The “Head of Christ” has been called the “best-known American artwork of the 20th century.” The New York Times once labeled Sallman the “best-known artist” of the 20th century, despite the fact that few recognized his name.
“Sallman, who died in 1968, was a religious painter and illustrator whose most popular picture, ‘Head of Christ,’ achieved a mass popularity that makes Warhol’s soup can seem positively obscure,” William Grimes of the Times wrote in 1994.
The famed image began as a charcoal sketch for the first issue of The Covenant Companion, a youth magazine for a denomination known as the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant.
Sallman, who grew up in the denomination, which is now known as the Evangelical Covenant Church, was a Chicago-based commercial artist. Wanting to appeal to young adults, he gave his Jesus a “very similar feeling to an image of a school or professional photo of the time making it more accessible and familiar to the audience,” said Tai Lipan, gallery director at Indiana’s Anderson University, which has housed the Warner Sallman Collection since the 1980s.
His approach worked.
The image was so popular that the 1940 graduating class of North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago commissioned Sallman to create a painting based on his drawing as their class gift to the school, according to the Evangelical Covenant Church’s official magazine.
Sallman painted a copy for the school but sold the original “Head of Christ” to religious publisher Kriebel and Bates, and what Lipan calls a “Protestant icon” was born.
“This particular image of Jesus met the dawn of the ‘Mad Men,’ of the marketing agency,” said Matthew Anderson, affiliate professor of theological studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
The image quickly spread, printed on prayer cards and circulated by organizations, missionaries and a wide range of churches: Catholic and Protestant, evangelical and mainline, white and Black.
Copies accompanied soldiers into battle during World War II, handed out by the Salvation Army and YMCA through the USO. Millions of cards produced in a project called “Christ in Every Purse” that was endorsed by then-President Dwight Eisenhower and Trump family pastor Norman Vincent Peale were distributed all around the world.
The image appeared on pencils, bookmarks, lamps and clocks and was hung in courtrooms, police stations, libraries and schools. It became what scholar David Morgan has heard called a “photograph of Jesus.”
Along the way, Sallman’s image crowded out other depictions of Jesus.