Contemporary Temple Art and Landscapes of the Sacred

mormons have never been known for their church art. Despite the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sending “missionaries” to France to study in art academies in the nineteenth century, what sticks in the minds of many is an art that is colorful, sentimental, and trite. A more detached observation is that the art of chapels and temples has a “lack of cohesiveness.”1 From the 1980s until recently, Latter-day Saint temples have been built and decorated with little care taken as to how the visual arts might heighten the temple experience. What was on the walls was disconnected from the values or covenants conveyed within the temple ordinances.A related problem was that the art placed in the temples was the same art that appeared in numerous Latter-day Saint publications, visitor centers, and homes. Some of this art had originally been prepared for the Mormon Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. Other images came from the 1973 “Gospel in Art” program that encouraged the Saints to fill their homes with scriptural imagery. While past artists were talented illustrators, years of reproducing the works of Harry Anderson, Arnold Friberg, Tom Lovell, and John Scott rendered these images unremarkable.2 Other prints on temple walls were faded, drained of their original color. Even newspaper reporters who covered the openings of new temples asked why there was no original art in spaces filled with highly crafted furniture and handmade carpets.3There also was the problem of “geocentrism.” Although temples were being built all over the United States and even the world, many paintings within the temples echoed the landscapes of Utah. If church leaders counseled members to build up Zion where they lived, why would the Atlanta temple have two prints of Utah mountains? How could the Saints feel a sense of being in their spiritual home when the temple looked like an alien territory? Would it be possible to balance the feel of “other worldliness” with familiarity?What altered this disinterest toward temple art was the realignment of temple attendance within the devotional lives of Latter-day Saints. During the twentieth century, temple building had become the single most unifying and distinguishing aspect of the church. Church president Gordon B. Hinckley wanted temple going to become a routine religious activity of all Latter-day Saints everywhere. By delineating a few standardized architectural plans, he predicted faster temple production could occur. Hinckley proved correct. When he became church president in 1995, there were forty-seven temples; when he died in 2008, there were 124. There were thirty-four temples dedicated in the year 2000 alone. This focus on temple building continued with president Russell M. Nelson, who became the church's president in 2018. By 2022 he had announced the construction of eighty-three temples, six more than Hinckley. Most of those would be built outside of the United States, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, a major growth area for global Christianity.4 Temple going thus came to distinguish the Latter-day Saints from other Christians who also sought converts in the Global South.5 During the twenty-first century, it was hoped that temple going would become routine for all members.6The focus on temple building, renovation, and attendance drew attention to the need for improved art, and church leaders began to commission original art for temples.7 Given the increasing importance of the temple, institutional control over art selection was imperative. An Art Evaluation Committee was formed by the First Presidency in 2001 to recommend works of art for temples, meetinghouses, and special projects that supported the mission of the church.8 At the end of that review process, if the piece was acceptable, the First Presidency judged whether or not it would “help all patrons feel God's divine love.”9 The presidency therefore had the last say over what would now go on the temple's walls.Art renewal was also coordinated by an influential director of the Temple Department. In 2011, Larry Y. Wilson became a General Authority Seventy and soon after assumed oversight over the global construction of the church's temples, along with the Presiding Bishopric. Shortly after becoming director, he toured the Provo Utah Temple. Built in 1972, the massive structure had a modernist circular design but conventional art. Wilson was dismayed to find that three prints of Harry Anderson's The Second Coming (1969) were placed at different spots in the temple.10 Unlike other Latter-day Saints who may have had little exposure to the arts, Wilson was a part of the Mormon intellectual elite: he earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford, spent years working as an executive in California health care, and did a stint as a high-level church authority in Hong Kong. Since the nineteenth century, Latter-day Saints understood their art as proof of their respectability, gentility, refinement, and sophistication.11 Increasingly, broadly educated and well-travelled Latter-day Saints like Wilson had high expectations for their church. Many wondered why the holy space of the temple did not display better art.By the time Wilson was released from his calling in 2019, he had secured an art renewal. Wilson had received a commitment from the First Presidency to increase the budget for art, which enabled appointing Arch Williams as manager of temple art in 2016. Wilson also determined that any new art commissioned for the temples would only appear in temples. Artists would have to give over copyright to the church, and the church would only make high-quality reproductions (giclées) for exclusive use in temples. In the future, Latter-day Saints would only see temple art in temples. Temple art would be something special.By the start of 2022, over 160 Latter-day Saint temples had been evaluated and received new murals, original paintings, or improved art reproductions. Over three hundred original easel paintings and forty ordinance room murals have been placed in temples since 2000. For instance, when a new temple was built in Pocatello, Idaho, it contained sixty-six carefully placed images, which included eight original paintings and a