Heavenly Bodies: Mormon Male Homoerotics in the Sacred Art of Arnold Friberg

A tan, bare-chested man stands in the foreground to the right, half turned away from the viewer. His right foot is perched on a rock, causing his studded leather kilt to hike up, exposing a hairless and muscular thigh. His vascular arms and neck are taut, and in one leather-cuffed hand he holds a sword. He is turned to look at an oncoming barbarian, so identified by his darker hair and skin, his shaggy beard, and hairy body. 

This striking tableau is one of many painted by Arnold Friberg depicting a scene from the Book of Mormon. This particular painting, titled “Ammon Defends the Flocks of King Lamoni,” is referencing a story from the Book of Alma chapter seventeen. Friberg’s art has been widely utilized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for much of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries in devotional materials, official publications, and decorating the walls of Church buildings. His most frequent subjects are men in action; his religious paintings depict heroes from scripture while his patriotic paintings showcase the Canadian Mounted Police and the Founding Fathers of America. But a Friberg man is always identifiable by his square jaw and broad shoulders atop slim hips. And despite the ancient Israelite origins of the characters in his Book of Mormon paintings Friberg consistently whitewashes his subjects, depicting men who would be more at home in Venice Beach than Zarahemla. 

The carved physiques of Friberg’s subjects highlight a fascination with the male form, celebrating hypermasculinity by exaggerating sexual difference: hard versus soft, active versus passive, and male versus female. Friberg created male figures which not only adhered to but superseded western standards of male beauty and virility, homoerotic in their careful and loving detailing of the male body. His work gained prominence at a time when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was making efforts to assimilate into mainstream American culture, and Friberg’s men resemble the heartthrobs of mid-century Hollywood. Rock Hudson would not be out of place in Friberg’s studio. 

Philosopher and Feminist Theorist Elizabeth Grosz argues that there is no “real” or authentic body which exists outside of cultural inscriptions, that there is no interiority or exteriority but rather a mobius strip of inscribable surface, constantly orienting to new inputs. In this presentation I will argue that the art of Arnold Friberg has been used by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to craft an idealized Muscular Mormon Man. As Noel Carmack notes in his study of Twentieth Century Latter-day Saint depictions of Jesus Christ, “religious images serve as a tangible manifestation and affirmation of doctrine.” (Carmack, 19) Sacred and devotional art turns the invisible of religious devotion and doctrine into material reality, reflecting both the theological and cultural ideals of a religious community. If, as Grosz asserts, It is only through experiencing what is the other that we begin to develop a sense of self (Grosz, 74) and that there is no body or self which exists outside of cultural (and, for those who are members of a religious community, doctrinal) inscription, then we may conclude that sacred or devotional art not only reflects the mores of a religious community but also acts as a chisel through which norms and ideals are inscribed upon the individual. 

In speaking about his own work Arnold Friberg acknowledged the generative nature of art, that it was intended to do something for and to the viewer, that “his large muscular characters are intended to physically portray the inward greatness of the men he depicts.” (Carmack, 40) Friberg asserts that he was reading his subjects from the inside out, materializing spiritual greatness onto magnificent bodies. “When I paint Nephi [one of the major heroic figures in the Book of Mormon],” he said, “I’m painting the interior, the greatness, the largeness of spirit. Who knows what he looked like? I’m painting a man who looks like he could actually do what Nephi did.” (Allen, 115) In this way Friberg is ostensibly invested in a doctrine of mind-body dualism in which the self is separable into chambers or elements, the spirit (or mind) and body occupying the same space but not fully married. As such he imagined that he was depicting greatness of spirit manifested through an idealized physical form. Friberg cannot imagine a spiritually heroic figure that is not a virile, muscular, white or white-passing man. As Julie Allen points out, even when his paintings include female figures, “these women are visually as blandly nondescript as their textual equivalents. It is the men, large of stature and taut with righteous purpose, who dominate both Friberg’s canvases and the scriptural stories they bring to life.” (Allen, 115) 

However, if the self is not chambered, is not separable into material and immaterial but is instead a cohesive whole, a constantly re-orienting inscribable surface, then his mythmaking does not reflect a truth about the Mormon self but instead creates a new orientation for the individual and collective self of Twentieth Century Mormonism. Our bodies are constantly moving and reorienting, and “a single movement reorients the whole of the body” (Grosz, 84) creating posturing and bodily style. The orientability of the body shows it in constant motion, receiving and processing cultural inscriptions such as these, which illuminates the processes by which we understand our selves: outside to inside, incorporating kinetic, postural, tactile, and visual sensations. These understandings of the self, and the non-static orientation of the self, provide a blow to the accepted narrative of distinct spheres and mind-body duality tacitly endorsed by Friberg.

Works cited:

Allen, Julie K. “Mormonism, Gender, and Art in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender. Routledge, 2020.

Carmack, Noel A. (2000) "Images of Christ in Latter-day Saint Visual Culture, 1900-1999," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 39 : Iss. 3 , Article 4. 

Grosz, E. A. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Theories of representation and difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.