Since its founding, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has tried (and continues to try) to find a balance between introversion and extroversion, seeking, at times, to reach out to the world or finding comfort and protection in bunkering down in the mountain valleys of the West, “our desert home.” Put another way, it has struggled to know if it should stand out or stand in.1 Moreover, while embracing its status as peculiar, it has also—actively and at times uncomfortably—sought to fit in by shedding its unique peculiarities. Similarly, at the center of what is called “Mormon art” is a conflict of trying to create work that attempts to capture the quintessence of the Latter-day Saint ethos and experience, while, at the same time, trying to fit in within a larger Christian context.To understand this dynamic more fully, this essay explores the interwoven trajectories of the Danish artists Carl Bloch and C. C. A. Christensen. Indeed, Danish artists have played an oversized role in Mormon art. Bloch and Christensen provide a revealing case study in that they share important similarities but went in disparate directions, both were forgotten and later rediscovered in the twentieth century, and both were brought together again under the umbrella of church art. Lastly, this essay investigates what the competing reputations of these similar yet disparate artists reveal about the aspirations and aesthetics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Carl Christian Anton Christensen was born to a poor family in Copenhagen, Denmark, on November 28, 1831. The son of a hosiery merchant, Carl Bloch, was born in the same city three years later, on May 23, 1834. Both showed artistic talent in their youth and were encouraged to seek additional training, which brought them to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.Founded in 1754 and still active in the twenty-first century, the art academy was known as one of the best academies in Europe.2 Established to train and exhibit young Danish artists, it took inspiration from the work and reputation of artists like the celebrated neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (another Danish artist later embraced by Latter-day Saints).3 Recruited from different classes, students typically began around age twelve copying drawings before graduating to limning plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and then to live models.4 Once they mastered the human form, they would move on to study painting under one of the school's masters. The work that students ultimately produced was academic in nature displaying carefully polished surfaces, an attention to detailed anatomy and correct proportions, and convincing illusionistic settings. The subject of these works of art was history painting, or the representation of “great deeds of great men,” incorporating historical, allegorical, biblical, and mythological subject matter. At the academy students were also encouraged to explore nationalistic themes celebrating Danish landscapes, figures, and events.Christensen and Bloch studied at the Royal Academy in what is considered the golden age of Danish painting. Christensen began his studies at age fourteen in 1847 and continued for the next six years under the influential artists and teachers C. W. Eckersberg and J. L. Lund. Eckersberg emphasized the study of nature and, at times, even encouraged an untutored and naïve style that possibly influenced Christensen.5 Bloch began in 1849 and his tenure overlapped with Christensen. It is tempting to imagine that they knew each other and possibly sketched while sitting at adjacent easels.While Christensen seems to have floundered in his studies, Bloch excelled. Within three years of his entrance into the academy, he received accolades for his work and by 1859 he traveled to Italy to continue his artistic development, a prerequisite for accomplished professional painters. Like other talented and ambitious artists, he studied in Rome, which enriched his eye and his art. He developed into a successful painter whose works demonstrated the hallmarks of his academic training, including an emphasis on the human form, near perfect craft, tight brushwork, and excellent draftsmanship. Even before his return to Denmark, his talents were recognized, and he received awards including his official election to the academy at age thirty-one. He also received important commissions for churches and palaces including a series of twenty-three biblical scenes for the exclusive and elaborate King's Oratory in Fredericksborg Castle, which was being renovated after a devastating fire in 1859.In 1850 C. C. A. Christensen was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This proved to be a decisive event for the young artist. Following his conversion, it appears that his studies lagged in his last three years of training, even though it was reported he earned high marks. His thoughts, he admitted, were on weightier matters and his dreams of becoming an artist, he believed, were “destroyed or overthrown for good.”6 Upon his graduation he served consecutive proselyting missions to Sweden and Denmark and eventually