99% Invisible - Your Own Personal Jesus

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

How did a simple painting transform into the world's most recognized depiction of Jesus?Head of Christ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars and I'm in the studio with Christopher Johnson. Hey, Christopher. Hey, Roman. So I want you to do something for me, okay? And I'm coming in kind of hot, all right? Okay. Okay. So I want you to picture in your head an image of Jesus Christ, okay? Specifically, the Jesus that you saw in your imagination when you were growing up. that you saw in your imagination when you were growing up? Um, okay. When I was growing up, okay. Um, this does feel like a trap.

But I will play along. So mostly I'm picturing a kind of, you know, flowy brown hair, you know, a peaceful face, lean, bearded, white with blue eyes. I recognize what territory we're getting into here with blue eyes. Okay, good. You know, but like a nice surfer, like a mild, peaceful, nice surfer.

Yeah, same. Listen, this is not a trap, man. And the way that you described him, that's exactly how I grew up thinking about Jesus too. And a lot of our listeners may have also grown up seeing this same mental image of Jesus. And so what I'm here to tell you today is that that mental image that's in so many of our heads,

that idea of what Jesus looks like, it actually comes in large part from one single painting that was made in 1940 in Chicago. It was called The Head of Christ. And it's the single most popular, most ubiquitous image of Jesus in the world. Wow, okay. So here, let me show it to you. Yep, that's the dude.

He's kind of three quarters of a profile, blue eyes, white, thin, lean, trim beard. He's got this sort of soft glow around him as he looks softly into the distance. But yeah, that's the Jesus. That's the guy, right? And this Head of Christ painting is, by some accounts, the single best knownknown piece of American

artwork of the whole 20th century. It's been reproduced a billion times and spread all over the planet. And it has shaped so many of the popular depictions of Jesus that we know. And just up front here, like, we don't know much about what Jesus actually looked like, right? We don't, and the Bible doesn't tell us a whole lot. But that fact hasn't stopped anybody. Artists have been creating images of Jesus for many, many centuries all over the world.

Yeah, so, so Joy and I went and saw the blast supper in Milan, like in person last year. And I didn't really think about it much at the time, but I just kind of pulled it up as we were talking to see how different it was from this head of Christ image that you just showed me. And it's really different. So that there's lots of different images of Jesus out there and some of them are very famous, like The Last Supper.

And so how did this one painting, Head of Christ, come to dominate all of our images of Jesus in our heads? Okay, so that story starts with a Chicago artist named Warner Salmon. Back in the 1920s, Salmon was a commercial illustrator who did ads for pianos and toothbrushes and trucks and suits and stuff like that. He was also a Christian and he volunteered to be the art director for this new magazine for young people that his church had just started. And in early 1924, he was on deadline to draw something for the cover art.

And is he trying to draw Jesus, like put Jesus on the issue of this magazine? Kind of like Oprah's on every cover of Oprah magazine? Or what? I mean, you know, he's the art director for this kids Christian magazine. I guess he could make whatever he wanted. But then, Salman suddenly got artist block. Is there such a thing as artist block?

He said he had been working on it for a while, and nothing worked out. He was unsatisfied with everything he tried. This is Jack Lundbaum. He's Warner Solomon's biographer, and the two were good friends. And, yeah, it came close to the deadline. He went to sleep, and during the night,

he had a dream or a vision in which he saw this picture in his mind's eye. So he got out of bed and he penciled out kind of a first draft and the next day he turned that into a larger charcoal sketch. Okay so what did this charcoal drawing look like? So this was a very simple black charcoal sketch of Jesus's head. This is still 15 years before Solomon would make his world famous Head of Christ painting. And this drawing is much more basic than that. But the template is definitely there

and you can see the similarities. It's Jesus's head with long wavy hair, the trim beard and those soft, peaceful eyes gazing off into the distance. And in his biography or in the story of his life, is there ever an explanation as to why he drew Jesus this way? Why did the drawing come out like this?

