I love that Latter-day Saint temples tend to be well-decorated with artwork, including the temple murals. I still find it a bit painful that the murals were not preserved as part of the Salt Lake City Temple renovation, but still find the history of the original murals in the Salt Lake City Temple to be fascinating, particularly due to the Paris Art Mission initiative. Notably, Linda Jones Gibbs discussed the history of the Paris Art Mission in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.
To start, Linda Jones Gibbs offered a summary of what the Paris Art Mission was:
In 1890-91, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent five Utah artists to receive art training in Paris to improve their skills for painting murals in the soon to be completed Salt Lake Temple. They were designated as “art missionaries, “ officially set apart and given blessings to remain single minded in fulfilling the purpose of their mission.
These art missionaries were given a great opportunity to study at a major cultural center for the western world:
All the art missionaries attended the prestigious Julian Academy in Paris, a private atelier founded in 1868. It was open to any aspiring artist and became so popular it eventually rivaled in attendance the government sponsored Ecole des Beaux Arts.
Technical facility was paramount at the Julian Academy. Students were first taught of the fundamentals of draftsmanship by copying engravings and plaster casts. They then moved on to drawing and then painting the human figure.
Each of the art missionaries were able to receive training at the Académie Julian, and were particularly influenced by Impressionism.
The Church was willing to offer funding for the art missionaries because they had agreed to use their skills to paint the murals in the Salt Lake City Temple, which fit into a developing tradition:
The first temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to have murals was the St. George temple, completed in 1877. There were none in the first two temples built in Kirtland, Ohio and Nauvoo, Illinois.
There is no recorded reason for the initial use of murals. The earliest precedent occurred in 1855/56 when William Ward (1827-1893), an early Utah architect, sculptor and painter, was hired to depict trees, animals and plants on some walls of the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. … One can surmise the murals were intended to enhance the temple endowment experience by immersing the participant in an environment that was both aesthetic and instructive. …
Two months after returning to Utah, the art missionaries, along with one of their former instructors in Utah, Dan Weggeland, were asked to begin painting the Garden of Eden and World Rooms in the Salt Lake Temple. Hafen, Evans and Weggeland worked on the Garden Room, assisted by Pratt. The World Room was painted by Evans, Fairbanks and Weggeland.
The artists were able to provide the murals, though they were given a tight deadline for their work.
While the recent removal of murals in the Salt Lake City Temple was a loss of an artistic legacy, very little of what was removed was the original murals that were created by the art missionaries:
Over the years, the murals were painted over due to peeling plaster and attempts to clean the murals which resulted in faded colors. In 1987 only one small part of the original murals remained. In 2021, all the murals were removed, rolled and placed in storage and the temple ceremonies converted to the use of film.
For more on the Paris Art Mission, follow the link to read the full interview with Linda Jones Gibbs at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. While you’re there, check out the new Heber J. Grant quotes page!
Here’s one thing that I never understood about the church’s decision to remove the murals: murals and film aren’t mutually exclusive when it comes to the endowment. There are six other temples that use the muraled 4-room presentation of the endowment in addition to film (Manti, Idaho Falls, Nauvoo, Cardston, Laie, and Los Angeles). Not only that, the grand majority of the temples from the Hinckley and Monson eras also use murals/progressive instruction rooms with film (through two rooms instead of four). So it would have been totally possible to keep the former layout while transitioning to film.
If preservation was impossible due to extenuating circumstances (peeling plaster and such), why not just repaint the murals on canvas this time? I’m sure artists would have killed for the opportunity to recreate them. We just repainted the murals in the St. George and Mesa temples that paid tribute to the original ones that were removed in the ’70s, so why not repaint the ones in Salt Lake?
When the Church Newsroom showcased the Manti Temple renovations in April, it described the murals as “sacred, priceless, and historic.”
Even one of the church conservators said that “we needed to care for the murals…To extend the lifespan of these murals means we preserve a symbolic entry point into new understandings of our temple worship, theology and relationship with the divine.”. It’s unfortunate that the Salt Lake Temple got the opposite treatment…
Yeah, it was a shocking move when it was revealed, especially since they were touting the renovation as one that would preserve the historic nature of the building. But the reality is that they made a lot of changes to the layout of that part of the temple to accommodate more endowment rooms and remove the need for the grand staircase, so the rooms that had the murals likely don’t even exist now. It would be nice if they added murals to the new endowment rooms that pay tribute to the old ones, though.