Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” is an elusive, unrepeatable masterwork that nonetheless has prompted countless artists to recreate aspects of it in everything from toys and comic books to paintings, sculpture and architecture.
To approach the number of such efforts, think of all the commercial tie-ins for the recent film “Pocahontas.” Then multiply them by, say, 1,000. The total might come close to how many ventures, unbidden and (mostly) unsung, have been inspired by “Moby-Dick” since its publication in 1851.
Interestingly enough, the 1956 film of the novel started scholar Elizabeth Schultz thinking about the relationship between “Moby-Dick” and its visual representations. Like Ahab pursuing the whale, Schultz tracked her idea relentlessly until last year, when she published a 382-page study titled “Unpainted to the Last: `Moby-Dick’ and Twentieth-Century American Art” (University Press of Kansas, $35 paperback).
That landmark study, in turn, occasioned a traveling exhibition, currently hosted by the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery at Northwestern University in Evanston. No more fitting site could have been chosen, given the school’s involvement with Melville through professor emeritus Harrison Hayford, who for 31 years has worked to prepare a new edition of the master’s writings.
For viewers unacquainted with Schultz’s volume, the exhibition only hints at its riches by presenting 86 objects created between 1927 and 1994. These suggest something of the range of works inspired by “Moby-Dick” whereas the study by Schultz is remarkable–indeed, staggering–in its comprehensiveness. Although the exhibition lacks such important material as early 20th Century illustrations and contemporary political cartoons, most of the other categories are present, mirroring especially clearly the two primary currents of the novel.
Capt. Ahab’s story, his pursuit of the whale and its consequences to everyone aboard the Pequod, is the book’s vigorously active element that, in general, has fueled imaginations of representational artists who depict incidents from the narrative fairly literally.
But the sailor Ishmael’s manner of telling the story is contemplative in the way it meanders from the action into seafaring history and, particularly, whaling lore. This more “inward” element has been the focus for abstract artists and others who have derived from “Moby-Dick” a method of creation they have sought to apply to work of their own.
The exhibition proceeds by decades, juxtaposing groups of objects that indicate each approach. Its jumping-off point is the 1930 Lakeside Press edition of the novel, brilliantly illustrated in black and white by Rockwell Kent, whose strong design and simplified sense of shape give the most direct access to the narrative of “Moby-Dick” of any of the works on show.
A single canvas by Karl Knaths, who began to work from a theoretical system of painting around the time of Kent’s illustrations, is not really enough to balance art in the representational mode, particularly since the piece is indebted to Cubism, a movement that never wholly departed from representation. But Knaths’ still life of the Melville book, a portrait sculpture, a lemon and a model sailing ship does introduce a distanced, ruminative note that abstract artists will return to again and again.
Perhaps the largest group of these artists numbered among the Abstract Expressionists from the 1950s. Such painters and sculptors as Jackson Pollock, Seymour Lipton, Theodore Roszak and Robert Motherwell created works based on the book. But as their titles suggested, they were more interested in translating the psychologically ambiguous spirit of “Moby-Dick” than in any specific incidents.
Representational artists from the 1950s through the 1970s sought, if anything, to minimize ambiguity by extending images from the novel into pictorial sequences. Pieces such as those in Gilbert Wilson’s “Insanity Series” deepen the impression of a theme by isolating it in linear progressions that both clarify and intensify what lurks just beneath Melville’s intentionally cloudy surface.
The tone of works created before the ’70s was reverential if not awestruck. But in the decade of Watergate many aspects of national pride underwent re-evaluation, “Moby-Dick” included. It emerged as perhaps more a landmark than ever, but not before such artists as Robert Arneson, Robert J. Warrens and Kim Weston had some fun cutting a cultural icon down to size and punning on it both verbally (Arneson) and visually (Weston).
That “Moby-Dick” emerged with its inspirational power undiminished is affirmed by works from the last 15 years. These are the pieces in the most diverse media, for only among the contemporary selections will viewers find examples of architecture and installation art as well as illustrations, paintings and sculptures. The works were created by such artists as Siah Armajani, Richard Serra and Frank Stella, who were not at all followers but some of the most independent figures in American art of the period.
Unfortunately, whatever this may suggest about the impact of literature on the visual arts is only true in an ever-tightening circle, for the artists are of an older generation that still distinguishes between “high” and “low” sources of inspiration. Painter David Klamen is the sole exhibitor under age 45, and he is an aesthetic conservative working in a highly traditional manner; the young turks are otherwise occupied.
There is the distinct possibility that “Moby-Dick” will inspire artists in the 21st Century only if Ahab pursues his whale in a video game and Ishmael notes it on the Internet.
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THE FACTS
When: Through March 3
Where: Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, 1967 S. Campus Drive, Evanston
Admission: Free
Call: 708-491-4000