restoration of Minerva Teichert's Not Alone. The newly renovated Mesa temple, twice the size of the Pocatello temple, houses 213 images, including twenty-three original paintings and four rooms of floor-to-ceiling murals. A giclée of Frederick Church's Cotopaxi (1855), secured from the Houston Art Museum, is now in the Quito Ecuador Temple. Church art curators purchase appropriate paintings at art auctions and accept donations from collectors. As new temples are built and older ones renovated, art will no longer be “seen as a decorative element of the temple,” Williams explained, but rather as something “beautiful to look at” that provides “spiritual renewal.”12There are several different genres of art that are placed in the temple.13 The remainder of this essay will explore one genre that I argue is unique in Christian art history. While Renaissance painters might have included glimpses of landscapes in their scriptural representations that found their way into Catholic churches, portrayal of nature always was subservient to the biblical narrative. Dutch genre paintings that flourished after the Reformation included elaborate portraits of natural landscapes, but these were placed in homes, not churches. Even during the nineteenth century, when nature took on highly symbolic and spiritual meanings, landscapes devoid of people were not placed in either Protestant or Catholic churches. Latter-day Saints are exceptional among Christians in that they include natural landscapes in their most sacred of spaces.The inclusion of nature scenes in Mormon temples began in the late nineteenth century when, in order to facilitate the drama being performed during the endowment ceremony, floor-to-ceiling murals were painted on the rooms’ walls. In 1890, the church sent John Hafen, Lorus Pratt, and John B. Fairbanks to Paris to study art in the hopes of making better murals for the Salt Lake Temple, which was completed in 1893. That temple also held two framed landscape paintings by Alfred Lambourne (1850–1926): Adam-ondi-Ahman and Hill Cumorah. Murals were painted for temples in Hawaii, Canada, and New Zealand in addition to those in several cities in the continental United States. The last temple to have a full set of murals in its ordinance rooms was the Los Angeles California Temple, which was dedicated in 1956.Landscapes were not simply theatrical backdrops. During the first third of the nineteenth century—at the period of Mormonism's birth—painted representations of nature came to hold symbolic power. At the very time that Americans were settling and commercializing natural resources, they imagined an untouched nature as possessing “universal truths of beauty, independence, and freedom.” Following the European Romantic tradition, nature came to symbolize the divine presence. The universe was God's handiwork and those who sought God should look for him in the beauty of nature. Americans as diverse as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir “venerated nature in its untouched state, suggesting that encountering the wilderness could enable individuals to reclaim their own lost innocence and wonder.”14 Such nature was perceived to be a harmonious Edenic wilderness uncorrupted by sin. “The landscape,” wrote historian Barbara Novak, is “a holy text which reveals truth.”15 In providing renditions of nature, artists participated in a spiritual endeavor.For the painters of the Hudson River School like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, and Thomas Moran, nature was God's temple captured in their art. Carrying on the Hudson River School in the Rocky Mountains, early Latter-day Saint painters were influenced by the prevailing fashion for associating “virgin” nature with Eden and God's creation. More than other Christians, Latter-day Saints understood specific places as being designated by God for their use. Coming to the Utah territory was coming to Zion, to the Promised Land. The mountains, waterfalls, sunsets, and valleys of Utah “symbolized purity, the majesty of God as seen through the vastness of his creations.”16 Such wildness protected Zion from the destructive forces of Babylon, thus fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy that in the last days, “the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains . . . and all nations shall flow unto it” (Isaiah 2:2). Temples would be built on high points of land and landscapes would remind patrons of God's world before sin.In 2002, after a hiatus of almost fifty years, landscape murals returned to the visual culture of Latter-day Saints with the rebuilt Nauvoo Temple. The original temple had been constructed between 1841 and 1846, and by 1850 it was a pile of ruins. In 1999, church president Gordon B. Hinckley announced its rebuilding. The outside would look like the original temple, but the interior would be fully modernized. Six artists—Douglas Fryer, James C. Christensen, Robert Marshall, Christopher Young, Ernest Smith, and Frank Magleby—were called to paint murals for the Creation Room, the Garden Room, and the World Room. Fifty-four original paintings were also placed in the newly reconstructed historic temple.17Twenty-first century murals do not narrate the plan of salvation as played out in the endowment ceremony but instead depict a natural environment “untouched by human hands.” Thus, contemporary mural art differs from that of the earlier period when people were included in the Celestial Room (Idaho Falls 1945), Adam and Eve experienced a dreary world (Los Angeles 1956), and animals devoured each other (Cardston 1923). Mural landscape also should be recognizable by patrons as “local” rather than representative of an artist's idea of what a newly formed cosmos or ancient Eden looked like.The Newport Beach California Temple (2005), for instance, is a highly detailed, finely crafted exposition of the California coastline.18 Painted by one of the Nauvoo muralists, Christopher Young (1963– ), it is a masterpiece of trompe l'oeil. Rather than noticing the corner of the room, viewers’ eyes are drawn away from the defining architecture by the residing coastline. The scene is calm and contemplative. Verdant greenery punctuates the rocky hillside and tempers the arid landscape. Hidden in the shadows, blending into a niche in the rock, is a resting