The Center's Studio Podcast
The official podcast of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts with interviews of artists and scholars on topics of art with host Glen Nelson.
The Center's Studio Podcast
C. C. A. Christensen and the Shaping of LDS Visual Culture
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More than an early figure in Mormon frontier painting, C.C.A. Christensen helped to invent the visual language of Latter-day Saint history and theology. In this interview on the occasion of her new book on Christensen, art historian Jennifer Champoux reveals how the Danish artist’s Mormon history panoramas, Book of Mormon paintings, missionary images, and Scandinavian paintings and writings shaped Mormon memory, gospel teachings, and identity in surprising and under-appreciated ways.
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Sanders Studio Podcast. I'm your host, Glenn Nelson. Today I'm excited to talk about a pioneer of latter-day painting, the subject of a new book by Jennifer Champot. It just came out, and the book is titled CCA Christensen, a Mormon Visionary. I love this book, Jenny. I can't wait to talk with you about it. It was published by the University of the Illuminati Press, and I think it's a real jam. It's one of those books on art that is a prerequisite for literacy in LDS art and culture, I think. And you've done an extraordinary job of taking a figure who I think was once familiar in previous years in LDS culture, but has slipped away a bit from prominence, undeservedly, in my opinion, today. So welcome. It's great to have you as my guest.
SPEAKER_03Oh, thank you so much for having me, Glenn. I'm a big fan of all the good work that you do. Um, and boy, can I quote you on that? It's a prerequisite for LDS art literacy.
SPEAKER_02Sure. Well, it's too late for a blurb. You know, I wasn't blurb, although you got some very impressive blurbs on this book. Anyway, so I'd love to ask you questions about CCA Christensen, of course, and his work, but I'd love to talk with you first about the book itself. Like, how did you become interested in him? And I know that you gave a presentation in like 2019 or so at a at a conference, but does your connection with him go back even further than that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that was um the first time I had started thinking about him in a scholarly way. I when I first started looking at his art um in around 2018, I just couldn't believe that I wasn't more familiar with it. I thought the art was exciting and different, and there's some something felt very immediate about it. Uh, and it just spoke to me in a way that I thought, wow, this is some of our earliest Latter-day Saint art. And I'm an art historian, and it's not very familiar to me, you know, much less to sort of a general audience, either within the church or just um as, you know, scholars of uh American art history. And uh I was shocked at how little had been published on him. It was hard to find much information. And so I started going to primary sources in the church history library, his journals and letters and uh looking at the art. Spent a lot of time just looking at the art um and thinking about it, uh, reading about his life. And um yeah, I just I I felt like he was someone that we should be more familiar with. And and I actually think did have a big impact on Latter-day Saint thought and and art uh in a way that he hasn't really been given credit for.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I can't wait to dive in with those questions about that. But you know, in New York where I live, he is a little bit more known because at the Whitney Museum in the 70s, there was a big show of his work. Right. And it was on the cover of Art in America magazine and and so on. And in a way, he was a proxy for Mormon art. The article uh I'm quoting from in uh Art in America said, you know, other than the Quakers, the Mormons are like the most important American contributor as a as a religious culture, and we know everything about the Shakers and nothing about the Mormons. That's what the article said in the stuff.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I'd love to ask you about the series too, Introductions to Mormon Thought. This is uh editors, uh Matthew Bowman and Joseph M. Spencer. And so I think they're up to around 10 titles now, and yours is the is the latest or second latest there. Kind of uh uh but but tell me about that series. What's its goal?
SPEAKER_03Sure. Yeah, um, I think I might be number eight, but I'm not positive. And uh they do have several more in the works. I know there's one coming out in October and another one in March, uh, and then there are others that are currently being written. Uh and the idea is to give accessible introductions to these figures from Latter-day Saint history that have shaped um Latter-day Saint culture, or I guess I should say Mormon culture, because they're taking that term pretty broadly in terms of what Mormon culture uh and how how they've shaped our history and our thought. And what I love about this series is uh it, they're they're not afraid to bring in figures that are lesser known. I mean, they're including the bit the big names that you might think of, but also people you might not be aware of. And I've really enjoyed reading the other volumes in the series that are out already and have learned so much uh about these people that have influenced us and just learning more through their lives, learning more about the history of the church, too. Um, you probably saw Rich, there was just a biography on Richard Bushman in the series that done by JV Haas. That was excellent. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, in culture, it kind of amasses like uh like the proverbial uh snowball going down, you know, the hill and gets bigger and bigger. And when you are born, you your culture is just what's around you, and you don't know how it arrived, and you don't know how it what was collected into that gigantic snowball. So I love this thing. I don't know how these two these two editors do all that they do. I mean, they're very busy.
