Alice Stallknecht’s Mural Paintings

(two separate articles follow)

Stallknecht’s Inspiration: The Ethos of Chatham in the 1930s

By Linda Botsford and Deborah Ecker – Summer 2006 edits by Pandora

These murals reflect the predominant religious views and economic reality of a small coastal New England town during the depression of the 1930s. The artists had two messages for us:

• Christianity is embedded in democracy. Alice Stallknecht wrote in a statement to accompany her work: “These Murals show a cross-section of the United States of America – portraits of the people of the Town – with Christ The Spirit of Good predominating. He is the Christ of NOW, ever-present in Democracy.”
• The men and women who lived in Chatham in the 1930s and 40s deserve our respect. In those years Chatham’s economy was dependent on fishing, but many families were forced to supplement their incomes by farming. Hard work and cooperation among neighbors enabled the town’s residents to survive near-poverty living conditions.

Stallknecht moved to Chatham in 1910 with her husband Carol Wight, to cure his disabling depression. Physicians had prescribed a quiet location and physical work. Wight’s work was growing cabbages on their back acres. Their home was on Stage Harbor Road (1/4 mile from this museum) next to the town docks. Fishermen walking home from the sea stopped to chat with the Wights, to whom they donated their catch. Stallknecht turned their front room into a tea parlor, hoping to earn a few dollars. Despite her best efforts, they still lived in poverty and depended upon financial relief from relatives.

It was those early years in Chatham that gave Stallknecht her appreciation for the ethics of hard. Here, she developed a sense of community with her neighbors who pulled together their resources. Wight’s recovery enabled him to become a professor of Greek and Latin at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. When these murals were painted in the 1930s, the artist and her husband had recovered financially.

After high school graduation, Stallknecht trained three years at a school that trained young women to become commercial artists. During her husband’s convalescence, she raised their son Frederick to appreciate art. However, it wasn’t until her son developed into an artist and her husband taught college that she was able to pursue her painting.

Asking her models to sit for only an hour, Stallknecht outlined the essentials in charcoal and completed details later. Reflecting the thrift of the times, she often used house paint. The resulting tone of these murals is somber. This quality is appropriate to their religious themes and the difficult times in which they were painted.

 

If you love these murals, and wish to hold your private event here. Follow the link https://chathamhistoricalsociety.org/events-schedule/event-rental/

 

The murals:

The earliest, 1931, is the triptych on the left wall as you enter the room: Christ Preaching to the Multitudes. “The mural is an imaginative synthesis of historical tradition and contemporary vision.”1 The historical tradition reflected in this mural is its representation of a biblical account of Christ, Matthew 13.2: “And great multitudes were gathered together unto him, so that he went into a ship, and sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore.” Through the centuries Christ has been associated with fishermen and natural settings. The contemporary aspect is the artist’s use of a well-known local man, dressed in ordinary, modern work clothes, as the model for Christ.

After completing the painting, Stallknecht arranged for it to be installed in the vestibule of the Congregational Church, hung so that it could be viewed from the street when the doors were open in summer. Its installation gained attention from the national press. Time magazine referred to it as “startlingly modern,” headlining the article the “Holy Dory.” A local woman is quoted as saying “Imagine Christ with a belt!”

The second mural, 1935, is on the right wall, as you enter the room: The Circle Supper. This mural portrays the once-a-week supper to which all townspeople were invited. The menu was simple, as illustrated (far right) by the husband and wife carrying in a bowl of baked beans, a pot of coffee and a loaf of brown bread, but the event was important enough for people to wear their best dresses and suits. Note the ladies’ brooches and pearls and the men’s coats, ties, and uniforms. The artist explained: “A church supper shows Christ asking the Blessing – at this moment all recognize that He is the Christ, THE GOOD IN MAN. These suppers are the key to Democracy, where all may go to be fed and sit down together.”

This mural also hung in the Congregational church, on the back wall of the sanctuary. In 1943, for reasons never publicly recorded, the church asked the artist to remove both murals. It was then that Stallknecht bought this abandoned railroad freight barn, at an auction, in which these murals are now displayed. She moved the barn to her property, installed the two murals, and then went to work painting another to fill the third wall.

The third mural, 1945, on the opposite wall as you enter the room: Every Man to His Trade. Here Christ, the central figure, is painted in contemporary work clothes with carpentry tools at his feet; a still-life fish pictured below signals his identity. The portraits surrounding Christ show important facets of town life:

• The fisheries – oystermen and clam diggers, lobster trappers, a weir fisherman; a boatyard worker, and a recreational fisherman.
• The town’s political figures – Town Meeting; selectmen giving money to the needy; and another, a selectman giving money to stranded fishermen.
• Summer residents; and Girl Scouts.
• Birth (Frederick Wight, his wife, and a new baby in the beginning); and at the opposite end, death.

