings in Chicago to Los Angeles for another exhibit. The dinner with sizable guest-list was held in the Green Room at the Spink Arms Hotel also in Indianapolis. 

Constance Coleman (at the time) with Street Light (1930)
at Indiana Artists Exhibit at Herron, 1931  (source Indpls Star)

A Street Light is Born.

In the last weeks of February and the entire month of March 1931, the 24th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron Institute of Art was widely covered in the Indianapolis and regional papers. 

On March 1, The Richmond Item reported that honorable mention artworks in the Indiana Artists included an oil painting by Constance Coleman, Street Light.

A description of both of Coleman's pictures is included in an Indianapolis News review of the show on March 7. The unnamed writer discusses the improvement of certain artists from prior years' exhibits, notable Coleman, as follows, 

“Her work, from the promising impressionistic bits which she first exhibited, has grown to strikingly beautiful and inimitable tenancies. Her Street Light, to which was given honorable mention, is a cool green composition, with smoothly blended flat surfaces and amazing highlights. Lone Man, her second example, is an arresting study in pastel shaded surfaces, in which she has allowed the sweep of a reservoir curve and the blue expanse of a sky suffice for the detail which she might have been justified in inserting.”

The next day, on March 8, in her 'In the World of Art' column in The Star, Lucille Morehouse discusses both works by Coleman in great detail. Her observations are particularly thoughtful, and will be quoted at length as follows,

“I like exceedingly the two paintings by Constance Coleman. Since anything and everything that is a little bit out of the ordinary is called modernistic these days, the same mantle-like term that covers both sins and virtues would doubtless be applied to these two examples of excellent work. If every modernist were only as individual in his style and also had something to say that merited the saying as much as does the thought back of Miss Coleman's work, then we should all welcome the moderns with open arms.”

Morehouse continues by detailing the pictures,

“Both of the paintings...seem to be merely a fresh new way to present realism, the one a park scene after night entitled Street Light, the other a partial view of a great reservoir. (Regarding the latter, Lone Man, she adds) On one side the gray cement of the storage basin slopes downward, on the other side is the downward slope of the grass terrace, yellow green as if in early springtime.   At the dividing line between cement and grass slope stands a lone man – a circumstance which furnishes the picture's title.” 

And further about Lone Man and its technique, 

“In the background curls of smoke rise from factory stacks. The paint is applied smoothly and there is particularly fine balance of lights and darks.”

On March 22, in the Star Magazine supplement to the Sunday paper in Indianapolis, included a pictorial spread of select artists with their artworks at the exhibit and Constance Coleman and Street Light are shown.

On March 29, in a follow up article in The Star by Lucille Morehouse about other works in the 24th Indiana Artists besides the prize winners, a photograph of Street Light by Coleman is presented as an aside, under the caption, “Tonal Effects are Distinctive.”

The news regarding Constance Coleman and her Street Light and Lone Man had not yet run its course.  On March 31, 1931, The Indianapolis News reported that the Indiana Artists exhibit, just closed, was the second most popular exhibit recorded at Herron, behind only a St. Gaudens one-man sculpture show from many years prior. Total attendance was 8,686. And that year a popular picture prize was awarded to the work that accumulated the most votes from the attending public. Constance Coleman's Street Light was the fan favorite, receiving 136 of the total 690 votes cast. And her Lone Man took fifth place, as well. Homer Davisson's In Blossom Time earned second place with 40 votes. 

The Fine Balance of Light, Life and Love.

For Constance Coleman, the remainder of 1931, at least as reported in the newspapers, would revolve around her engagement and marriage to Edgar Preston Richardson of Detroit. An August 26, 1931, Indianapolis Times article announces the couple's wedding date as September 15. It mentions that Mr. Richardson had attended Williams College and was then employed as a director at the Historical Bureau of Indiana, where Coleman's father was employed. By the eve of the wedding, on September 14, The Indianapolis News reported that Mr. Richardson was now relocated and employed as assistant curator at the Institute of Arts at Detroit.

Different wedding photos of the bride, Constance Coleman Richardson, graced the pages of all three Indianapolis newspapers on or about the date of her wedding.  Her pretty and younger sister Martha Julian Coleman was to be bridesmaid, and her only attendant. Palms and ferns would decorate the church and the colors for the Coleman girls would be peach and ivory. A complete detail of Coleman's post-wedding outfit, her dress for travel to her honeymoon, was covered in the wedding day Indianapolis Times article on September 15, 1931; “a bright green silk suit trimmed in brown buttons, a brown felt Eugenie hat, with small coque feather at the side, and brown accessories.” 

The elaborate coverage of her wedding details in the papers attests to the place in society for Miss Coleman by the time of her wedding due to her mother's lineage, her father's position in academia and with the State of Indiana and her growing reputation as an artist.

