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Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

David Morgan
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Extract

Traditionally, art historians have relied on iconography, biography, and connoisseurship as the fundamental means of studying images. These approaches and methods stress the singularity of an image, its authenticity, and its authorship; therefore, they reflect an enduring debt to the humanist tradition of individualism. The image is understood principally as the product of the unique and privileged inspiration of an individual artist and is regarded as a measure of this individual's genius. Iconographical and biographical research secure authorial intent; connoisseurship authenticates the work. While this scholarly apparatus certainly offers the art historian indispensable tools, it is important to understand that its commitment to original intent is singularly ill-equipped to assess the reception of images, the ongoing history of response that keeps images alive within a culture from generation to generation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Winter 1993 , pp. 29 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1993

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References

Notes

1. Jack R. Lundbom, in his unfinished biography of Sallman, “Masterpainter: Warner E. Sallman” (typescript in the possession of Mr. and Mrs. James Sallman, n.d.), 5.

2. Muncie Evening Press, May 28, 1987. According to Sallman's publisher, Fred Bates, the images were distributed during the war by the Y.M.C.A. and the Salvation Army. Letter to the editor, Time, December 20,1948,8. The firm Kriebel & Bates, formed in 1941 exclusively to promote Sallman's work, liquidated in 1987. Copyright and production of the images are now under the ownership of Warner Press, Anderson, Indiana. One hundred twenty original works by Sallman are located in the Wilson Galleries of Anderson University, Anderson, Indiana.

3. In the last year of Sallman's life, sales records of Kriebel & Bates show that total sales to Protestant vendors of Sallman's work were roughly seven times that of sales to Catholic vendors. Kriebel & Bates, Annual Sales Record, 1968, shown to the author by Charles Bates.

4. For instance, for a number of years reproductions of two different portraits of Christ by Sallman, The Head of Christ and Follow Thou Me (1948), flanked either side of the pulpit in the Alexandrian Church of God, Alexandria, Indiana.

5. Letter to Warner Sallman, July 4, 1957, photocopy in possession of Howard W. Ellis, Greencastle, Indiana.

6. Smith, Tom, ‘Tiny Picture of Christ Weeps Tears of Blood,” The National Enquirer, August 21,1979,29.Google Scholar

7. Letter to Kriebel & Bates, December 1948, Wilson Galleries Archive, Anderson University, Anderson, Indiana. The author requested anonymity in the letter.

8. Howard W Ellis, “The Life and Work of Warner Sallman in Words and Pictures” (typescript, Greencastle, Indiana, n.d.), iii.

9. Ibid., 2.

10. Eckhardt, Susan, “Covenanters Celebrate the Sallman Legacy,” The Covenant Companion (March 1984): 40.Google Scholar

11. Kriebel & Bates, Kriebel & Bates, Inc., Religious Art Publisher (Indianpolis, [1984]), 7.

12. Haskin, Dorothy, “The Man Who Painted a Manly Head of Christ,” Contact 5, no. 5 (1959): 1 Google Scholar, emphasis added; reprinted from Haskin, Dorothy, Christians You Would Like to Know (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1954).Google Scholar

13. Everett, Glenn D., “Story of a Great Picture,” The Link 16, no. 4 (1958): 14.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., 13.

15. Nail, T. Otto, “He Preaches As He Paints,” Classmate 50, no. 50 (1943): 7.Google Scholar There are several variations of this interview; for another early version, see Howard Ellis, “Story of Sallman's Head of Christ” (Indianapolis: Kriebel & Bates, 1944), 5-6. Lundbom, “Masterpainter,” 26, dates the conversation with Sellers soon after Sallman's enrollment at Moody in January 1914.

16. Peterson, Sylvia E., “The Ministry of Christian Art,” The Lutheran Companion 55, no. 14 (1947): 11.Google Scholar Dorothy Haskin's even later rendition of the conversation has Sellers say to Sallman: “Keep at it. And someday I hope you draw us a real he-man conception of Christ.” Haskin, “The Man Who Painted A Manly Head of Christ,” 11.

17. Gill, Boyd, “Putting ‘Christ in Every Purse’ Forms Hobby” Indianapolis News, April 5, 1955;Google Scholar quoted in Sylvia Peterson, “Into All the World” (typescript, Wilson Galleries Archive, Anderson, Indiana), 12.

18. Peterson, “Into All the World,” 14.

19. Lundbom, “Masterpainter,” 18, notes that after his confirmation Sallman joined Waveland Avenue Congregational Church in Chicago, and in 1908, at sixteen years of age, he attended a meeting at the church led by a visiting evangelist where he experienced a personal commitment of his life to Jesus. During the same time he was active in supporting Prohibition parades.

20. Ellis, “Life and Work,” 42-43.

21. For a discussion of gender, patriarchy, and American Fundamentalism, see DeBerg, Betty A., Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990).Google Scholar

22. The process of urbanization, of course, began much earlier, but it reached an unprecedented level after World War II. In his discussion of the response of popular religion to urbanization, Peter Williams has included a brief mention of Sallman in his Popular Religion in America: Symbolic Change and the Modernization Process in Historical Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 142,187 note 2.

23. In the discussion that follows, I do not mean to imply that any of these visual habits is exclusively Protestant but that their constellation has shaped Protestant visual culture in identifiable and more or less consistent ways.

24. In several instances in the Anderson University collection, Sallman cut out a paper reproduction of the Head of Christ and glued it to a surface in the creation of a new work.

25. Told to the author in a telephone conversation with Charles Bates, son of Fred Bates and lifelong employee of Kriebel & Bates, June 16,1991.

26. The original ink drawings, probably taken via projection from the original paintings, and retouched stat photos of each are in the Anderson University collection. A copyright document in the files of The Warner Press lists each as an “etching.”

27. For excellent and extensive discussions of this, see Luther und die Folgen fiir die Kunst, ed. Werner H of mann, exhibition catalog, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (Munich: Prestal-Verlag, 1983); and Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

28. C. H. Duning, “Christ in Every Purse” (Richmond, Ind.: The Nicholson Press, 1948), 8.

29. Quoted in Sylvia Peterson, “Into All the World,” 13.

30. Duning, “Christ in Every Purse,” 10.

31. Kriebel & Bates, Kriebel & Bates, Inc., Religious Art Publisher, 9.

32. Ibid., 3. These lines originally appeared in a letter by Fred Bates sent to friends of Sallman on the occasion of the artisf s death, May 24,1968; quoted in the Anderson Daily Bulletin, June 18, 1968.

33. Lundbom, “Masterpainter,” 12; Lundbom also points out that several of Sallman's teachers at the Art Institute studied art in the traditional academic system in Paris. Ibid., 24.