Here Stallknecht’s murals reflect her philosophy, which merges protestant Christianity with democracy, and portray a place in which men and women demonstrate this merger by creating a cooperative, caring society.

These murals and the art history of the early 20th century: Stallknecht’s organization of individual canvases into murals was in the direct context of works by well-known artists of the 20th century’s first decades: John Singer Sargent, Violet Oakley and Edwin Howland Blashfield from her New York City art school, Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton. Stallknecht’s work can also be linked to that of German Expressionists such as Otto Dix and Oscar Kokoschka. Her depiction of the “Last Supper” references Leonardo da Vinci’s work, which it is assumed she saw when she traveled to Europe with her son in 1925.

Article #2

by Patricia Likos Ricci
Assoc. Professor, Elizabethtown (PA) College

Alice Stallknecht’s mural paintings in the Chatham Historical Society have remained Cape Cod’s best-kept secret for decades. Despite the fact that her paintings were exhibited at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in 1958, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles in 1977, Stallknecht has not yet found a place in the history of American Art. In the foreword to the 1977 exhibition catalog, William C.Agee, then Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, noted that Stallknecht’s paintings “were all but unknown.”(1) At least one reason why Stallknecht has remained obscure is that critical responses to her first retrospectives focused almost exclusively on her enigmatic style which seemed to defy categorization. In the catalog to the 1958 exhibition of her easel paintings at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, Lloyd Goodrich, then Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, stated that Stallknecht was “a natural.”(2) Although he acknowledged that the rhythms of her brushwork suggested Van Gogh or Marsden Hartley, he concluded that the resemblance was “probably coincidental” and did not affect “the authentic originality of her art.”(3) Nearly twenty years later, her son, Frederick Wight, a painter and an art historian, expressed a similar opinion on the occasion of the first traveling exhibition of his mother’s mural paintings. In an article entitled “Portrait of a New England Town” published in Art in America in 1977, Wight wrote: “Her painting was outside of the world of art history, of development and change. Her vision was simply her way of seeing under emotional pressure.”(4) At first glance, Agee, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, also thought Stallknecht’s painting was in the vein of “popular,” “folk” or “naïve” art, but a closer look convinced him that her style bore a family resemblance to German Expressionists such as Otto Dix and Oscar Kokoschka. (5) While critics differed in the terms they used to describe Stallknecht’s painting, they agreed that it was bold and original. The fact that all of her major work was produced in a fifteen-year period from 1930 to 1945 when she was over fifty years old contributed to her image as a talented amateur who suddenly blossomed on the thin soil of the Cape. However, the reconstruction of Stallknecht’s biography proves that this interpretation is actually a myth.

It can hardly be a coincidence that Stallknecht, whose most important works are three mural series, grew up during the golden age of American mural painting. Beginning in 1876, the “American Renaissance”, a movement in architecture and city planning that transformed the public and private buildings of the United States, gained steady momentum. Throughout the next four decades, the interiors of new opulent residences, public libraries, courthouses, and state capitols were ornamented with murals in the manner of the Italian Renaissance. Coinciding with the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, this golden age of the American mural was also the era in which women emerged as muralists. The Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 was painted with murals by Mary Cassatt, Mary Fairchild MacMonnies, Lucia Fairchild Fuller, Amanda Brewster Sewell, Rosina Emmet Sherwood, Lydia Field Emmet and Dora Wheeler Keith. In 1900, the illustrator Violet Oakley (1874-1961) received a commission to decorate the interior of All Angel’s Church on W. 80th Street in New York.(6) In 1902 she became the first woman to receive a public commission when she was selected as one of the mural painters to decorate the new Pennsylvania State Capitol Building in Harrisburg.(7)

It was after her return from Europe that Stallknecht began to develop her own work. By then she was in her forties, her son was raised, her husband was gainfully employed, and she had both the time and the money to paint. During these years she produced three life-size portraits of the American presidents, Washington, Lincoln, and Wilson, a series that was inspired, perhaps, by Wilson’s death in 1924. The size of these portraits is the first indication that the artist was attempting to paint on the scale of murals.

At that time, a new style of mural painting was supplanting the American Renaissance. In the 1920s, the Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera, Davis Siqueros, and Jose Orozco, were depicting the plight of the indigenous Mexican peoples with the innovations of Modernism. In a similar fashion, American painters such as Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood were applying the lessons of the “Ashcan School”, painters of the urban underclass, to the rural areas and small towns of the Midwest and the South. Known as Regionalists, these artists created the imagery of the “American Scene”, a genre that became the dominant style of mural painting sponsored by the Public Works of Art Project during the Roosevelt Administration. The prototype was Benton’s America Today mural series painted for the New School of Social Research in New York in 1930, which portrayed the life of the working class in the cities, small towns, and rural areas of the United States.