SPEAKER_03I know. I know. Matt and Joe are like superhuman in the way that they just have so many great ideas and and make it happen.
SPEAKER_02Pass off to them, really. I think that most people, you know, know uh CCA Christensen because of his panoramas primarily. Those extraordinary multi-panel works that one critic uh referred to as Proto-Cinema, a book about uh early Mormon cinema. He he lumps Christensen into that. And your book starts there in 1880, and he toured around with these to the early Saints settlements in the West and reviewed with these people what their history had been using these panels. But could you give us a little bit more information about them and what that experience might have been like for people in these audiences?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's a really great question. I love thinking about what it was actually like there. And I read some Deseret News uh article re reviews from that time that talked about it, and they talked about people packing into a local schoolhouse or chapel and seeing this presentation, and they were very popular. He would travel around. Well, let me back up, let me tell you first. Describe a little what it is. Um, so huge canvases, 10 feet wide by six feet tall. He started with several um and kept adding to them. He ended up at finally having 23 of these scenes, and each one was stitched to the other one so that they would be put on these um like dowels and then rolled across. And so you'd see one scene at a time, and then the next one would roll across. And the whole performance was it wasn't just visual, he also had a prepared lecture that he would deliver to give more information about what the people were seeing. And it was very emotional. He included names of real people. He uh, you know, didn't shy away from the the violence of the persecution that the saints had experienced, and in fact, I think really wanted to exaggerate and emphasize the persecution, the level that they had experienced. There were hymns, they would, you know, between scenes, there would be hymn singing, and there were stage lights, there were usually curtains that he would set up around it. So it was very much like an like an early cinema, uh, very theatrical.
SPEAKER_02Huh. And did people pay to go these to go to these?
SPEAKER_03They did. Yeah. I saw one uh Deseret New or Deseret Evening News advertisement in Salt Lake City in 1880. They were charging 25 cents for adults and 20 cents for children.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02That sounds like maybe a lot.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, he did.
SPEAKER_02Significant amount.
SPEAKER_03He did usually about a third of the proceeds would go back to that ward to help fund things in that ward. And then Christensen, of course, had costs for traveling. There was a really this is a little tidbit that I just uh kind of pulled at my heartstrings. I saw one Deseret News article in 1880 saying, you know, Christensen's coming tomorrow. Don't miss the Mormon Panorama presentation and the 14th ward tomorrow at 7:30. And then the next day in the newspaper, there was a little blurb saying, uh, if anyone's found CCA Christensen's horses, they strayed from the tithing office yard. And if you have any information, please meet Christensen at the tithing office to return his horses. So, oh, I I hope he got his horses back to get home.
SPEAKER_02All right. Um, you know, you mentioned other panorama presenters, including Philo Dibble. I didn't know that. Is this an element of American art history? I mean, I I really don't know all that much about this period. I mean, were these kinds of presentations happening all over the country? They kind of sound like illustrated Lyceum lectures, like their version of a TED talk or something. And I remember reading a little bit about James Talmadge and had all these glass slide presentations that he would travel around. Are these things kind of related?
SPEAKER_03That's interesting about Talmadge. I'm not as familiar with that. I do know that in the 1830s and 40s and 50s, there was uh a big panorama movement in America, and that was centered in St. Louis. So actually not far, not that far from Nauvoo, where the Saints were. And I think they would have been exposed to some of that uh hype around the panorama and the popularity of those. Sometimes they would travel around. Uh, and then when the Saints moved to Utah, there were, like you said, Philo Dibble, Reuben Kirkham was another one who did Latter-day Saint-related panoramas. Um, and in fact, Philo Dibble, once CCA Christensen started touring with his Mormon panorama, Philo Dibble was kind of upset because he'd already been doing that and he felt like Christensen was like coming into his territory taking his business. And I think he even filed a lawsuit or a complaint or something.
unknownYes.
SPEAKER_03So it was, it was already um a known format and and media that people were familiar with.
SPEAKER_02Interesting. You know, it given the scale of it, it must have been kind of quite immersive. And so this must have felt real. I mean, more real to them. So I I find that really interesting. You know, you were just talking a little bit about some of the purposes of the these presentations themselves. And part of Christensen's importance is this shared memory of early saints in the West, as you write, the meaning in his art that echoed and affected Mormon thought. And I was thinking, you know, as these decades passed, the number of people who had experienced Midwest persecution firsthand or who knew Joseph Smith personally, for example, were kind of on the wane. Is that is that something that you think was important, you know, to this project?
