Art: Christ on Cape Cod

Women and art do not seem to mix well. The top ranks of American painters include only two women—Mary Cassatt and Georgia O’Keeffe—and few countries can boast even that much female talent. Nevertheless, with the increasing leisure of American womanhood and the enticement of painting as a hobby, women have an invitation to become popular artists. Grandma Moses has proved it possible, on a grand scale. And now Cape Cod’s Alice Stallknecht, a spry, sturdy widow of 77, is seconding the nomination.

Easterner Stallknecht has had her greatest success in the West, with a traveling show this summer that went to Colorado Springs, Pasadena, San Diego and San Francisco. In the exhibition catalogue, Art Historian Lloyd Goodrich of Manhattan’s Whitney Museum went full out for Stallknecht’s work, describing her as “a ‘natural’; she puts things down on canvas with unhesitating directness, as if reality guided her brush. But her realism is never merely photographic. Sometimes her patterns take on an expressionistic freedom, with pronounced rhythms, suggesting Van Gogh—or, nearer home, Marsden Hartley. But such parallels, probably coincidental, do not affect the authentic originality of her art.”

No Stumbling. Stallknecht is no Van Gogh. A triangulation of her merits would include not only such lofty points of reference but also the magazine illustrations of Norman Rockwell. Yet undeniably, in an age when thousands of young artists are stumbling about in search of a style they can call their own, Stallknecht has found hers. And she has done it without stumbling or even seeming to breathe hard. She studied illustration as a girl, before the beginning of the century, paused to raise a family and to farm at Chatham on Cape Cod, and then, past 50, felt compelled to paint some more. Meanwhile, her son Frederick Wight (Stallknecht is her maiden name) had become a proficient painter and art critic (TIME, Sept. 3, 1956). Young Wight encouraged her to paint, yet was amazed when she embarked on a masterly series of religious pictures drawn directly from the life and the people about her.

In twelve years she completed 58 panels, crowded with 158 clearly recognizable residents of the Chatham vicinity. “I needed each one to pose for an hour,” she says. “I paint very quickly. I would do the face and hands and let them go. They were all very willing and helpful, and many told their life stories while they were posing. I always offered them a modeling fee of a dollar, but not many took it.”

Painter Stallknecht depicted her fellow townspeople with almost embarrassing clarity and force—in attitudes of worship, puzzlement or indifference—around three versions of Christ in modern dress. For a while, the paintings adorned the local Congregational Church. Then, upset at seeing itself mirrored in its own house of worship, the congregation voted to return the pictures to the artist.

Ever-present Christ. Artist Stallknecht herself belongs to no church. To house her church pictures, she bought an unused freight depot and moved it onto her property. Inhabited only by its painted population, the building stands open to the public. It is protected by a roughly lettered sign: “Chatham murals. Free. No Children. No canes. No smoking.” On the table inside is Stallknecht’s own handwritten and framed description of her work: “This is Chatham—portraits of its people—democracy. A cross-section of the United States, with Christ, the spirit of God, predominating. He is the Christ of now—ever present in true democracy—the good in man. His likeness is a composite from the oldest Byzantine mosaics and the men of Chatham.”

The Stallknecht canvases that toured the West were also filled with works of religious feeling, works interspersed with somber pictures of Chatham, its seafaring people and their tribulations. Straight-forward and often powerful, her art conveys almost as much bitterness and darkness as it does sweetness and light, with a Christian theme to give some light to its darkest corners.