Biblical colossus

"Bigger-than-life tribute to Christ returns to Georgia"

By JIM AUCHMUTEY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 12/29/05

It took five strong backs to tote three wise men and their camels out of the truck. When the job was done, Beverly Bailey smiled as if she were greeting long lost friends.

"Talk about a Christmas card!" she exclaimed.

Christmas card? It's more like a billboard.

The Three Wise Men appear on one of 50 canvases that make up "The Life of Christ," a panoramic painting created in the 1960s by DeKalb County artist Jackson Bailey, Beverly's late husband. The work stretches more than three football fields and was named the world's largest religious painting by the Guinness Book of Records.

Few people have ever seen it. The canvases, which haven't been exhibited in three decades, spent the past 20 years in warehouses in Florida. On Wednesday they finally came home to Georgia, in a second coming arranged by one of the artist's sons.

"I'm just trying to finish my daddy's work," Jackson Bailey III said as the first of five tractor-trailers backed into a warehouse off Cobb Parkway in Marietta.

Half a dozen family members were there for the reunion. Most had posed for the painting in their youth, and they flashed cameras and grins of recognition as the 11-by-20-foot panels were hauled onto the dock.

"That's my Rodney," Beverly Bailey said, spotting her son in Jesus' lap.

"Daddy used me for Mary," said Bailey's daughter Marcia Presnell. "My husband was Judas."

Her brother Jackson had the starring role. He posed as Christ when he was a teenager, once hanging from a scaffolding so his father could study how muscles strained during a crucifixion.

The homecoming was the latest chapter in a saga that could only be called biblical.

Bailey was a self-taught artist who worked as a sign painter and commercial illustrator, designing, among others things, DeKalb County's official seal. He conceived "The Life of Christ" while he was recuperating from a stroke. It took Bailey and a team of assistants three years to execute the colossus.

A group of investors backed the painting and planned to display it in a custom-built hall in Stone Mountain. But they ran out of money. After several short-lived exhibitions around Atlanta during the '70s, the artwork became mired in a series of failed theme park ventures and lawsuits.

Herbert Brown, a businessman in Clearwater, Fla., bought the painting for about $100,000 in 1995, when it was being auctioned to pay off creditors. He underestimated the work's size, and never displayed it.

Bailey - who desperately wanted the public to see his painting - died in 2004, and his son, Jackson, took up the cause.

Late this year, Brown agreed to donate the work, through an intermediary, to the nonprofit Jackson Bailey Art and Museum Foundation (whose Web site, www.jacksonbaileyart.com, shows images of the painting). "We felt like it ought to be back in Atlanta," he said.

Debra Freer, an Atlanta appraiser, inspected the canvases last month and found them in better shape than she had expected. "When we brought them out into the sunlight," she said, "the colors were so vibrant."

Shae Avery, a Marietta gallery owner and art conservator, volunteered to store the paintings while he and his staff reconditioned them - a job that might take two years. He had never seen the work until Wednesday and couldn't say how much the process would cost, but Jackson Bailey III expects the tab to run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And that's just the beginning. Once the paintings are restored, Bailey wants to exhibit them in the round in a new building that would cost millions.

So far, the foundation hasn't raised a dollar. Bailey wanted to get the paintings back home before he started fund-raising.

"This is just a first step," he said as workers unloaded "the Sermon on the Mount" and leaned it against "Soldiers Mocking Christ." "Daddy must be so proud."

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