SPEAKER_03Yes, that's a great insight, Glenn. And I think you're exactly right. I think that was a driving motivation for Christensen. And in fact, he wrote about that in a newspaper article about wanting to preserve this history for the younger generation that was born in Utah and didn't hadn't experienced things the same way. Um, and he wanted them to remember it. And I think that's why he made it so emotional. And um I mean, sometimes it's kind of violent, like showing the violence against the saints in the early days of persecution. And he wanted them to remember that. It's important to keep in mind, he's painting these, you know, 50 or 60 years after the events that occurred. And when you think about what's going on in the 1880s in Utah, there is this renewed moment of struggle with the United States government as they're trying to get statehood but being rejected, and they're dealing with polygamy and you know, United States laws against um unlawful cohabitation. And so there is this, I think, sense of wanting to remember that uh they've already been through this kind of thing with the United States, and and they left because of that. And they want to preserve um the sort of religious liberty that they've established for themselves out in Utah.
SPEAKER_02You know, I mean, they had occupation, they had they had wars, they had armies coming in, they have threats of wars. So as we would say today, this was quite relevant, you know. Yeah. It resonated with them for sure.
SPEAKER_03Right, right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Let's see, I I don't know if I should do this, but I uh one of these paragraphs on this uh really struck me. I think I will read it. The old this is uh writing in 1879 to a uh Danish newspaper in Utah. The old generation who bore the burdens of the day of the persecutions in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois will no longer be with us a few years hence. History will preserve much, but art alone can make the narrative of the suffering of the saints comprehensible for posterity.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah, that the that's right. That's a great quote. And you know, one thing I noticed was uh even though Joseph Smith had already been martyred by the time that CCA came over from Denmark to America, so he never knew Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith appears a lot in the Mormon panorama. Brigham Young never does. And to me, that indicates that he is really interested in preserving this early history. Like it's it's less about the current moment and more about remembering how they got where they are.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, maybe we should back up a bit. Uh we just launched into this without even saying who this guy is. So he was Carl Christian Anton Christensen. Where did he come from? Where was he trained? All that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_03Sure, yeah. He was born in um Copenhagen, Denmark, and in 1831. And he grew up in a very poor family. His mother worked extremely hard to support her boys. Uh she ended up having to put him and I think one of his brothers into a poorhouse boarding school. And that was where he first started learning some skills. He was apprenticed to a toy maker and he started learning some craft skills there. Um a wealthy widow noticed his skills and agreed to fund his training at the uh Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, which was a huge opportunity for him, something he would never have been able to do on his own. So thank you to her. And he started his training there. But while he was about halfway through his art training, and this is, you know, one of the greatest European art academies at the time, uh, then he joined the church. Uh the first missionaries came over and he joined the church. And uh, and then, you know, even in his own uh journals, he talks about how suddenly his art training was not as important to him. He was just all in on the church. He was translating hymns into Danish, he was reading the Book of Mormon, he got ready to go on a mission in Scandinavia. And and so he finished his art training. He he technically graduated from the school, but he never took the highest level courses there, like the live drawing, live live model figure drawing classes. Uh and you know, you see that in his art, that that there's it's not always technically perfect.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I want to talk about that in some detail a little bit, yeah, a little bit later. But you're I I you're exactly right. I mean, or at least your version of things aligned with mine, so therefore you're right. I you know, something that I had never heard about CCA Christensen was his work other than painting. So his first autobiography came out in 1853. Tell us a little bit about Christensen the writer.
SPEAKER_03Oh my gosh, I loved learning about this. Had you known about it Yeah, I I did not realize what a writer he was. And he wrote poetry, he wrote hymns, he wrote articles, he wrote letters to the editor and newspapers that were communal calls to action. He just he was a pretty incredible man because he had so many interests and took the time to write about those things and explore them. He wrote theological kinds of essays. Um so many things. So yeah, I I think he's actually a terrific poet. His poetry often has a lot of humor in it. Uh, it's it's very accessible. And I think some of his hymns, I don't know if they're still in the Danish hymn book today, but I know for years his his hymns were sung both in Utah in the Danish communities there and back in the old country in Scandinavia.
SPEAKER_01Huh.
SPEAKER_02You know, uh your the book refers to a poem he wrote on his second mission. Uh and I don't know if you have your copy of the book handy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But page 10, he uh he's talking about, you know, being really far away from home.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And he has a family at this point. And you know, you you're called and you go you leave everything behind, and you it's not like you can get a letter off to them and then hear back very quickly. So I'm sure all of these kinds of feelings were just it would have had to have been overwhelming to people. But would you mind reading that poem on page?
