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Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art
Endlessly pursued but ever elusive, Moby-Dick roams freely throughout the American imagination. A fathomless source for literary exploration, Melville's masterpiece has also inspired a stunning array of book illustrations, prints, comics, paintings, sculptures, mixed media, and even architectural designs. Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Unpainted to the Last illuminates this impressive body of work and shows how it opens up our understanding of both Moby-Dick and twentieth-century American art.
Deftly interweaving words with images, Elizabeth Schultz radically reframes our most famous literary symbol and provides a profoundly new way of "reading" one of the key texts in American literature. Ranging from the realists to the abstract expressionists, from the famous to the obscure, Schultz reveals how these artists have tried both to capture the essence of Moby-Dick's many meanings and to use it as a springboard for their own provocative imaginations.
The most continuously, frequently, and diversely illustrated of all American novels, Moby-Dick has attracted some remarkable book illustrators in Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson, Garrick Palmer, Barry Moser, and Bill Sienkiewicz, among others represented here. It has also inspired extraordinary creations by such prominent artists as Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Sam Francis, Benton Spruance, Leonard Baskin, Theodoros Stamos, Richard Ellis, Ralph Goings, Seymour Lipton, Walter Martin, Tony Rosenthal, Richard Serra, and Theodore Roszak.
The artists reflect in equal measure the novel's realistic (plot, character, natural history) and philosophical modes, its visual and visionary dimensions. Some, like the obsessed and haunted Gilbert Wilson, claim Moby-Dick as their "Bible." Still others view the novel as a touchstone for feminist, multicultural, and environmentalist themes, or mock its status as a cultural icon.
Schultz demonstrates how these and many other diverse talents enlarge our appreciation of Moby-Dick and how literature and art can amplify each other's meanings and achievements. Yet ultimately she, like Melville, concludes that the great white whale remains unpainted and unread in any absolute or final sense.
Deftly interweaving words with images, Elizabeth Schultz radically reframes our most famous literary symbol and provides a profoundly new way of "reading" one of the key texts in American literature. Ranging from the realists to the abstract expressionists, from the famous to the obscure, Schultz reveals how these artists have tried both to capture the essence of Moby-Dick's many meanings and to use it as a springboard for their own provocative imaginations.
The most continuously, frequently, and diversely illustrated of all American novels, Moby-Dick has attracted some remarkable book illustrators in Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson, Garrick Palmer, Barry Moser, and Bill Sienkiewicz, among others represented here. It has also inspired extraordinary creations by such prominent artists as Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Sam Francis, Benton Spruance, Leonard Baskin, Theodoros Stamos, Richard Ellis, Ralph Goings, Seymour Lipton, Walter Martin, Tony Rosenthal, Richard Serra, and Theodore Roszak.
The artists reflect in equal measure the novel's realistic (plot, character, natural history) and philosophical modes, its visual and visionary dimensions. Some, like the obsessed and haunted Gilbert Wilson, claim Moby-Dick as their "Bible." Still others view the novel as a touchstone for feminist, multicultural, and environmentalist themes, or mock its status as a cultural icon.
Schultz demonstrates how these and many other diverse talents enlarge our appreciation of Moby-Dick and how literature and art can amplify each other's meanings and achievements. Yet ultimately she, like Melville, concludes that the great white whale remains unpainted and unread in any absolute or final sense.
440 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1995
About the author
Elizabeth A. Schultz
6 books2 followersElizabeth (Beth) Schultz grew up in Flint, Michigan, spending all of her summers at her family's beloved cottage on Higgins Lake in northern Michigan. Encouraged by her parents to read and to appreciate nature, she experienced the best of childhoods, and remained always blessed by her parents as well as by her grandparents and two aunts.
Beth graduated from Wellesley College with her BA in 1958 and from the University of Michigan with her MA in 1962. Her long teaching career included Baika Jo Gakuen in Japan (1958-1961), a Fulbright semester at Bejing Foreign Studies University in China (2007), numerous universities in Japan, China, Russia, and Poland, in addition to thirty-four years in the English Department at the University of Kansas.