Well, there are a few answers. One answer, of course, is that this is the image that he saw in his vision. Sure. But there are a couple of other reasons too. People had depicted Jesus for a long time before Warner Solomon sat down. And Solomon admitted he'd seen some of those

and he got inspiration from those. But probably the biggest thing that inspired Solomon was that in the mid-1920s, around the time that he made this drawing, there was this growing general concern that American Christian men were getting soft. Part of that anxiety was stoked by changes in work. People were becoming more sedentary, there were more office jobs, and folks were worried that men were getting more sluggish

and putting on weight. This was especially problematic for Christians, who felt that a man of God was supposed to be exemplary and disciplined and strong, not some schlubby pencil pusher. On top of that, white Protestants like Salman were really freaked out about cities. Oh, there was a real concern that city life zapped, zapped moral goodness and energy. This is David Morgan. He's an art historian who teaches religious studies at Duke. And he's written a lot about Salman's artwork. Salman was very much a part of this discourse about the, particularly the effect on men,

that they lost their masculinity, they became effeminate, they became preoccupied with the pleasures of a city life that would distract from moral mission and fail to recognize what was supposed to make them different from the world. And so one reaction to this was this movement that was called muscular Christianity. The movement started in England and was picked up by Protestants in the US, who felt that they had to redefine what it meant to be a real Christian man. And so people like Salman, who were connected to that movement, that they had to redefine what it meant to be a real Christian man. And so people like Salman, who were connected to that movement, felt one of the best ways

to inspire men, and especially young men and boys, to be more fit and strong and manly and courageous was to give them images of Jesus Christ that had those same qualities. There's this strong desire for a new image of Jesus. This is Edward Bloom. He's a historian who co-authored the book The Color of Christ, The Son of God, and The Saga of Race in America. There's a desire for a Jesus who would represent manliness and masculinity in a time when white men often feel like they're kind of losing their masculine identity.

And so the 1924 drawing that Warner-Solman made for the Kids Magazine, that was his attempt at this. Yeah, yeah. But here's the thing. What's up? This image, it's not what I would, masculine is not the first word that would come to me. You know what I'm saying?

This is not stereotypically, this is a person who has a very, very gentle face. I mean, maybe the action of this moment is masculine, but this image doesn't scream that without that context. Hey, listen, I agree, but masculine was exactly what Warner Solomon was going for here. When Solomon produced his image, he was interviewed and he made this point that my image of Jesus, that drawing, represents a manly, in his phrase, a manly image of Christ that our young people need. And so how was this prototype, you know, head of Christ image received?

Well, Salmon's church members liked it a lot, but the image mostly just circulated inside that small, tight-knit religious community. Keep in mind, this is only in the Midwest. This is Solomon's friend and biographer, Jack Lombard, again. Really, his exposure was largely in covenant churches in the Chicago and Midwest. Very few people outside of the Midwest would have known the Solomon name or the picture. But this was all about to change, and what took this image to the next level was when

it went from a small black and white charcoal sketch to this full-size oil painting done in color. In the late 1930s, Salman met a couple of marketing reps who sold Christian goods. And one of them was this guy named Fred Bates. Fred Bates worked for a big company that was later named Warner Press. Warner Press made and sold all sorts of Christian-themed merch. You've seen this stuff, like thermometers, table sets, including plates and pans, lamps, pencils, mirrors, all with biblical mottos and scripture on them.

Warner Press started selling prints of Salman's simple black and white charcoal drawing. And then Fred Bates started whispering in Solomon's ear that they would love to see a version of this black and white drawing of Jesus done in color. Bates and his colleagues at Warner Press, they believe that a color version would have way more appeal to the masses. And why did Fred Bates think that a color version of Jesus would do so much better commercially than the black and white version they were already selling?

Because it would feel less like, you know, sketched art, which is kinda what the drawing really looked like, and more like a real portrait. The representatives of Warner Press said, you know, we think doing a color version of this would have added appeal and could be used in a variety of different ways. You could create little prayer cards. You could create color reproductions to frame and hang in the home. What they were talking about were commercial possibilities. Mostly, Salman just kind of ignored Bates's request. But then in 1940, Salman, on the low, actually did do a version that was a full-color oil painting. And he named that painting Head of Christ. Ah, so this is the painting that you showed me earlier.