SPEAKER_03Sure. Sure. And let me mention this was um in 1865, and it it was in the Danish hymn book of the church, and um it was written in Danish, and here it's been translated by um Richard L. Jensen. So this is his translation into English. Do they miss me at home in the valley? Am I mentioned among those I love? When the children are lovingly hugged and kissed, oh, how I wish I were near. When early they kneel for prayer and angels smile at the little ones. Do anyone's thoughts dwell on the one who now must be lonely? Sad. Yeah. He was far away in Scandinavia on his second mission.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, Christianson reminds me of another LDS artist of the period, Henry Lavender Adolphus Colmer. These people have very long names. Uh H. L. A. Colmer is the way that most people refer to him, and he was primarily a painter, but also a poet, a nature explorer, a man of the theater, a composer. Is that name familiar to you at all?
SPEAKER_03I'm not familiar with him.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was just wondering because the two seemed to be cut from the same cloth, lived in the same place at the same time. And I wonder if artists like them were just like trying to cobble living together, and so their create creativity spilled out in many different directions, or if in those days they just like had this broader view of what a creative life was like. Like today it's quite siloed, you know. If you self-identify as a sculptor, sometimes that's all you do, right? Um, but I wonder did he other than the other his uh regarding his livelihood, um, painting was part of it. What other things did he do for his livelihood?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, when he first came to Utah in 1857, really he just had to be a farmer for a while. And so he was farming wheat and potatoes and corn and taking odd jobs on the side, trying to get some painting jobs where he could. He was not trying to be a fine art painter at that time because there really was not a market for it.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03But he did do some painting in the Springville theater for some scenery there. This was in the maybe 1862, sometime around then. And then uh that led him to get a a commission to do some painting in the Salt Lake Theater in 1863. Yeah. Uh but really that's that's the biggest thing he does until the 1870s. Um, so for you know, for 15 or 20. He's mostly living in Sampe County as a farmer, um, painting houses or shutters. He coffins, I read.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Painting coffins?
SPEAKER_03Uh apparently. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, I have to see photos of that. I don't I can't quite visualize what that is. My my thought goes to Egypt. Um, but I'm curious what that is like. You know, around 1877, Christensen begins another sequence of panoramas, but these had a very different purpose. Uh can you talk about these Lamanite works?
SPEAKER_03So the the the untitled Huntington Panorama one? Yeah. This is an interesting art piece that what just was rediscovered in the past decade, really. It was it had that shocking to you? Totally. Okay.
SPEAKER_02All right. That's that's a conversation for another day. But I I that I find that shocking. But go ahead.
SPEAKER_03Right. It was in someone's attic and had just been passed down through um actually it was um so Dimek Huntington and George Washington Hill were missionary companions at the time, and they were called to preach to some of the Ute and Pai Ute and Shoshone people in the area. And so it it ended up in George Washington Hill's family, and that was the descendant that that had it. And I just I have to mention, I both I they said that it had been used as a matchbox car racetrack at one point by grandchildren. So it's long, it's about 22 feet long, um, maybe about a foot and a half or two feet wide. Yeah, probably almost two feet wide. Uh, and it has 11 scenes. So different from the Mormon panorama, which went horizontally across, this one is a vertical thing. And the and it's all just one long piece of linen muslin, and then there's just 11 scenes. Almost like a like a comic strip, kind of, but just in a vertical.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, pattern.
SPEAKER_03So they um Dim McCunt and asked CCA to create this, we think, for um as a visual aid in their preaching to the indigenous people there in the area.
SPEAKER_02So it covers God's flip chart version of 1877 or whatever.
SPEAKER_03The first flip chart, maybe, right? Uh yeah. Um, it covers sort of the history of God's people, starting with Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah's flood, uh Jesus, you know, some of Jesus' ministry, the baptism of Jesus, his crucifixion, his appearance in the New World, and calling his apostles there. But then it also includes some Book of Mormon moments, um, like Lehi's family leaving Jerusalem, arriving in the Promised Land, and uh Moroni and Mormon safeguarding the plates at the end of their civilization, and then finally ends with Joseph Smith receiving those plates uh from the angel Moroni.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You know, I I have multiple thoughts. I'm still thinking about that them in somebody's uh somebody's attic. Maybe we should take out a giant ad and say, okay, everybody, if you're a multi-generational person in the church, just go up into your attic right now. Like we want to know because because things are still coming out. Anyway, incredible. It's amazing. Yeah. Okay, but the other, but back to these, uh, back to these panels. So then I love it, I love when I'm reading a book and I know a little bit about the the person or the subject, but not all that much. And I come across things that just are so surprising to me that I never considered even why that would be true. And in and in your writing about the next series of works, these Book of Mormon paintings, I was really surprised the way that you described how rare those were. Like that fine art paintings mostly didn't exist uh in the first, did you say, 40 years or so? You write very little fine art painting, and essentially no religious theme painting exists from the initial 40 years of the church from 1830 to 1870. So tell tell me more about that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I feel like I should add a caveat there that there was painting done for temples and tabernacles that was essentially just copies of famous European religious paintings, mostly images of Christ. So there were some artists, um, but even that was more 1870s or 80s, 90s. Um, so yeah, they're just you know, I have to think it had something to do with these people being pioneers out, you know, out there in Utah. It that just they had to get established first before they could have space for that kind of fine art community and patronage.