Since her retirement from KU, Beth has become an advocate for both the arts and the environment in Douglas County. In 2006, she established the Elizabeth Schultz Environmental Foundation, which encourages citizens of Douglas County to apply for funding to support creative means for preserving and educating others about the environment.
Today, Beth continues to write on Melville, but she has also become a memoirist, a poet, and an environmental writer. She has published poems in numerous journals as well as in five volumes of poetry. She served for many years on the local committee for selecting winners of the Langston Hughes awards in fiction and poetry. She also supported the environment through teaching nature writing, through her writing, and through establishing a column, "Sense of Place," in the Kansas Land Trust's Stewardship News, where she wrote primarily about specific sites in Kansas. A long-time supporter of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, she was the co-organizer for the first ecocritical conference in Beijing in 2009.
Beth graduated from Wellesley College with her BA in 1958 and from the University of Michigan with her MA in 1962. Her long teaching career included Baika Jo Gakuen in Japan (1958-1961), a Fulbright semester at Bejing Foreign Studies University in China (2007), numerous universities in Japan, China, Russia, and Poland, in addition to thirty-four years in the English Department at the University of Kansas.
Since her retirement from KU, Beth has become an advocate for both the arts and the environment in Douglas County. In 2006, she established the Elizabeth Schultz Environmental Foundation, which encourages citizens of Douglas County to apply for funding to support creative means for preserving and educating others about the environment.
Today, Beth continues to write on Melville, but she has also become a memoirist, a poet, and an environmental writer. She has published poems in numerous journals as well as in five volumes of poetry. She served for many years on the local committee for selecting winners of the Langston Hughes awards in fiction and poetry. She also supported the environment through teaching nature writing, through her writing, and through establishing a column, "Sense of Place," in the Kansas Land Trust's Stewardship News, where she wrote primarily about specific sites in Kansas. A long-time supporter of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, she was the co-organizer for the first ecocritical conference in Beijing in 2009.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 26, 2019
Someday, I will get myself a gorgeous illustrated edition of Moby-Dick, but until then, this is the next best thing. It's chock-full of beautiful illustrations and other Moby-related artwork through the ages (or at least up until the 90s), all of their artistic and literary significance examined and explained in loving detail.
I personally got a little lost during the chapter about abstract Moby art, but that's only because I'm one of those people who just doesn't "get" abstract art. Oh look, I grabbed a bucket of red paint and threw it at a white canvas, calling it a portrait of Ahab's lost leg. ART!!! On the upside, I gained a new appreciation for Rockwell Kent's Moby illustrations. Up until I read this book, I always thought that Kent's straight, pretty, art-deco lines were too clean and manicured for what I always thought was a gritty, battle-scarred, roughly-textured book. Thanks to Schultz, I now understand that Kent knew exactly what he was doing, and that he came closer than most to really getting the spiritual, symbolic, and psychological aspects of Moby-Dick.
I would love to see a sequel to this book in the future, one that takes a look at 21st century Moby-Dick artwork. If Elizabeth Schultz thought the Great Illustrated Classics edition of Moby-Dick was bad, I would love to see her reaction to the manga version!
I personally got a little lost during the chapter about abstract Moby art, but that's only because I'm one of those people who just doesn't "get" abstract art. Oh look, I grabbed a bucket of red paint and threw it at a white canvas, calling it a portrait of Ahab's lost leg. ART!!! On the upside, I gained a new appreciation for Rockwell Kent's Moby illustrations. Up until I read this book, I always thought that Kent's straight, pretty, art-deco lines were too clean and manicured for what I always thought was a gritty, battle-scarred, roughly-textured book. Thanks to Schultz, I now understand that Kent knew exactly what he was doing, and that he came closer than most to really getting the spiritual, symbolic, and psychological aspects of Moby-Dick.
I would love to see a sequel to this book in the future, one that takes a look at 21st century Moby-Dick artwork. If Elizabeth Schultz thought the Great Illustrated Classics edition of Moby-Dick was bad, I would love to see her reaction to the manga version!
September 3, 2007
barry moser and basquiat are the best discoveries herein.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews