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From the very beginnings of the Christian religion,
mural artists in the Western world have grappled with the necessity of portraying
the person of Christ who was, according to the theology, both God and man.
Thus, an image of Christ had to be at once a portrait of a man, yet also
immediately recognizable as the incarnation of God. When mural painting
enjoyed a rebirth of its own in the United States, artists perforce revisited
the iconography of Christ. American Renaissance artists such as John La
Farge tackled the problem of a Christian iconography for a new nation in
his paintings for Trinity Church in Boston, where the mural painting revival
in America is usually pinpointed as beginning. John Singer Sargent also
famously—and controversially—dealt with the issue in his murals
for the Boston Public Library. Even realist Thomas Eakins painted a mural-scale
Crucifixion. Still, a Christ for a modern age had yet to be established
with any authority when Alice Stallknecht painted her series of murals in
Chatham. She appropriated centuries-old iconography—from Byzantine
art to the Renaissance—and integrated it with the people and folkways
of the small Cape Cod town in which she had lived for over two decades.
The remarkable result is a significant departure from established iconography
for the image and person of Christ, and is as reflective of American culture
and values as the Christ of Raphael was reflective of the papacy in Renaissance
Rome. In a period of empire such as the Byzantine, Christ quite naturally
appeared as a formidable ruler; in a period characterized by the humanist
revival of learning in the Renaissance, it is not surprising that Christ
should appear as the ideal man. How to imagine a Christ for a democratic
society, one principally based upon Protestant ethics? The liberal and democratic
ethos of New England religious culture, particularly as it was represented
in such sects as the Unitarian and the Congregationalist, where Alice Stallknecht
was herself a member and for whom she initially painted the murals, lent
itself to a re-envisioning of Christ as a modern-day Everyman, literally
a blue-collar, working-class man. |
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Christ Preaching to the Multitudes |
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In the earliest of the three murals, “Christ Preaching
to the Multitudes,” Stallknecht incorporated ancient traditions into
her modern subject matter in several ways. She chose, for example, a tripartite
composition, and fashioned what is essentially a triptych. The triptych
is a very old art form, dating to medieval times, and defines an altarpiece
in three parts. This tripartite composition allows for a fine compositional
symmetry: a center section of focused interest, and balancing, framing elements
to either side. Its was also a widely used format because of the significance
of the number three for Christians, usually associated with the Trinity.
The image of Christ associated with the sea also has its basis in tradition.
Medieval images of the “Calling of Saints Peter and Matthew”
refer to the memorable passage in the Gospel according to Matthew, in which
Jesus says to the two would-be disciples, “Follow me, and I will make
you fishers of men.” [Matthew 4:18] Stallknecht chose another passage,
from Matthew 13:2, as her specific reference: “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.” The ancient association of
Christ with fishermen and the sea provided her with an uncannily appropriate
image of a Christ for a town of seafaring men. |
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Stallknecht transformed this ancient tradition, however,
by reimagining Christ as literally walking among the people of her day
and her place—the people of Chatham, physically present as the audience
of Christ, and Christ himself transformed into a man of the early twentieth
century. During her lifetime, Stallknecht refused to reveal who had served
as her model, for obvious reasons of propriety. According to contemporary
and family accounts, however, he was Sabin “Slim” Hutchins,
a local man—but with the important distinction of having come from
“away.” With a lean face, a fairly long nose, deep-set, rather
intense eyes, and high forehead, “Slim” Hutchings made, in
many ways, in ideal model for Christ. But in choosing to represent the
First Man as a particular man known to many in her audience, Stallknecht
was doing something pretty daring. If there is something familiar about
Christ’s face in Stallknecht’s painting, it is its rhythmic
linearity. Her painting style tended to form strong patterns in her subjects’
faces. Taken together with her subject’s over-large eyes, elongated
nose and face, these strong linear patterns echo Byzantine images of Christ—probably
the most electrifying images of Christian history. The artist acknowledged
this influence: “His likeness is a composition from the oldest Byzantine
mosaic, and the men of Chatham.” |
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The Circle Supper |
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In the second mural of her cycle, Stallknecht
transformed one of the most famous paintings in Western art, Leonardo da
Vinci’s “Last Supper” (1499). Both paintings are based
on an arrangement of people sitting on one side of a long, narrow, refectory
table. Christ sits alone at the center, with his hands extended. In Leonardo’s
original, the twelve disciples are arranged symmetrically to either side
of Christ, in four groups of three each. Stallknecht has done very much
the same thing, especially in the row in which Christ occupies the central