SPEAKER_02Are you making a distinction between the works like fine art works and those that might have existed as commissions for you know many church map publications, magazines? But were did they put new images in about about the gospel, you know, the the script the you know, Latter-day Saint scripture and so on?
SPEAKER_03In church magazines at the time?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean, I'm just wondering when you say fine art paintings, are you saying that that's separate from another body or that kind of nothing existed?
SPEAKER_03Oh, I guess I'm when I say fine art, I'm distinguishing that from like painting houses and shutters and coffins and banners and stage scenery. You know, I uh I would maybe put that in a in a separate category from you know a framed standalone canvas or a temple mural. Um but so much of that early art when the Latter-day Saints did start producing that, those kind of you know, easel paintings, was landscape. Um, as you know, the the Paris art missionaries and John Hafen and Loris Pratt, and they they were mostly doing European-style impressionistic landscapes. Um there were really only a few people trying to tackle the visualization of Latter-day Saint history and scripture. And CCA was one of them. And and I think became with this Book of Mormon series that you mentioned, uh his work there became more broadly disseminated than any other religious art at the time, uh, because it was published as lithographs by the Desert Sunday School Union and sent to all the Sunday schools.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You know, as I read the book, which I, you know, hey audience, which I absolutely loved and warmly recommend, the thing that stayed with me even more than the biography and history was the brilliant way that you interpreted these works. So let's talk about landscapes a little bit more. We just we just referenced them a little bit, but I would love to get interpretation into this a little bit more. Many of these landscape paintings or scenes are set in the rugged outdoors that that Christensen was making. Could you talk a little bit about the symbolism of forests and the wilderness that appear in your book, uh, particularly in those early paintings and panoramas?
SPEAKER_03Oh, thank you. Yeah. Thanks. I I really appreciate that question. It was one of my motivations for this book was I felt like when I saw Christensen's work discussed anywhere, it was often just as a vehicle to talk about the history. And very few people had ever really analyzed the paintings themselves as documents that could tell us something just by what the painting itself says.
SPEAKER_02Uh, even or to go deeper into any of the paintings.
SPEAKER_03Right, right. Yeah. Even um, you mentioned Carl Karmer in the 1970 Art in America. His his he doesn't really analyze the paintings. He he shows all the paintings, but he has just a little historical blurb with each one. And he doesn't really talk about what is Christensen doing here? What, you know, how is he using the language of art to tell a story? And that's what I wanted to think more deeply about. And I actually think Christensen is so good at this and is very sophisticated in the way that he uses he uses traditional European fine art symbolism and composition to create these really interesting commentaries on the latter-day Saint experience, um, and also just what it means to be a disciple in the world.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, one of the one phrase that you wrote was wilderness marks the divide between right and wrong, civilization and wilderness, and acceptance and exile. I love that interpretation because many of these images have this dividing line, the edge of the forest, where it has been tamed or where Joseph is preaching or whatever, and then what is going on in the forest. And I, you know, in my background with arc history is just a standard, you know, overview. And when we would get to the periods like the Hudson River painters and whatever, with their you know oversized grandeur of nature and the relative tininess of man, you know, almost insignificant in this giant thing. That's not the same purpose as what you're describing to me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's interesting. I I do see some similarities that he does often, Christensen does often have small figures in this enveloping landscape or wilderness. Um, but yeah, he's definitely influenced by these ideas about these long-standing Christian ideas about chosen people and Exodus and having to move through a kind of a wilderness and coming out on the other side to build a better community. But then also it's this moment too. He's there, you know, painting these in the 1870s and 80s, thinking about American expansion ideology and the idea of progress, meaning pushing, you know, the frontier west and cultivating the land. And then also these Latter-day Saint thoughts about America and the history of um God's people in America and these thoughts about salvation and restoration and how that's all tied up. And you see this in the rhetoric of the church leaders too at the time. It's all tied up with the land and cultivating the land and building Zion. And it's a fascinating mix of these three different ideas that I think Christianson is pulling from. And like you said, he does really interesting symbolism, like this dividing line of civilization and wilderness. And he uses that very, very successfully as a visual device to help tell that story throughout the series of Morteman panorama paintings.
SPEAKER_02You know, one of the famous paintings of his is this predominantly blue image where the the saints are walk are crossing the frozen river. And even that forest, which is, you know, deciduous trees in wintertime that have no leaves, that's symbolic too.
SPEAKER_03For sure.