immigrated to the United States, where in 1857 he joined a handcart company of “tired pilgrims” going west.7 Once in Utah, he learned that it was difficult to secure a living as an artist, and to support his family he created banners, signs, and theatrical scenery. One contemporary noted that Christensen was often found in overalls and with a pitchfork engaged “in practical work, in order to obtain something to fill the bellies of himself and his family, instead of following the bidding of Apollo.”8Christensen may not have followed the bidding of Apollo, but he remained active in the arts throughout his life. He felt that becoming a Latter-day Saint did not destroy or overturn his ambition of being an artist; rather he used his skills on behalf of his deep religious convictions. This is best illustrated by his most important and famous work: the Mormon Panorama, which recorded in an epic scale key events from church history. The “cultural nationalism” Christensen learned at the Royal Academy would now be channeled into the newly minted history of his faith with its own set of great men and great deeds.9 Equal parts missionary tract, pageant, art, and entertainment, Christensen's 175-foot-long panorama traveled from community to community throughout Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Wyoming beginning in 1878. Its aim was to instruct and edify his fellow Saints and to “awaken more than ordinary interest for the fine arts.”10 “History will preserve much,” the painter argued “but art alone can make the narrative of the suffering of the Saints comprehensible for the following generation.”11One of the more puzzling elements of Christensen's art is the fact that he spent so much time at the academy and yet his work remained remarkably unacademic. This is evident in his panorama and other works, which have been called “primitive” and “naïve.”12 Others have suggested that his work exhibits a “homespun, quasi-primitive style.”13 As such he is compared to the painter Peter Breughel the Elder, who traveled to Italy in the sixteenth century but returned to Flanders without adopting the style and sophistication of the Italian Renaissance, choosing instead to maintain a unique and “folksy” approach.14 What seems clear, however, was that once Christensen joined the church, he turned to an approach that favored narrative over form or what he called “practical instruction.”15 His style, as Nathan Rees has argued, exhibits an “authentic pioneer character, a sign of virtuous, simple living.”16 He was not an artist separated from his people or traditions but what Richard Oman called a “‘everyman’ of early Mormonism.”17In 1893 Christensen tried unsuccessfully to sell his panorama. At nearly the same time, church leaders, principally George Q. Cannon, sent the “art missionaries”—John Hafen, John Fairbanks, Lorus Pratt, Edwin Evans, and Herman Haag—to study in the academies of Paris in preparation for painting the murals in the Salt Lake Temple, then under construction.18 With academic art at its peak of prominence, sending artists abroad to improve their skills represented a clear effort to fit in with accepted artistic norms and practices. It also seems clear that the “folksy” style of Christensen was already passé. The work of Hafen prior to his departure was similar to Christensen's “naive effects.”19 It was this style, however, that was to be updated and abandoned.By the turn of the century, the academic painting practiced by Bloch and a proud list of other academic painters like Alexandre Cabanel and William-Adolphe Bouguereau fell from favor. In its place came the rise of modernist forms and approaches from Manet to Monet, Cezanne to Picasso, Van Gogh to Munch. The art missionaries were instructed in the Académie Julian in Paris to paint like academicians but came home painting like Impressionists as evidenced by Hafen's later work. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, academic painting was “in great disfavor” in the art world, evoking “the image of a cut-and-dried, rule-ridden, arbitrary art Establishment.”20In this rapidly changing artistic climate, Bloch would be forgotten and so would Christensen. Seen as primitive and a product of a bygone age and zeal, Christensen's murals were stored away and neglected. By 1900 there were other forms of entertainment and additional ways of telling the story of the Saints. Even Alice Merrill Horne, the most important supporter of the visual arts in Utah at that time, acknowledged that Christensen's work already represented a dwindling generation that differed from current artists like Hafen whom she favored. It was only the “old settlers” who recalled his panorama, she insisted. Moreover, Christensen was remembered as a struggling artist whose “passion for the art life was never satisfied.” “Cast apart from art influence,” Horne proposed, “his life was one of self-suppression and toil.”21In time, however, both Bloch and Christensen would be remembered. Bloch came first, not in his native Denmark, but in distant Utah where his paintings would be seen and adored. His work began appearing sporadically in church publications in the 1940s, but it