Collections on Campus: Portraits of Jesus
By Deborah Lilly
For more than 90 years, Anderson University has been a place for people to come and launch their careers. But hidden among the classrooms and work studios, the university holds three gems — The Warner Sallman collection, The Gustav Jeeninga Museum of Bible and Near Eastern Studies, and now a rare book collection that places AU on the map of unique holdings of children’s literature. The point of these collections is not to boast but to provide a distinct educational opportunity for AU students as well as those who live beyond the walls of campus. These collections bring in not only graduate scholars but people whose lives have simply been touched by a painting or whose curiosity needs satisfying by genuine artifacts from the Near East.
In American religious life, Warner Sallman is one of the best-known popular painters of Jesus. His painting of the head of Christ is recognized around the world. His work spans the country, but the majority of his original work can be found only in the art galleries at Anderson University.
Sallman was born at the end of the 19th century. As a young artist, he trained at the Art Institute of Chicago. He began his career in advertising, working as a commercial artist. “He was a devout Christian,” explains Jason Knapp, director of the Wilson Galleries and art professor at AU. “His home denomination, the Swedish Covenant Church, was always calling on him for work as well.” His work often graced the cover of the church’s publication.
In 1941, Sallman painted his famous Head of Christ. By that time, he had attracted the attention of Anthony Kriebel and Fred Bates, originally employees of the Gospel Trumpet Company. The two established a separate company in 1941 to become the exclusive publishers of Sallman’s art. As a result the Gospel Trumpet Company — later Warner Press — became the principal distributor of Sallman’s images. When Kriebel and Bates’ company folded, AU and Warner Press took ownership of the collection. As it stands, the university owns the pieces while Warner Press owns the copyrights to Sallman’s work in the university’s hands.
Sallman died in 1968. After his death, his youngest son, Jim, donated Sallman’s student work to the university. AU also owns around 40 oil paintings, along with pastels, watercolors, pen and ink and pencil drawings, and bits of typography. Aside from Sallman’s student work, the collection numbers around 200 objects. In addition, once the university became the owner of the collection, Knapp, as director of the gallery, began soliciting written pieces from the public about what Sallman’s images have meant to them. These letters, both positive and negative, remain with the collection.
According to Knapp, Sallman never considered his pieces to be high art. He realized that they were considered part of a popular religious culture. But that never bothered him. “He painted them skillfully and with as much care and attention as he could,” says Knapp of Sallman’s paintings. “He obviously cared about the images a great deal. But since he saw his own work in terms of Christian stewardship and ministry, the more the images were disseminated, the better he was pleased.”
The university purchased the collection in 1987 and exhibited it for the first time during the North American Convention of the Church of God. Currently the display is up year-round unless the galleries are needed for student exhibits. In the long term, Knapp hopes the Sallman collection someday finds a more permanent home on campus.
“As fine as the galleries are here, they were not designed with a permanent collection in mind,” says Knapp. Lack of humidity controls in the gallery and the movement of the pieces have taken their toll, and today many of the paintings need restoration work.
Since coming to AU and to the collection in the late 1980s, Knapp has learned what a tremendous influence Sallman’s work has had on the public during the last century. “Because Sallman was interested in publication, he was able to reach a huge cross section of the religious public,” says Knapp. During World War II, soldiers carried wallet-size reproductions of Sallman’s work in their pockets. These veterans continue to come in to see the collection, some of them still carrying the now well-worn cards in their wallets.
While Sallman himself belonged to the Swedish Covenant Church, his work is seen as interdenominational. Early in his career, he worked for the Salvation Army. His images were also used in youth rallies across the nation. “The Head of Christ in particular has become iconic in that worldwide pretty much everybody would recognize it as a picture of Jesus,” says Knapp.
While AU owns a majority of Sallman’s work, the institution certainly does not house it all. Sallman, for example, did a number of murals, one of them in a hospital chapel in Des Moines, Iowa. Park College, associated with the Swedish Covenant Church, owns several of Sallman’s pieces. Sallman also traveled the country doing “chalk talks,” two of which are owned by Park Place Church of God in Anderson.
But Knapp understands why people of the Church of God in particular have found such a fondness for Sallman’s work. “I think the appeal to the Church of God holiness movement is that for them Jesus is seen as a friend, a confidant, as someone who is very available.” This is the kind of Jesus found in Sallman’s paintings.
Anderson University maintains a Web site dedicated to Sallman’s work — www.warnersallman.org.