SPEAKER_02The forest is gone. And so it's not like it's not like uh American art at the period, it was this this post-edonic thing where man was supposed to tame nature. Yeah. It was supposed to go, it was supposed to be subjugated uh because of that. And yeah. And maybe there's an element here, but it seems slightly different. Would you agree?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think that's right. Um there there's an interesting duality of the wilderness where it's it shows up in his art as both a place that people are pushed, the saints are pushed into unfairly, unjustly, but it's also a place where they meet God. So it's, you know, there's a scene of when the the last people who had left Nauvoo have crossed the river and they're camping in the the forest, and many of them are sick or infirm, and God sends quail to feed them. And so there's this scene of them catching all these quail in the camp. And um, and so there's this sense of they're pushed into the wilderness, but then they find God and providence in the wilderness and protection there too. Uh, and that I think that's really fascinating. That that kind of I mean, even I mean, right? I mean, Joseph Smith gets the gold plates in right in a in a forested hill. Um, so I don't know. I think that's really interesting.
SPEAKER_02And the and the first vision itself.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Our organ story is in the middle of a forest.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so unlike other painters who were either showing it as a dark and evil place or a place that was divine and beyond comprehension, those two kinds of separate things, this is a this is a slightly different approach. Fascinating to me. Yeah. These some of these early Utah painters um had an interesting effect on government policy regarding the wilderness. So they would go to these really remote places. Again, I'm talking in Utah now, where other people hadn't been, and they were, and they were making artwork and sending that back to the government with a plea to protect these lands. And I'm not sure Christiansen is part of that, but you know, Colmer was, and um uh Lynn Fawcett was, and a whole bunch of photographers were. And so I find that kind of fascinating because our view of the land, the the the Mormon view of the land is this thing that's gonna be paradisical. You know, so I think I don't know. I I might just be making stuff up. I don't know.
SPEAKER_03Not at all. No, that's that's really interesting.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Let's talk about uh style a little bit. We we hinted earlier about the way that he draws uh a figure, for example, as being as being you know slightly different than than uh things. So one of the things that I'm trying to do in my life is remove as much bias as I can generally. And I've I have to confess that growing up I didn't really respect folk art and outsider art as I do now. And I did value artists who were self-taught as highly as I did academically trained ones. And you know, Christian Sinali was not a self-taught artist, but his technique, particularly the figure, is closer to folk art than let's say an old master technique.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_02So I had punted on that question earlier, but let's get into it a tiny bit now. Um what do you what do you make of well let me s let me give you one more idea? I think it's a common problem that when we're looking at art, we incorrectly conflate technique and philosophical rigor. And so here you got these sections of your book that are talking about interpretation and making a really strong case that a tree is not just a tree.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so uh, but I would say that the trees are represented quite beautifully, but sometimes for me the figures are a little bit of a stumbling block for me personally. And I'm coming around to seeing them in a new way. But what what do you make of that? Do do you do you feel that they that was intentional? Was that was he bumping up against the limitations of his own technique? Was it a stylistic choice? What do you think?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's great. I I do think it was partly just the limitations of his training. Um I I don't know. I don't know if it was a stylistic choice because it's some something he continues always. And he was such a perfectionist in his writing, um and in and in his art too. He would even he'd write journals on his mission and then come home and rewrite them in beautiful scripts and edit things to make it nicer. So I mean, he was a perfectionist. I think he wanted to do it the best that he could. And I I think you're right that um his his figurative work is not on a par with someone like Carl Bloch, right? Who was a contemporary of his. Classmate. Yeah, classmate, right? Yeah, in in Denmark. But what I like about Christensen is even though his technique or his execution is not perfect, you always see him striving to do something. And I think that's a mark of greatness when you can push yourself to do something that is really beyond your abilities. And I imagine that was probably a little frustrating for him that he couldn't execute it um in in a more finished way. But but I see that striving element in so much of his life, in his art, but also just the way he lived his life, that he was always wanting things to be more than they were. He wanted to build a better community, he wanted to build the church, he wanted he he was always urging his community to something higher. And and I think in his art, although, you know, he he may not be capturing something perfectly, he does capture something essential and something that can speak to the viewer in a really deep way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, that's beautifully said, which doesn't surprise me. Everything that you say is beautifully said in my mind. You're kind there is there is an interesting and positive consequence of this because he has some limitations with the figure. Um he he relies on gesture. And so these people are doing stuff, they're pointing to things, they're in they're in action mode.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, and there's so there's more dynamism in the paintings than you would typically find in an artist who was not trying to be more aspirational as you're describing, I think.
SPEAKER_03Interesting point, yeah. I think he definitely learned that from his academic training in Denmark. Um, I mean, history the Danish golden age history painting, which is, you know, big scenes from history or the Bible or mythology, would often uh, especially Danish art at that time, would use these kind of pointing, gesturing figures to lead your eye to the important part of the scene or to help send the message that they want you to take away from it to just make the picture a little more easily readable for the viewer.