was the editor of church publications, Doyle Green, who championed Bloch's work and brought him to the attention of Latter-day Saints.22 He included Bloch's paintings in church magazines and as “appropriate” illustrations in Meet the Mormons, a book aimed at reintroducing the faith to an outside audience.23 In 1962, Green praised the artist as having “few weaknesses” and possessing an ability to be understood by all. The editor noted that Bloch's “fascination with detail, his powerful use of light and shadow, his dramatic animation and heroic vision, his accurate draftsmanship and the all but perfect structural qualities of his figures, combined with the skillful use of vivid color, give a highly realistic quality to his paintings.” He continued, “It is hoped that they will bring much inspiration, joy, and understanding to homes and classrooms throughout the Church.”24 Eschewing more mainstream modernist ideas for academic art's “historical realism,” editors, administrators, and, in turn, rank-and-file Latter-day Saints began to revere Bloch.25 This amused the Danes who were puzzled that this Danish artist received more attention abroad than he did at home.26In truth, using Bloch as a means of fitting in within a larger Christian context was not unique to the LDS faith. The academic artist's work was used by other denominations for similar purposes. In St. Hagia Sophia, a Greek Orthodox church in London, for example, a reproduction of Bloch's Sermon on the Mount was placed near the iconostasis in the front of the domed church. Bloch's work enables those on the periphery who, according to Terryl Givens, are more apt to seek for “connections and universals” in order to avoid the “sting of being excluded from the fold of Christendom.”27Christensen's artistic resurrection is also rife with irony. His work, preserved by his descendants in attics and basements, eventually came to the attention of the church, and in the early 1950s his large Panorama was purchased by BYU who moved it to one of its basements. Roughly two decades later it was “rediscovered,” not by church historians or curators, but by outsiders and “Gentiles” like the American cultural historian Carl Carmer who broadcast the remarkable “find” and the “special talent” of the artist.28 In an age that celebrated and admired primitive art, C. C. A. Christensen's murals, especially in their scale, were seen as a revelation to the American art scene and were likened to other notable primitives like Henri Rousseau and Grandma Moses who were known for their “direct, simple, and unfettered forms of expression.”29 With naïveté now a virtue, Christensen was praised for his “bright, clear colors, the vitality of the human figures, [and] the strength of the compositions,” which, Carmer argued, gave “them a unique quality.”30In 1970 Christensen's panorama was brought to New York City, where audiences did not look at the murals for what they revealed about the faith, its hardships, or successes. Rather they saw the panorama as an important surviving example of American folk expression. During its time in the art capitol of the world, the Mormon Panorama was featured in Art in America, the prominent art history journal, appearing on the cover of the May/June 1970 issue. In the journal, the newly rediscovered Christensen appeared alongside illustrious American artists like Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Alexander Calder, and contemporary artist Dan Graham. According to its editors, the Latter-day Saints had made “serious contributions to American art,” but “Mormon painting has been almost totally overlooked.” Yet, they argued that Christensen's work was “especially worthy of recognition for both its historical and artistic importance.”31 Later in the journal Christensen was applauded for his “vigorous style” and his blending of history and landscape, which was touted as “superior to that of most of the painting of his time.”32 The Panorama was also exhibited, in its entirety, in the Whitney Museum of American Art where the prominent art critic Harold Rosenberg praised the Jackson Pollock-sized murals as the “best thing that has been in New York for years.”33 No other Utah or Mormon artist has received the level of recognition Christensen received prior to his posthumous New York triumph or since.Christensen's risen star, however, did not guarantee success in Mormondom. Elder Boyd K. Packer was selective and parsimonious in his praise in 1976.34 According to the apostle and amateur artist, “Brother Christensen was not masterful in his painting, but our heritage was there. Some said it was not great art, but what it lacked in technique was more than compensated in feeling. His work has been shown more widely and published more broadly and received more attention than that of a thousand and one others who missed that point.”35 What is clear here is that Packer wanted, in a brother, a combination of artistic mastery, illustrative material, and the ethos of the Latter-day Saints. Christensen could not meet all these criteria for him and therefore would not or could not be fully embraced.The dismissal of Christensen, despite deeply rooted