panel. The strongest parallels between the Renaissance original and Stallknecht’s
twentieth-century version may be found in the panels directly to either
side of Christ. There, the group to the left of Christ fairly closely mimics
the same group in the Leonardo: the woman in Stallknecht’s mural who
occupies the position of Leonardo’s St. John the Evangelist extends
her arm out in much the same way, and leans slightly away from Christ. The
woman at the center of the group of three has her hand raised to shoulder
level, too, although she does not gesture quite as directly to Christ. The
third person in this trio, who is the shadowy Judas in the Leonardo, appears
to be borrowed from the next disciple down the line, and has her hands upraised
before her, as if in surprise. |
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The group to the right of Christ in Stallknecht’s
painting are a little more subdued than those that may be found in Leonardo’s
painting, but the parallels still exist: the upraised hands of the woman
closest to Christ are a far less active response to Christ’s presence
than the widely stretched apostle’s arms, but the woman in the middle
clearly echoes the “who, me?” pose of the apostle in the Last
Supper, and the man at the far right leans upon his elbow and closes the
composition much the same as Leonardo’s end disciple. Aside from such
superficial similarities of pose, her work, like Leonardo’s, was based
on the interweaving of glances and hands. The most important aspect of any
portrait by Stallknecht was without question the expressiveness of the face,
and the extraordinary communicative quality of the hands she painted. |
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Renaissance master, the artist still made important contributions to an
age-old subject. Unlike Leonardo, the people in attendance on Christ were
clearly not apostles, but the painter’s neighbors and fellow church
members. She established this point by multiplying the numbers of the attendants,
so that one cannot easily count them. The human eye can readily grasp—without
consciously counting—a group of twelve, separated into 4 groups of
3. One cannot easily count, however, Stallknecht’s multitude of 51
people in addition to Christ. Truly, this is a representative cross-section
of a community: young and old, men and women, people from all walks of life,
dressed in their Sunday best while Christ appears as the Everyman, the only
man among the group without a tie. More obviously than Leonardo, too, this
work embraces us as viewers. Christ appeals directly to us, rather than
looking down and away as he does it the Renaissance masterpiece, and there
is a seat left invitingly open. |
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Every Man to His Trade
In the final work of the cycle, Christ is, as before,
the central figure, a humble working man, identifiable solely by the carpentry
tools that lie at his feet, and the fish still life below him. The symbolism
of fish has a very ancient history in Christian iconography, dating back
to Roman times. It came to be the symbol of Christ because the Greek word
for fish, ichthys, is an acrostic in Greek for Iesous Christos Theou Yios
Soter, or “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” Since her husband
was a professor of Greek, it is not unlikely that the artist knew this
reference. |
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This image of Christ, here a full-length portrait,
makes his most complete appearance as one of, and one with, the people of
Chatham. Stallknecht claimed that the murals, all taken together, “show
a cross-section of the United States of America—portraits of people
of the Town—with Christ The Spirit of God predominating. He is the
Christ of NOW, ever present in Democracy.” She pointed out that she
created an encapsulated view of life in the town, a kind of Joycean “day
from Birth to Death” with a baby in a cradle in the upper left-hand
corner, and an elderly woman next to a tombstone at the lower right-hand
corner. In between, people from the town in all walks of life represent
the political, cultural, social and educational life of the town. |
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Further meaning may be found in the title of
this multifaceted mural painting. She called it “Every Man to His
Trade,” with the word “Every” used separately, presumably
in the sense of “Each.” The two words easily elide into one
another, however, forming the more historically resonant “Everyman.”
The term comes originally from a late-15th-century English morality play,
in which the central character, named “Everyman,” is a stand-in
for all of humanity. He finds himself summoned by Death, and first looks
to such allegorical characters as Beauty, Kindred, and Worldly Goods to
accompany him on his journey, but ultimately only a character named “Good
Deeds” will go with him. In Stallknecht’s painting, we also
find ourselves summoned by death, as represented by the tombstone. Everyman
is represented both by the cross section of Chatham’s citizenry as
well as by the twentieth-century American Everyman figure of Christ. It
is through him and Good Deeds that we will find salvation both in this world
and the next. The Good Deeds are clearly represented in such images as the
selectmen giving alms to the unknown poor, and the shipwrecked Novia Scotia
fishermen being given assistance by the locals. Blending historical imagery
and references with her own vision of American democracy, Stallknecht created
a unique synthesis of religious art and the American spirit. |
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