Jesus with three-quarters of a profile, gentle blue eyes, trim beard, white guy, that soft glow in the background looking off into the distance, all that. Exactly. And when Solomon first painted it, he just kind of hung it above the family piano and went on with his life. And then one night, Fred Bates stopped by Solomon's house and he saw the Head of Christ painting. And he was like, yes, this is it. He was totally enchanted.

I mean, to him, this looked like the real guy. This is what he'd been asking for. And he loved this painting. And when Bates saw that, they said, you know, we think, you know, this sort of thing can sell. So they felt like we can take this from being a magazine illustration into a special object in domestic life. And I think their intuition was quite correct. So Warner Press did a print run of Head of Christ in various sizes, and they tested it,

and they tweaked the image. And then in early 1941, the first print run of 100,000 copies went out into the world. They were distributed through those Christian bookstores, through door-to-door salespeople, catalogs, and of course through churches. And that print run sold out, Roman, in two months. Jesus, well, that's a lot. By the end of the year, more than a million copies of the head of Christ image had been distributed.

And then over the next several years, four million more versions of the head of Christ image went out in all different sizes on all kinds of stuff like bookmarks, baptism announcements, obituaries, you name it. I mean, I can imagine it doing well. You know, it's a pretty painting of a man, you know? But surely this isn't the only contemporary color painting of Jesus that looks kind of realistic. Like, why was this one, why was Head of Christ in particular,

the one that was so wildly popular? Okay, so here's what art historian David Morgan says. He says that the difference was that this image, it looked like more than just a painting. It looked to a lot of people as if someone had taken a camera and snapped a real photo of a living Jesus Christ. When I was talking to people, and I would sometimes ask them, what is it you really like about this picture?

And some would say, well, because it's what Jesus really looked like. And some would say, frankly, it's a photograph of Jesus. I was struck by how they would regard authenticity in photographic terms. And so what David noticed was just how much this painting uses elements of what was then modern studio photography portraiture. This was super popular at the time that Salman made Head of Christ, especially for things like high school and college yearbook pictures. You would walk in, sit down, and there was a... There was a shtick, a visual shtick. This is how you pose.

This is what the photographer is looking for because that's how everybody thinks you need to be remembered. I mean, now that you've mentioned it, I totally didn't put it together, but it really does look like Jesus Christ's senior yearbook. Yes, exactly. And so like when you, you're right, when you look at the position of Christ's head, David says it has that three quarters pose. Typically looking away, looking off into the future, into the past, wherever, it gave you much of the face. And by the early 20th century, the three-quarter pose was considered the dignified look of eternity. This is how I will be remembered forever. And then there were the ways that Salman mimicked studio lighting to get that Sears portrait

studio gauziness that you see in Head of Christ. He uses yellows, whites, and tans to create the sense that Jesus is both emanating light and he's also lit up like he's in a studio. He decided, I think, creatively that this is how I'm going to show Jesus. This will give him a presence and a kind of relevance. And people said, this is what he really, one woman told me, this is what he really looked like. What she meant was it matched the image in her mind of what Jesus looked like. And when that happens, that clicks, that's why people form such a lively emotional connection to the picture. It's so remarkable that he's using a visual vernacular of this moment to create a portrait

of Jesus that looks like a photograph, and then it matched the image that Christians had in their minds of what Jesus actually looked like. And so you give them this portrait that looks like a family member whose picture you just like hang up in your living room. A photo basically. Yeah. So this like portrait studio vibe, is this the thing that really makes it go global? Well, that's why people were so drawn to it was that studio portrait vibe.

But what really made it go global was an incredible mass distribution effort during World War II. And that effort was called Christ in Every Purse. Okay. It has a name. Christ in Every Purse. So what was that? It's pretty much what it sounds like.

It was a huge project that was started by Christians in Indiana to get head of Christ images that were about the size of baseball cards, handed out to soldiers who wanted them. Every GI was offered this picture, take this picture with you, it's made for your pocket, and many of them did. And it went through the war with them so that when these folks came back, you know, a lot, many of them still had the picture of Jesus and had developed narratives about how important it was and what it meant to them. David says that when he was doing research about Head of Christ,

he got letters from hundreds of veterans and their families. And those letters talked about how, for the GIs in World War II, that small image became a talisman and a protector, an inspiration, a source of good luck, and also a reminder of fellow soldiers who they'd lost on the battlefield. That's amazing. I mean, it seems like it would become infused with a bunch of power because of that.

