{"id":102159,"date":"2026-03-16T08:30:26","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T15:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=102159"},"modified":"2026-05-31T09:07:44","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T16:07:44","slug":"reading-the-tea-leaves-in-john-hafens-life-and-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/reading-the-tea-leaves-in-john-hafens-life-and-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading the Tea Leaves in John Hafen’s Life and Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The exhibition of John Hafen’s work at the Springville Museum of Art is quietly beautiful: pastoral landscapes float in soft tonal harmonies; fields, trees, and distant hills seem to belong to a simpler century. The paintings are assured and accomplished, the work of an artist clearly in command of his craft. But more than pretty pictures, they trace the making of an artist\u2014his ambitions, frustrations, and hard-won growth\u2014while raising larger questions about what it meant to pursue art in a place that had not yet decided whether art itself was necessary.<\/h4>\n

John Hafen arrived in Utah in 1862 as a child immigrant from Switzerland and came of age in a territory where professional art barely existed as a viable path. His earliest instruction came through the informal networks that sustained art along the Wasatch Front in the late 19th century, studying drawing and painting with local artists including Danquart Weggeland, one of Utah’s first academically trained painters, and later working alongside artists connected to the emerging art program at Brigham Young Academy. But training opportunities remained limited, and artistic work alone could not provide a living. Hafen supported himself through a succession of practical occupations\u2014house painting, sign painting, decorative work, and photography\u2014turning to fine art whenever time and finances allowed. Yet he possessed an unusual degree of conviction. Determined to become a serious artist, Hafen helped advance what would become the most consequential decision of his early career: an audacious proposal that he and several fellow artists would take directly to leaders of the LDS Church.<\/h4>\n

In the summer of 1890, the LDS Church agreed to send a small group of young Utah artists to Paris to study painting. The idea originated with the artists themselves. With church support, they would travel to Europe, receive academic training unavailable in Utah, and return prepared to complete the long-awaited murals of the Salt Lake Temple.<\/h4>\n

The timing was striking. Throughout the 1880s, federal authorities had intensified their campaign against the LDS Church and its practice of plural marriage. Church leaders were arrested and imprisoned; others disappeared into hiding to evade federal marshals. The Edmunds\u2013Tucker Act of 1887 dissolved the church as a legal corporation and authorized the seizure of its property, placing even sacred spaces under potential threat. In May 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the legality of those seizures. Only weeks later, in July, Hafen and his fellow artists boarded an eastbound train.<\/h4>\n

Polymarket didn\u2019t exist in 1890, but its logic did. Watching a financially embattled church make an expensive cultural investment in Paris art training during a period of property seizures and leadership persecution, one might read it as a clear signal: this institution expects to survive, and expects to own a temple. Three months after the artists departed, Wilford Woodruff published the Manifesto of September 1890, announcing the end of official authorization of new plural marriages and reshaping the future of the church. The art mission, in retrospect, was one of the earliest legible signs that accommodation\u2014and survival\u2014had already been chosen.<\/h4>\n