SPEAKER_02Um that makes perfect sense to me. One of the things uh as far as breakthroughs in uh in the visual style of our culture, you describe his uh uh attempting to fashion a new Latter-day Saint iconography because of his depiction of heavenly beings. Can you describe that a little bit?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so he depicted uh in his early in the Mormon panorama the first the first scene of the Mormon, the first of the 23 scenes is we don't know what happened to it.
SPEAKER_01It's lost.
SPEAKER_03So we it's lost. So we have 22. And the first one that we have that's that we still have is of Joseph Smith receiving the plates from the Angel Moroni. Um, and there the Angel Moroni is does not have wings, but he is hovering off the ground. And then later in his 1891 Book of Mormon series, he depicts the vision of Nephi, where Nephi sees a vision of the Virgin and Child, and it's pointed out to him by a heavenly messenger or an angel. And this time Christianson, again, the angel doesn't have wings, but he's very firmly planted on the ground, and he's very clearly in a moment of space and time with Nephi, and they're looking at this vision up in the clouds, but these two embodied people are clearly there together, and that is really revolutionary for that's a that's a break from the tradition the Western European tradition. I mean, the wings like the lack of wings was already a break, and then this having an angel that is embodied and can exist um in space and time um in a way that, yeah, that's that's brand new. And and that's that's Christensen drawing on his European art tradition, but adapting it to Latter day Saint beliefs.
SPEAKER_02But you know, it it kind of is an echo of what we were talking earlier about the philosophical Rigor. You know, he's processing these things and he's just not he's just not regenerating tropes, which is a very common religious painting that in the tradition. I find that really, really cool.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I do too. Yeah, that's great.
SPEAKER_02I'd like to conclude our discussion. Yeah, it's going by so fast. I hope. Um the same way that you do in your book. So with thoughts about his blending of Scandinavian, American, and Mormon identities. I find that chapter in this book to be really uh really extraordinary and it just means a lot to me personally. In Utah at the turn of the century, you know, 19th, 20th century, uh, the admonition from the official church was for immigrants that spoke languages other than English to learn English and more to adopt American manners and customs. I actually I didn't know that. So tell me a little bit more about that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think that was the the goal, although there certainly were pockets of ethnic groups that settled in certain places, right? I mean, even still today, you can write Midway, sort of Scandinavian, and right, and Sandbeat County is still a lot of Scandinavian, mostly Danish. Emory County has a lot of Swedes, and that's still the case today that the those families um have stayed. Um but there was some tension there, although although they the I think the church and I think a lot of the members wanted to adopt this Latter-day Saint identity that superseded their their prior national or ethnic identities. There was still a tension there. And that I mean, these people had, you know, hundreds of years of of history of feeling certain ways about each other. And now they're supposed to be neighbors and and ward members together.
SPEAKER_02They had all these foreign language newspapers and associations and groups. And I can imagine these converts feeling very homesick for their birthplaces. You know, I mean, surely they many of them gave up families and everything they knew to immigrate, and they must have been quite nostalgic for things from home. So Christensen's paintings of Scandinavia are sweet to me. And maybe that's because my ancestors came from Sweden and Germany, and I just know that they loved where they came from. My great-grandfather was just one of those that you just described. He was, he came to the church as a teenager. He was the only one of his family to convert. He found his way to the saints in the West. He lived in Cedar City, Utah. And other than me, everybody in the family still lives there.
SPEAKER_01Oh well.
SPEAKER_02And so the idea that somebody could make so many radical changes in their life, all under the pressures of prosecution and wars, is hard for me to comprehend. So how do Christensen blend all these identities? And I mean, like, how do you see that in in paintings and and his writing?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, um, that's a great question. He he again wanted to preserve that heritage for the younger generation, especially right the his children and grandchildren that were born in Utah and never knew their the homeland that he came from. So he continued to write poems and hymns in Danish. Um, he helped organize annual Scandinavian celebrations in Manti and Ephraim. He would often read his Danish poems as part of those, you know, celebrations. Uh he taught the Danish language at um the San Pete, what was it, San Pete Steak Academy, which is now snow college down there. Um, so he was teaching the younger people Danish so they would know that language too, which is so interesting because early when he first joined the church, he was so quick to learn English. And it's amazing how quickly he was able to learn English and write, even in his personal journals, to write in English really well. Uh, and then at the end of the of his life, he's like, Well, wait a minute, let's not forget Danish. And I want to teach, teach you guys some Danish, and here's some things you should know about it. And then he does these paintings, um, about a dozen beautiful, small, mostly small, kind of like a 10 by 12 kind of size of uh these mostly countryside scenes in the city.