Definitely. And then in the decade after the war, tens of thousands of prints were going out every month. And they were going to Alcoholics Anonymous, they were going to the Salvation Army, and they were going out to all sorts of huge international Christian groups and leagues. They were all a part of this, and they were giving Head of Christ cards away.

And in the US, the spread of Solomon's image also synced up with this much larger effort to inject Christianity into public spaces. After the war, in the sort of Cold War setting, there were movements to put that image of Jesus in settings like courtrooms and libraries and public buildings and to blur any distinction of sacred and secular. That movement actually succeeded in the mid-1950s, around the same time that the phrase, under God, was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Head of Christ was being hung in public schools and hospitals

and all sorts of public buildings all over the country. Historian Edward Bloom says the biggest impact of this supersaturation of the globe with this image was that Solomon's head of Christ then eclipsed most other images of Jesus in the popular imagination. Before 1940, you just see lots of more localized images of Jesus. There's a lot more flexibility in how people present Jesus, how they alter images of him. And really after the Warner-Solomon revolution in the image, it became the Ur symbol, became the symbol by which all other symbols that were then judged.

If it was close enough to Solomon's head of Christ, that could be what Jesus looked like, but if it was too far, then it was just symbolic or metaphorical. Solomon's head of Christ became the head of Christ, not a head of Christ, for how people not only in the United States but throughout the world then judged what Jesus actually would have looked like.

This one image was so wildly successful that Solomon's publishers at Warner Press went to him and they said, we want more of this, give us more Head of Christ, please. And so, Solomon, who passed away in 1968, made many more religious paintings featuring Jesus in all these different scenes. And so, even as the scenes changed, the Jesuses still looked like the guy from the Head of Christ painting. And so I think you can trace a through line

from Solomon's Head of Christ and all of those Head of Christ inspired pieces that he did much later to a lot of our popular culture depictions of Jesus today. And that image of Jesus, which is so fully soaked into our popular consciousness, of course, he's a white man. He's got these blue-gray eyes, this straight Roman nose.

And so when head of Christ became the dominant portrayal of Jesus, that portrayal really helped crystallize this single popular image of this guy who is white. I mean, whiteness is a very thorny and big concept, which many, many books have been written about, and it's got too much to go into here. But like, in terms of the historical Jesus, what do we know or what do we think we know about what he might have looked like? As you were just suggesting, there is a lot to say about this, and we won't do it here. But what we do know, of course, is that Jesus was a Jewish man who was born in what is now the West Bank in Palestine. And although the Bible

doesn't tell us much about what he looked like, lots of people think that he would have been at the very least a lot more brown than the Jesus that's portrayed in Salmon's Head of Christ and in the subsequent renderings inspired by Head of Christ. Warner Salmon was a white Christian artist who painted a world famous image of a white Jesus. And what made the image so meaningful to so many Americans was its whiteness. It gave Americans, particularly white Americans, a Jesus that was theirs, their take. This is art historian David Morgan again.

It gave that image a special, comforting, reliable portrait of not only who Jesus was, but who they are as Jesus people. And race is very much a part of this. They wanted to see a white Jesus. But as much as white Americans fell in love with this image, they were not the only ones who used it a lot in their homes and churches. But we can talk about that after the break. Okay, we'll do that after the break.

Okay, so before the break we were talking specifically about what this white Jesus meant to white Americans, especially white Christians. And so I'm curious about what this image meant to non-white Christians. Yeah, so Head of Christ was not just popular among white Christians. You could find Salmon's image in the homes and the churches of brown and black Christians too. I mean, I know in my family, both my grandma and my great grandma, who were very religious

black women, they definitely had things around their houses with the head of Christ image on it. And so in black churches, you might have seen Solomon's head of Christ in the vestibules or on people's Bibles, maybe in the sanctuary, and very, very likely on those handheld paper church fans that people would use to cool themselves during service. So why do you think black Christians also use this image? I mean, if white Christians saw themselves in this rendering of white Jesus, what did non-white Christians, what did they get out of this image?