convictions to his faith, was particularly clear to art historian Jane Dillenberger. “Christensen's significant paintings” she wrote in 1978, “are as expressive to me as they are to Mormons. Indeed, I believe that I, and historians of American art, value them more highly than do the Mormon people for whom they were made.” She continued, “I would appeal to the Mormons to initiate a new ‘cleaning of the temple’—to remove the illustrative, shallow, socialist-realist-religious art, and await the coming of the artists who are equal to your epic history and your grand vision.”36 Christensen's art, to Dillenberger's point, was embraced, but measured. His paintings have appeared on the cover of the Ensign, and he would be praised by the young artists of the Art and Belief Movement in the 1970s who sought “historical fact and spiritual manifestation,” over “photographic realism.”37 For Oman, Christensen was the “Giotto of Mormonism,” and Jared Latimer called him the “most important Mormon artist ever.”38 Few LDS artists, however, trace their lineage back to him, especially if they want their work to be consumed by the church. Fewer would embrace him over Bloch.Ironically, the painter who believed that he was creating art for the benefit of his people, for his fellow saints, who believed he was standing in; has become the artist who now stands out. Bloch, who made work completely from the outside of an LDS tradition is now the artist who stands in. In 1991, BYU's Museum of Art (MOA) acquired Bloch's Pool of Bethesda from the Bethesda Indra Mission in Copenhagen through private donors and “a series of miraculous events.”39 Nineteen years later and again in 2013–2014, the museum mounted large and elaborate exhibitions of Carl Bloch's work, which sought, according to MOA curator Dawn Pheysey, to bring the artist “out of obscurity.”40 Obscurity? Certainly not in Utah. The MOA exhibitions were massive undertakings and the museum was rewarded with increased visibility in the community and high attendance—more than three hundred thousand visitors attended the first exhibition.41Two years later, the MOA presented Christensen's full Mormon Panorama in a downstairs gallery.42 The exhibition was well done, but quiet. In contrast to Bloch's exhibit, there were no iPads to help visitors navigate their experience, it did not require prebooking tickets, and there were no crowds. It was an important reintroduction of Christensen's most important work, but it was not a blockbuster and barely received any recognition. Similarly, framed Bloch giclee prints are often placed in prominent areas in ward meetinghouses, while Christensen prints, if present at all, are often hung in back halls where few stop to look.Another recent use of Christensen's work highlights the ways in which he has become further dislocated from the church and traditions he cherished. In 2012, Bloomberg Businessweek used an image by Christensen for the cover story on the sizable financial holdings of the LDS Church or what it called the “Mormon Empire.”43 The work was derived from Christensen's 1887 engraving of John the Baptist appearing to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery to bestow the Aaronic Priesthood in 1829. Instead of the pronouncement that comprises section 13 of the Doctrine and Covenants, in the Bloomberg parody John proclaims, “and thou shalt build a shopping mall, own stock in Burger King, and open a Polynesian theme park in Hawaii that shall be largely exempt from the frustrations of tax” to which Joseph replied, through a text balloon, “hallelujah.” The use of Christensen's work in this instance heightens the distinction between Mormons and other denominations by making it seem backward, primitive, and parochial once more. It separates, by making the church look peculiar through Christensen's homespun style. It is difficult to imagine Bloomberg art editors using an image of Bloch in this case. Somewhere in the great beyond Bloch must be bemused that he has been embraced so fully by a religion he did not know, while his Danish peer must be dismayed that he is not. Success for Christensen was not dependent on exhibiting his work in the Whitney, but on being embraced by his people and its traditions. He would certainly be dismayed by the Bloomberg example, in which his work was used to slight the church.Finally, it is worth asking which artist, Carl Bloch or C. C. A. Christensen, better represents the art of the Restoration in the twenty-first century? This is not easily answered. In truth, both artists, both styles, and both philosophies of art play a role in what art is produced, celebrated, and consumed. Both help the church stand out and stand in. Bloch will continue to play an important role in the art that is used by the church and its members. And yet, it must not come at the expense of those like Christensen. In 1892 he stated that “time has changed us, and our notions.”44 It is time to bring Christensen back into the fold, to celebrate an artist who created work that may not be as polished or perfected, but which captured something of the essence of the Latter-day Saints, where they are from, and what they want to become.