c. 2007 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Late one evening in 1924, Warner Sallman, a commercial artist, was working on deadline on a new magazine cover. He went to bed but was restless. When an image appeared in his mind’s eye sometime after 2 a.m., he got up and drew what he saw.
That nocturnal vision produced the first draft of what eventually became an icon of mid-20th century American Christianity: “Head of Christ.”
The 1940 image of a pensive Christ, soft light accentuating his blue eyes against a brown background, has been reproduced more than 500 million times. Bibles, calendars, church bulletins, and even wallet cards given to armed forces during World War II have all born Sallman’s “Head of Christ.”
For millions who have encountered the image, the portrait represents the Jesus of their faith.
“I’ve had tons of people tell me this is how they pictured Christ,” said Christian Sawyer, museum coordinator at the Billy Graham Center on the campus of Wheaton College in suburban Chicago.
The Billy Graham Center Museum is featuring “Face to Face: Warner Sallman’s Images of Christ” through January 2008. The small exhibit includes works in various media as well as memorabilia, including the oil palette and brushes, chalks and charcoals with which Sallman worked. It represents the first time these images, drawn from private collections and archives at North Park University in Chicago, have been collectively displayed in public.
Trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sallman, who was born in 1892 and died in 1968, created more than 550 original works of art. He was also a devout member of the Evangelical Covenant Church, often producing images to illustrate “chalk talks,” presentations he gave at churches and Sunday schools.
Those “chalk talk” sketches are still around, in church storerooms, attics and retirement homes, said the Rev. LeRoy Carlson, founder and president of the Warner E. Sallman Art Collection, which seeks to collect and preserve Sallman’s art.
A few oil paintings are floating around, too. Carlson got a call from a woman in Texas who told him she had found an original Sallman painting under her bed.
“We don’t want them to be under the bed or in the attic,” Carlson said. “We are looking for a place to exhibit our art.”
Critical estimation of his work varies. In Sallman’s heyday and now, evangelical Christians especially have prized his work, finding devotional value in it. Comments in multiple languages written in an exhibition guest book testify to this. The Wheaton museum exhibit “has been very well attended,” Sawyer said.
Art critics, however, and some mainline Protestant clergy, have dismissed Sallman’s work as sentimental. Yet the impact of his work is notable, and numerous cultural historians appreciate his contribution to the visual language of 20th century Christianity.
“Head of Christ” is “an image that an entire generation bonded with,” said David Morgan, professor humanities and art history at Valparaiso University in Indiana and author of “Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman.”
“Sallman was an artist whose imagery shaped popular perception in a powerful way,” Morgan said.
Several characteristics made “Head of Christ” especially successful, Morgan said. The painting is styled as a photographic portrait, with no background and showing only Jesus’ head and shoulders, prompting the viewer to perceive it as if it were a photo of a real person.
Moreover, the image was vigorously marketed. Through the United Service Organizations, which included the Salvation Army, “Head of Christ” found its way into the pockets of millions of American soldiers during World War II.
Morgan said he has heard from veterans from World War II, the Korean War and even the Vietnam War. “They said, `This is the Jesus I carried in my pocket through the war,”’ he recalled.
Sallman’s work captured Carlson’s eye and imagination when the Evangelical Covenant Church minister was a pastor at a Rockford, Ill., church where an 8-by-10 foot copy of the famous picture hung.
Carlson learned that this portrait had hung in Sallman’s own Chicago congregation until the church building passed into the hands of another congregation, which intended to discard the picture.
Instead it was rescued by more appreciative hands, and taken to an Evangelical Covenant church in Rockford.
“Every Sunday I saw that picture when I preached,” Carlson said. Feeling drawn to Sallman, Carlson founded the Warner E. Sallman Art Collection, which includes five Sallman family members on its board.
Given the popular impact of Sallman’s work not only in America, but around the world through Christian missionaries, the Graham center was a logical choice, Carlson said.
“To put Graham and Sallman together makes some sense,” he said.
END NELSON
DSB DS850 words
Photos of Warner Sallman’s works are available via https://religionnews.com.
