The Toledo Museum of Art has acquired “The Seven Words” (1898), a rare F. Holland Day photograph that shows the American artist posing as Jesus Christ on the cross. The piece is made up of seven tightly framed platinum prints set in a single wooden frame. According to The Art Newspaper, it is the most expensive photograph the Ohio museum has ever bought and the first work by Day to enter its collection.
Why the Toledo Museum of Art wanted ‘The Seven Words’
“The Seven Words” captures Day in the final moments of the crucifixion, a deeply theatrical project that changed his own body. Day, a leading figure in the Pictorialist photography movement, grew his hair long and fasted for the role. Raised a Unitarian Universalist, he was moved by the religious traditions he encountered in Europe, including a Passion play he saw in Germany.
Adam M. Levine, director of the Toledo Museum of Art, calls it “the most important photograph that people don’t know about,” adding that the work can be placed alongside performance art and “anticipates what will happen with cinema.” Erin Corrales-Diaz, the museum’s curator of American art, points to the artist’s commitment: “Day grew his hair long and fasted, changing his own body for this role.”
Getting the images right took enormous effort. Day made about 250 plate studies, and only around a dozen of them worked.
A rare work with a long history
Only three original versions of “The Seven Words” are known to exist. Besides the Toledo Museum of Art’s copy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, each own one. Toledo’s print once belonged to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which let it go around 1928, about the time that museum moved into its current building…