Collections on Campus: Jeeninga Museum
The Gustav Jeeninga Museum of Bible and Near Eastern Studies grew out of pieces Dr. Jeeninga began collecting as a professor of biblical studies at Anderson University. David Neidert, once a student of Jeeninga’s and now director of the museum, explains that Jeeninga was a visual teacher, often using maps and the chalkboard. “He came to the realization that students often found it difficult to make visual connections, so he began to ask himself how he could help them,” explains Neidert.
The first piece Jeeninga purchased was a replicated statue of a Sumerian priest, the original found under a temple floor near Baghdad dating from 3000 to 2500 B.C.E. He kept the statue on a shelf in his office, a shelf that began to hold more and more artifacts as time went on. It became common practice for other faculty members to borrow the objects to use in their own lectures. “In time, he began to become very anxious about those pieces leaving his office and getting damaged or broken,” explains Neidert. So Jeeninga bought a display case to house the artifacts and set it outside his office.
One case soon turned into several cases along a basement hallway in Wilson Library as Jeeninga continued to collect pieces. Soon, the collection even outgrew that space, so the School of Theology gave space from their own building to house the collection. The museum continues to reside on the bottom floor of the SOT.
According to Neidert, 70 percent of the collection is made up of authentic pieces ranging from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman Period. “A museum could buy a lot of replicas, but that’s not our intent,” says Neidert. “Our intent is to make sure that we have real pieces in the museum.” But when originals cannot be purchased, such as one-of-kind pieces found only in major world museums, the museum does collect in replicated form. “Gus was very interested in making sure students who would not have the privilege to go to places like the Louvre and the British Museum could still see these things,” explains Neidert. These replicas — Shalmaneser’s obelisk, the Hammurabi Code, the Moabite Stone, to name a few — make up the remainder of the museum’s holdings.
Today the collection — which stands at approximately 1,000 pieces — has grown as large as it can without additional space. Even now, there are pieces in storage for lack of display room.
Besides Jeeninga himself, Neidert’s work at the museum has been influenced by the collection at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and the Kelso Museum at Pittsburg Theological Seminary. Every year, Neidert takes a group of AU students to the Oriental Institute as part of an archaeology course he teaches. “Some of the things there I think we can replicate here,” says Neidert. He has possibly been more inspired by the Kelso Museum, a Near Eastern museum only a bit bigger than the Jeeninga Museum. Neidert has spent time at the Kelso Museum working alongside the director and learning about his museum’s philosophy of development. From his experiences in Chicago and Pittsburgh, the influence of studying under and working with Jeeninga, and from his own experiences as the museum’s director, Neidert has developed four goals to focus on in the near future.
“The museum needs to focus on educational presentation, on how we might invite the visitor into the Near Eastern context,” explains Neidert. Like Jeeninga, Neidert continues to see the museum’s artifacts as teaching tools, which is why he hopes to develop lesson plans based on some of the pieces in the museum.
Secondly, Neidert hopes to make the museum’s holdings more accessible to the public from anywhere in the world. The museum does have a Web site (www.anderson.edu/campus/museum/). At one time, Neidert was fortunate enough to have a student assistant he could trust with the artifacts who also had computer technology skills. The student was able to photograph and place 10 percent of the museum’s holdings online. “That’s how we as an institution can engage the world,” says Neidert. Even pieces that cannot be displayed physically for lack of space, can find room in the virtual world. Neidert hopes to resurrect this project so that someday all of the museum’s collection can be viewed online. “The School of Theology can become an educational player on the world stage because technology allows us to do that,” Neidert explains.
The museum has also been the recipient of Jeeninga’s extensive slide collection recounting the digs in which Jeeninga himself participated. Jeeninga began digging in the Middle East in the mid 1960s. During his trips to Israel, he focused on the Ceasarea Maritima region. The number of slides total several thousand, all of which need to be cataloged and placed in a digital format so they can be used by the wider academic community.
Finally, Neidert continues to look for artifacts to add to the museum that will round out the story of the history of the ancient world. For example, Merneptah, the 13th son of Ramesses the Great, built a victory monument in the 12th century B.C. which is the only place in all Egyptian hieroglyphs found to date that mentions the name Israel. The monument is six feet wide and 20 feet tall, but Neidert would welcome a reduced-size replica for the Jeeninga museum. He has also been in contact with the Cairo Museum about obtaining a replica of Babylonian text recounting Nebuchadnezzar’s attack of Jerusalem. He believes a piece such as this helps students understand how archaeological evidence can illuminate biblical text.
