During the last year of World War II Millard Sheets worked as an artist-correspondent in Asia for Life magazine. Not only did he record the horrors of battle but he witnessed the perseverance of the Indian people during one of the worst famines in history. This deepened his social awareness. When he returned to the United States in 1944 he was haunted by the harshness of what he had seen and turned to his painting for catharsis. Sheets’s postwar works were less documentary and more religious in spirit than the countless drawings of the dead and dying famine victims he had drawn in India.
Painted shortly after Sheets he came back to the United States, Head of Christ is the most traditional in iconography of these religious works. He says that the depiction of the angular figure may have been based on a late nineteenth-century New Mexican Cristo carving. In a later oil painting, Bombed Christ, 1946 (estate of the artist), the Christ figure is saved by a native, and in Day of the Cross, 1949 (estate of the artist), it is venerated during a religious festival.
Through the formal devices of dark, oppressive colors and heavy brushwork in paintings such as Head of Christ Sheets expressed the horrors of death and his bitterness about the effects of war. His macabre, angular figures are similar to images of Christ by Georges Rouault (1871-1958). To give the watercolor the appearance of an oil painting, Sheets vigorously applied thick pigment to a rough paper. Despite its being water based, because of the paint’s opacity Head of Christ must have seemed an anomaly to members of the California Water Color Society when it was exhibited in 1945. Nonetheless the painting was awarded a purchase prize.