By January 16, 1932, The Indianapolis News reports that, having relocated to Michigan with her husband after their marriage, Constance Coleman Richardson had become allied with a group of Detroit artists and had already exhibited paintings in a Michigan artists exhibition held at the Detroit Institute of Arts that month. The News quotes an art writer for the Detroit News who said of her pictures in the show, 

“Among the new names this year...(is) Constance Coleman Richardson, who makes a startling pattern, approaching an abstraction with chair backs and a table with several objects upon it, intensified by the use of a strong light. Even more impressive is the precision with which she makes a striking pattern of gladiola stalks, and the daring elimination in her (picture of a)...lone man on a dreary stretch of beach, all three entries expressing that individuality of viewpoint and approach which separates the distinguished from the mediocre.”

By March 7, 1932, Mrs. Coleman Richardson would present new work in Indiana when she exhibited the canvas, Woodruff Place, at the 25th Indiana Artists show at Herron.  The success of the work would be covered by all three major Indianapolis papers, repeated the notoriety of Street Light, if not that picture's eventual importance. Woodruff Place was called outstanding by The Indianapolis Times in their March 12, 1932 review of the show. On the same day, The Indianapolis News, in a review headlined “In General Modern” (quoting Wilbur D. Peat about the show at his Herron gallery), chose Coleman Richardson's Woodruff Place as the photo representative of the exhibition in the paper. 

source - The Indianapolis News

About that picture and another work by the artist, the writer signed only as M.B. says,

“It is a study in those quiet grays and drab tones so common in any street scene, and so rarely duplicated in painting. Mrs. Richardson's other entry called Wind is a highly colored, spirited picture of a flag at the top of a building mast – fluted out firmly by a strong – practically a visible – gust of air.”

Later in the spring, the exhibition in part travels to other destinations around the state. The May 8, Muncie Sunday Star covers Coleman Richardson as follows,

“One of the most unusual pictures is Wind...It pictures a large flag billowing in the wind from the top of a high pole against a background of bright blue sky in which are white, billowy clouds. The glimpse of the top of the building adds to the effect of height, while the clouds and the flag add motion. The bright colors of this picture are attractive and pleasing.”

Work from this show, including by Mrs. Coleman Richardson would also travel to Baltimore, Maryland to be exhibited for a first of its kind show of Indiana art at a Montgomery Wards department store in the city, as reported by Lucille Morehouse in The Indianapolis Star on July 24.

The next season, Coleman Richardson again creates a show stopper with light effects for the 26th Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron in Indianapolis.  Lucille Morehouse said the work Storm in the Notch possessed “dramatic quality” in her March 19th column.  In a human interest column in The Indianapolis News called “Hoosier Homespun” under a sub heading 'The Art Crowd', the writer comments on the same painting writing, “Provoking most comment among artists was Constance Coleman Richardson's spectacular little Storm in the Notch...”

The painting was detailed in an earlier review in The News, dated March 6, 1933, 

“ Perhaps the most spectacular – certainly the most arresting – piece in the entire group of seventy-nine oils is Constance Coleman Richardson's little Storm in the Notch. Though the statement is meant in the most complementary sense possible, Mrs. Richardson has a sense of showmanship that scenic designers would do well to study. There is a radiance almost phosphorescent in the splash of electric white showing above the hill. One takes it apart – it is only a composition in nicely tones grays. But as a whole it is positively stirring in its effect!” 

Existentialism with a Heart.

Other paintings by the artist can be examined to study Coleman's Richardson's continuing fascination with the balance of light and dark, one's place in the universe and the natural power of scene.

Particularly of note are Fourth of July (1944) in the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art collection and Hot Sun (1947), in the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields collection. 

Her work has been compared to that of Edward Hopper.  He was creating his first sensations, including House by the Railroad and Nighthawks at about the same time Coleman Richardson created Street Light and Hot Sun. There is a startling quiet to them both, a whispering quality that they would each continue to explore in their own way.   

But it's not really the stark plight of Hopper that Coleman painted with her solitary figures, her dark and bright scenes, her encapsulations of natural might and scale. But rather, as Lucille Morehouse suggested, a realism, an existential realism I would argue, of the essential human nature of individual being, a being mixed with the solace of an other;  a nature, a person, a light. 

Coleman portrays a grounding comfort of earth beneath one's feet, the sun's warmth, even if amid nearby shade or overwhelming firmament. Again, as Morehouse said, the “particularly fine balance of lights and darks.”

Additionally, to contrast Coleman Richardson with her contemporary Edward Hopper,  his nocturnal set pieces are often theatrical, with the staginess of mannequins placed in storefront windows, the promise they offer comes at a heavy price. His florescent baths of interrogative, sterile night light or his pagan days of sun-worshiping subjects exposing an alienated anxiousness, almost painful to witness. 

Coleman Richardson's lone figures are not lonely or alone. They often bask in a halo of light, that can be experienced as a climber feels a mountain, both grounded and challenged, firm rock underfoot and wide open above.  The opposite of claustrophobic.  A bit unnerving, yes “stirring” –  that “fine balance” of light and dark.

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.