The visual mono-culture of the United States, relatively new in Sallman’s time, has since given way to the fractured image-production of the 21st century - the end of a taken-for-granted singular way of seeing.Īlmuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey’s sculpture – Crucified Woman – in the grounds of Emmanuel College at Victoria University in Toronto. Of course, the historical Jesus was neither Nordic, nor American. In Jesus’ own day, and as a Jew in the Roman Empire, masculinity was as contested then as it is now. Ironically, many now find his Jesus effeminate - demonstrating the extent to which definitions of “masculine” are cultural and fluid rather than biological. Masculine portrayal?Īpparently, Sallman was attempting to create a more masculine Jesus than earlier portrayals. For them this is, simply, what Jesus looks like. But for many there is nothing jarring in the high forehead, broad shoulders and long nose. Despite his beard, the “Head of Christ” is anything but hipster irony. Is Sallman’s portrait a kitsch Jesus? Certainly it wasn’t for the artist. What changed in the 20th century with Sallman, was that Jesus images met American advertising and mass production. From the time of the ancient Romans, Christians have always “contextualized” Jesus in their own image. Visual images of Jesus painted by Europeans reflected those who painted him only on rare occasions, such as when Jesus was portrayed as a red-headed youth, did historians object. 'Paul, Apostle of Christ' owes more to Coca-Cola than to the Bible Just as there had been, since the mid-18th century, literary “lives of Jesus.” These “lives” tended to portray Christ as representing the best of European (male) culture. When the “Head of Christ” became a hit, Sallman followed up with “Christ at Heart’s Door,” and “Christ our Pilot.” Mass produced kitschĪlready in the 1930s, there was a long tradition of “Caucasian Jesus portraits” That number multiplied exponentially when reproductions started appearing on clocks, lamps, buttons, laminated Bible verses, music boxes and night-lights. One of Sallman’s 1924 black and white sketches for the Covenant Companion magazine received such praise he painted it in oils, creating, in 1940, the “Christ” that would go on to sell 500 million copies. Sallman was a freelance illustrator and a devout member of the Swedish Evangelical Covenant Church. In his book, Icons of American Protestantism David Morgan of Valparaiso University in Indiana tells how millions of pocket-sized “Heads of Christ” cards were handed out by the YMCA and Salvation Army during the Second World War and carried to Europe and Asia by U.S. Reproductions of Sallman’s warm, sympathetic, Nordic and very much non-historical “Head of Christ” hang in churches of every sort, and in confessional schools and hospitals on every continent. The truth is that religious images can serve all these purposes. Their collection notes explain how images like Sallman’s may be objects of beauty, historical artefacts, mementos, articles of piety or propaganda in the service of an ideology. Despite never leaving Chicago, Warner Sallman influenced how many Christians the world over, for better or worse, picture Jesus.Īnderson University in Indiana holds Sallman’s collected works. April 30 is the 127th birthday of an artist whose name you probably don’t know, but his work may be the most widely distributed of the 20th century.
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