Jeeninga’s impact reaches further than the museum. Jeeninga understood that his ability to travel to Israel and participate in digs was a unique privilege. While his wife, Aletta, was still alive, Jeeninga and Aletta established a scholarship in archaeology for one seminary student and one undergraduate student. Before his own death, Jeeninga began to talk of transforming that scholarship into a fellowship, and that is exactly what the university was able to do under Jeeninga’s guidance. To date, two Anderson University students — one a seminary student and another an undergraduate student — have traveled to Israel to participate in ongoing archaeological digs.
Even after his death, Jeeninga, who had the complete support of Aletta while she was alive, is bringing the Bible to life not only for Anderson University students but also for visitors from outside the campus and surfers on the Internet. The museum and the fellowship are doing exactly what Jeeninga intended to do when he bought the Sumerian priest — letting people experience a time and place far away.
Collections on Campus: Children’s and Rare Book Collection
Not long ago, Janet Brewer, director of Nicholson University Library at AU, and her staff were mulling over how to properly display a collection of hymnals donated years earlier to the library by alumni Bill and Gloria Gaither. It was during this dilemma that Brewer welcomed a visit from Dr. Elizabeth York.
“She asked me what my wish list was for the library,” remembers Brewer. She told York about the hymnal collection. York herself was very interested in helping the library create a place for rare books and collections. She and her husband, Dr. James York, had become great supporters of the university, and she was beginning to think of transferring her own collection of rare children’s books to AU. As a result, the Yorks completely funded the creation of a large holding space for rare books along with a reading room on the first floor of the former Wilson Library. The hymnals were moved there last summer, and now Brewer and her staff have the excitement of adding York’s own rare books to the collections facility.
This is no small task. The first shipment included 61 boxes. This summer, York, with the help of her book dealer, has packed up an additional 153 boxes to be driven to the university by the book dealer himself. And there have been shipments in between. Her collection has been estimated at 10,000 books. So many, in fact, that the Yorks’ home, while generous in bookshelves, has not been able to contain the entire collection, and she has been storing her pieces in an air-conditioned rental space. “Everyplace we’ve gone,” says York, “I’ve collected books.” Now her interest is benefitting AU.
“Dr. York and I have been ardent readers all our lives,” explains York. “We both come from families of readers, people who value books. We treasure books.”
York began her children’s book collection by purchasing first editions of books featuring the works of 18th- and 19th-century illustrators such as Randolph Caldecott, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Howard Pyle, and Jessie Wilcox Smith. “They were primarily the kind of illustrators who did traditional, colorful, very detailed pieces, not fanciful or modern,” explains York. “They illustrated the classics — Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Mother Goose, The Arabian Nights.”
The search for these classics led her to Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, James Barry, and Rudyard Kipling. Then she came upon Robert Louis Stevenson.
“As I began to collect his things, I found they were beautifully illustrated, wonderfully written, and I ended up with what I am told is the largest collection of Robert Louis Stevenson in the country, except for the collection at the Harvard University Library,” says York.
It was while she was collecting children’s books that the Yorks inherited a 1926 signed copy of New Hampshire by Robert Frost. York followed up the acquisition by reading a biography of the poet. From there she was hooked and began collecting Robert Frost. She collected enough to fill four huge shelves in her home.
York broadened her range of collections over the years until she had at last count 200 to 250 Mother Goose, ABC, 123 books; 350 pop-up books; and 250 to 300 Christmas books. She has also collected early primers, chapbooks, and books by more contemporary children’s book illustrators. As she purchased books, York read and catalogued every one of them. As Brewer has received boxes from York, she has also found a nice representation of African-American and Native American children’s literature.
Brewer cannot say exactly where York’s donated collection will place Anderson University among the names of notable collections in the United States, but, she adds, “It represents a unique collection unheard of for a school of our size and standing.” Brewer also intends for the collection to be a growing collection, building on the strengths started by York.
On October 2, the Nicholson University Library will be dedicating its new collections space with a day full of activities relating to rare and children’s books. There will be workshops led by rare-book dealers and children’s book authors and illustrators.
The day-long conference is only the beginning of events prompted by the collection. Brewer adds that the collection could lead to specific education and art classes and will, in all likelihood, draw Ph.D. and other graduate scholars to Anderson University to study pieces in the collection.