mountain lion. While the mural is realistic, it is a perfected scene. The mountain lion does not menace but rather is incorporated into a balanced natural order. “I try to enhance reality,” Young explains of his art, “to enhance the tactile illusion without pushing it to the point where it is not believable. If I paint a rose, I want to paint the ultimate, symbolic rose of all roses.”19 The coastal landscape refers to the area around the temple but in a form of Edenic splendor.Landscape artist Brad Aldridge (1965– ) has painted six temple murals. Two are in Peru, with the others in Sapporo, Japan; Hartford, Connecticut; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and Raleigh, North Carolina. His framed landscapes hang in many temples. As a landscape artist, Aldridge acknowledges the influence of the Hudson River School as well as the American Romantic writers Emerson and Thoreau. In addition, Aldridge believes his efforts tap into the creative spirit that humans carry over from their premortal existence. Art itself, be it explicitly religious or not, has a deeper dimension when it seeks to make sense out of a chaotic world. Art functions best when it reflects the God-given order and harmony of creation. Art should help us make sense out of what is, at first glance, meaningless. When meaning is successfully communicated, truth, emotion, and spiritual experience result.Producing temple murals is a long and complicated process. Having secured a commission, the artist travels to where the temple is being built and photographs the locale, but only for a short period. During the trip, the artist learns about indigenous plants and animals as well as the regional geography. Returning home, a fuller design is made from the assembled photographs. The point is to create “an intricate, beautiful, varied surface that also tells a story. It's a beautiful landscape,” which temple patrons should recognize as their own.20 Mural panels are typically ten feet high and twenty-five feet long and it may take several of them to cover one room. The Raleigh North Carolina Temple, for instance, required three panels.21 Panels are painted near the artists’ studio, usually in large rented buildings that can accommodate sizable scaffolding and lighting. Brad Aldridge enjoys this artistic challenge because there are so “many things you can learn from painting large.”22 He uses paint rollers and four-inch house painting brushes as well as ones with fine tips. When the painting is finished, the canvas is rolled up and shipped. Then it is glued on the ordinance room's walls. The artist usually travels again to the site to supervise the mural's installation and to touch up any remaining problems.Landscape murals are especially attractive because they do not raise the same issues of gender, ethnicity, class, and race as are frequently found in figurative art. In this way, landscapes are less controversial. However, their production can provide a lens into the difficult negotiations that take place between foreign cultures and a Utah-run church. Nature turns out to have its own symbolism that may not be obvious to well-intentioned outsiders. In order to have his or her mural proposal for a commission, the artist a of art and church leaders that the mural will be to the unique of the recognize that the landscape is their space if devoid of At the same the church recognize the images as in “local” and of a a place they have never When Brad Aldridge made his proposal painting for the Temple, he included Aldridge and the other Americans at the proposal that when the proposal painting was to a temple site the did not like the He the What Aldridge and others as the Latter-day Saint as was not appropriate for a Aldridge altered the landscape paintings do not have human in to this is when a landscape is placed in the temple paintings typically a of and a of people being When Brad Aldridge was commissioned to paint a scene for the of the Temple he did not to he was sent a of historic photographs of In the photographs might have been of a from Utah who had in as the first Latter-day Saint to to what was Aldridge that that was “a little because it the of and he to paint one a a and a being Temple this and that all of the be why they this is but by 2019, there were over While came to the church was made up of members and in Aldridge with the of the temple However, the being can be seen in the framed The is by the natural a and a While the temple does near the early church were performed in and in an that had filled with in one of the not in the The the of the and newly in an Edenic devoid of the of or The scene is but it is also landscape paintings are also placed in temples. The Mesa Temple, which was dedicated in but fully renovated in two original landscapes by ) and many by other of paintings are of scenes with and The arid is balanced by and The is a The paintings the made in the biblical of of a where “the wilderness and the place shall be for and the shall and as the (Isaiah The Latter-day Saint who in the this prophecy was coming to as they from the mountains to make a land of As with the art of Christopher Young, the paintings enhance through highly and Latter-day Saint artists like a that and other landscape paintings to the of the Hudson This is the with paintings at artist Wilson had no to A artist of the painted in the of Thomas and Albert Bierstadt, who the of nature through of and His painting of the years by the church the of the as a a the the church secured the copyright from the so that could be prepared and in other temples. the Mesa temple was was to see the painting and were a of the art renewal during the first two of the twenty-first century is a by church leaders and Latter-day Saint artists to make art that would as for a specific set religious and At this point in the church's leaders want art that and should God fulfilling the of the and the of the natural Since art be and this and what of art can be placed in the art that those to the within the temple of a time where the Saints can in the sense of that the beauty of the world. While the production of the landscapes might and the art is to a perfected past Eden and a Art should thus the temple's to provide a and spiritual space for

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