SPEAKER_01Waiting the baby.
SPEAKER_03Oh, weighing the baby. Yeah, that's actually an earlier that's earlier from his career. Yeah, I love that one. Nice little domestic scene.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you know, for somebody who had been so conscious of culture building, I wondered if he said, because he's talking about losing culture in the in the case of the Nauvoo in the earlier period in in Utah, but then later I can completely hear him say, wait, wait, wait. I also have this culture from the old world that I don't want to have you l lose that either.
SPEAKER_03That's that's right, yeah. And he wrote about it too in in that Danish newspaper you mentioned in Utah. He wrote many articles and essays about his missions in Scandinavia. Um so yeah, he in in every way he was trying to pres oh, and then he worked in the church historian's office helping compile the history of the Scandinavian mission with Andrew Jensen. So he was going at it from every angle, trying to preserve that heritage for the next generations.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I love the ending section of your book where you list many of the known paintings by CCA Christians and nearly a hundred of them, and you point out where they are, public and private collections. How can people learn more about his visual artworks? I don't know if all of these are very accessible.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, unfortunately, many of them are still, I mean, not I don't, I shouldn't say unfortunately. Unfortunately for us who want to see them, many of them are still uh um in private collections of of descendants. Um the church history museum does have quite a few. Um the BYU Museum of Art has his Mormon panorama. Um Springville. Springville has one, yeah. Um The Utah Museum at the U has one. Um I will say there was a catalog in 1984 by Richard Omen and Richard Jensen that was part of an exhibition at the Church History Museum. It was actually the opening exhibition for that museum. And that catalog um probably has the most complete set of images of his art. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to include all the images. Um, printing color images is is expensive. And I was the ones I was able to print in here was um thanks to the the Charles Red Center at BYU, um, who uh through a publication grant that allowed us to include those images, which I just felt like you cannot have a book about an artist and talk about the art and especially when people aren't as familiar with these images, you have to be able to look at them. So I'm so grateful that the Red Center was able to do that.
SPEAKER_02You know, people who follow art just a little bit is not really their thing, and who are members of the church. They have this mistaken idea that there is some giant repository where all of these images exist, all these paintings and drawings and sculptures and prints, whatever, exist, and anybody who's really into it can go and find these things. That's not the case. Or that there's this giant library, and all you do is you go and you like look things up. There aren't very many books, really, right, about this. So this book of yours, I think is just can we call it canonical? It's it's not that big of a book. It's like whatever, 150 pages or something. But you know, there just aren't many books like this, and there should be many, many, many more books like this. Don't you agree?
SPEAKER_03That's so kind of you, Glenn. I I feel the same way. And and I think you and I are on the same page there, that that's that's one of our driving motivations in the work that we both do is trying to catalog and make accessible the the history of all forms of art in the Latter-day Saint tradition. I will I have to mention my Book of Mormon art catalog. Is that okay? So that and you can also find many of these images there. It's a public um online digital database of Book of Mormon art, um, and art related to church history, Doctrine of Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price. And we have about 13,000 images that we've cataloged in there and and it's growing all the time. And it includes art from members all over the world. Um, things that, like you said, are often hard to find on your own, um, not as accessible through some of the main channels. So um I hope people will take advantage of that resource to see the the great diversity uh of art in our in our culture.
SPEAKER_02Yep. Thank you for mentioning that. I had that in my notes to talk about when we were discussing that his Book of Mormon paintings, and I was gonna call you like who knows more in the world about LDS Book of Mormon paintings than Jenny. Um where what is the uh website for that?
SPEAKER_03Uh Book of Mormon Artcatalog.org.
SPEAKER_02Great. Well, this has been such an enlightening discussion. Thank you so much for your work and for your time today. Any final thoughts to share?
SPEAKER_03Um, you know, I just want to say I love that we got a picture of CCA on the cover as a young man. He, whenever I've seen published works on him, he's usually a very old man. And I love those pictures too. But I have not seen this young man photo of him published very much. And and I feel like with this title, A Mormon Visionary, you just get that sense of him having this exuberance for what lies ahead. And I was really inspired learning about the way he dedicated his life to what he believed the world could be, and and really um making sacrifices to make that come to pass and to help other people build that kind of a life. And so I felt like that picture of him as a young man looking forward kind of captured that thought for me.
SPEAKER_02Beautiful. Well, thank you, Chabby, and thank you too, listeners, for your interest in the podcast. You can hear more interviews by going to our website, Center for Latterday Saint Arts.org, by searching these the Center Studio Podcasts on major podcast platforms, and you can view our video version of the interview on YouTube on the Center's channel. We'd love to hear your thoughts too. Send me a note. Thanks, Jenny, and thanks everybody. Goodbye.