Like these artists, Stallknecht portrayed an “American Scene” that was ignored by the mainstream culture that traditionally emanated from the metropolitan areas. She did not paint the cosmopolitan world of the Boston Brahmins, or the picturesque scenery of Gloucester, or the art colony at Provincetown, but the local culture of a Cape Cod community that was largely invisible to the artists and tourists who descended upon it every season. She knew first-hand the people and the way of life in Chatham, the fishing village that became her adopted home.

A conspicuous outsider in a community where generations of the same families had been in continuous residence since the arrival of the Pilgrims, Stallknecht saw Chatham as an archetypal New England town founded on political and religious principles. “These Murals show a cross-section of the United States of America,” she wrote, “-portraits of the people of the Town-with Christ The Spirit of God predominating. He is the Christ of NOW, ever-present in Democracy.”(11) In the first of the murals, Christ Preaching to the Multitude (1932), the role of the Savior is played by a local fisherman who addresses his congregation from a dory. Painted on three canvases arranged as a triptych, it was designed for the vestibule of the First Congregationalist Church of Chatham so that the figure of Christ could be seen blessing the town when the doors were open. The second mural series, The Circle Supper (1935-43), represents the congregation’s weekly communal supper with Christ giving the blessing. It was assembled on a wall inside the church from 19 separate canvases with portraits of the congregation. The third, Every Man to His Trade (1945), composed of 30 canvases, celebrates the work ethic and the dignity of labor by depicting the townspeople at their trades, including a fisherman, a lobsterman, a quahaug raker, a scalloper, an oysterman, a mason, a shipwright, and a teacher, war veterans and boy scouts and girl scouts. Christ, the largest figure, stands among them as a carpenter. In this series, Stallknecht localized the portraits by depicting views of Chatham in the background: the sea and the lighthouse; the Congregationalist and Methodist churches; the modest town hall and the public school; and the cemetery. Included are Chatham’s collective activities: the church fair, the town meeting, the local election, and the selectmen giving alms to an anonymous needy resident. At a time when the federal government had introduced the WPA to deal with the hardships created by unemployment, the local government of Chatham took care of the poor among them, shielding their identity to spare them the stigma of poverty. To Stallknecht this act of generosity was “town’s great deed.” “There is no Poor House in Chatham, she noted.”(12)

Stallknecht’s murals are linked to the Regionalists not only in time and theme but in style as well. Painters of the Thirties abandoned the classical figurative tradition of the American Renaissance muralists in preference for the naturalistic, expressionistic, and primitive modes of Modernism. Like Diego Rivera who adopted the imagery of Mexican folk art, Thomas Hart Benton who appropriated the distortions of Mannerism, and Grant Wood who imitated the naïf qualities of Early American primitive painters, Stallknecht invented a personal style derived from European expressionism.

In the separate canvasses that comprise Every Man to His Trade, there are obvious visual parallels to the paintings of the Regionalists. In The Shipwright and His Wife, a sampler stitched with “God Bless Our Home” serves as an internal caption as in Benton’s a double portrait of an old couple, The Lord is My Shepherd. Stallknecht’s composition is similar to Grant Wood’s Daughter’s of the American Revolution in which the figures are placed in front of Leutze’s famous painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware. The incorporation of American icons was typical of Regionalists. The use of vernacular church architecture in Wood’s American Gothic and The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is echoed in Stallknecht’s paintings of the Methodist and Congregationalist churches of Chatham. Her Christ, the Carpenter is in the pose of Clifford Wight’s (no relation) standing worker in his mural at the Coit Tower, San Francisco. The influence of photographs of the Depression era can also be found in Stallknecht’s work. The expression and pose of The Widow bear a striking resemblance to Dorothea Lange’s celebrated photograph, Migrant Mother.

In summary, it is time to dispel the myth that Stallknecht was an anomaly and her art was naïf. She was educated and self-conscious about her manner of painting and its role as a form of political rhetoric. Her most significant contribution to the Regionalist movement is the discovery of an overlooked subculture, the fishing villages of Cape Cod, exemplified by the Chatham. At a time when the future of the United States was threatened by the Depression and World War II, Alice Stallknecht held up the example of Chatham and its residents as a model of the faith, courage and common sense of the people who originally founded America and whose descendants had already weathered the storms of three hundred years.