So I talked with a former pastor named Willie James Jennings about this. He teaches theology and Africana studies at Yale Divinity School, and he says one reason you find white Jesus in black Christian spaces has to do with capitalism. Historically, it's been white companies, not black ones, that control the production of religious goods. And those companies aren't necessarily thinking about diversity. They're thinking about which Jesus image is going to make their Bibles and their church fans sell.

And so to place a white Jesus on a fan that you're trying to sell made perfect sense. And for black folks, without control over that economy, we were often at the receiving end of that work. So what this meant was that you had church communities that were flooded with fans because we got a good deal on a package of 50. Jennings also says that black and brown Christians who were part of a society that pushed white Jesus for centuries, sometimes understandably came to envision

Christ that way themselves. There is a way of understanding our devotion to God that accepts the white Jesus image as normal. People when, you know, they were asked to close their eyes and pray, it would not be unusual for people, not only people of African descent, but people all over the world. When they close their eyes and think about the Jesus

who they're praying to, he looks like that man that is on that fan. But then in the 1960s, a lot of black churchgoers started to rethink their use of images like head of Christ. This was the era of black is beautiful racial pride. There was this huge shift in racial consciousness that permeated all sectors of black American life, including how black folks worshiped.

And so churches started to get rid of depictions of white Jesus, and they started replacing those with images that looked more like them and that portrayed a religious life in which they could see themselves. Black churches started to get a better sense of the importance of challenging the images that were being put in front of us that underwrote white dominance. And so that's when you start to have people change out those fans,

start to have churches change out their stained glass windows, start to have churches create murals and paintings and pictures that depicted black life and the beauty of black life as fundamental to shaping our devotion. Okay, so I definitely get the idea here, but could you give me an example of what this looked like? Sure, so I mean, there are countless examples of this, but one of my favorites actually isn't about

Head of Christ specifically, but it is about putting more black Jesus imagery in a black church. Specifically, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1963, the KKK bombed that church, killing four black girls. And in that bombing, some of the church's stained glass was damaged, including windows depicting white Christs. Two years after that bombing, the church installed what's known as the Whale's Window, which sits above the main entrance to the church. And the Whale's Window is this huge, gorgeous stained glass depiction

of a black Jesus dressed in all white. And he's set against this backdrop that just shimmers with all these different shades of blue and purple. And there's this bright rainbow that fans out between his arms as he stretches his hands towards the sky. Roman, it is a beautiful piece of art. Yeah. And there have been several popular renderings of Black Jesus,

at least among Black folks. But still, nothing with the kind of singular global impact of Head of Christ. So, at the end of the day, despite all of these alternatives, the head of Christ image persists and it's still super powerful and pernicious. And it still feels to a lot of people like the right version of Jesus. It's really hard to undo that. When you see a black Jesus or Korean Jesus or an indigenous Jesus, it's usually called black Jesus or Korean Jesus or an indigenous Jesus. It's usually called black Jesus or Korean Jesus or Indian or native Jesus,

whereas Solomon's Jesus is just Christ. It's just Jesus. Yeah. I mean, what's amazing to me is how much the objects that shape and represent our values all come from real specific decisions. Like it was a series of actions by a group of humans in the upper Midwest who decided to depict Jesus

in this particular way and had that not happen, had this specific story not happen, this specific chain of events, and then this thing was mass produced and then it was rallied around, it just didn't have to be this way. Yes, I think that's exactly right. Well this is fascinating stuff and I love that so much comes down to this single image. What an amazing story.

Well thank you so much Christopher, I appreciate it. You are welcome. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Christopher Johnson and edited by Emmett Fitzgerald. Mixed by Martín González Music by Swan Real with additional music by George Langford and Jamila Sandoto Sinai. Fact-checking by Graham Haysha. Special thanks to David Morgan for all his help researching this story. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Perube, Jason DeLeon, Vivian Ley, Lasha Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime,

Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on Blue Sky and our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99i.org.