Melville's Print Collection Online (MPCO) is a digital humanities website designed to exhibit, document, and interpret the 420 prints we know (so far) that Melville collected. Three of eight planned chapters have been completed and are available on the site. MPCO offers high-resolution images and discussions of the prints in relation to art history; to Melville's fiction, poetry, journals, and correspondence; and to his life as author and collector. In this essay, we consider Melville's acquisition of prints as what Susan M. Pearce, in On Collecting, terms an "act of imagination"; we describe the structure of the site; and we analyze three examples that convey MPCO's range of images and approaches, the discoveries that the Web has enabled, and the interpretive possibilities that the site affords. These examples span a range of techniques (line engraving, lithograph, mezzotint) and topics (Greek tragedy, topographical view, biblical miracle) and relate to issues prominent in Melville's writing and life: the reach of imagination, the geography of politics, and the intimacies of absence and presence.

Reviewed by: Moby-Dick Illustrated by Gilbert Wilson: A Celebration of Melville’s 200th Birthday by Herman Melville, and: Unfinished and Unbroken: The Life of Artist Gilbert Wilson by Edward K. Spann Robert K. Wallace HERMAN MELVILLE Moby-Dick Illustrated by Gilbert Wilson: A Celebration of Melville’s 200th Birthday Ed. Robert K. Elder. Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2019. 421 pp. EDWARD K. SPANN Unfinished and Unbroken: The Life of Artist Gilbert Wilson Ed. Robert K. Elder. Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2019. 315 pp. Gilbert Wilson (1907–1991) devoted much of his creative life to Moby-Dick and had little to show for it but a barnful of art when he died. A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, he had lived most of his early life in that city before moving to New York City in the early 1940s, where he pursued his dreams as a muralist, writer, librettist, painter, film artist, social idealist, and openly gay man until the early 1960s, when he moved to his sister Margaret’s farm near Frankfort, Kentucky, where he died at age 83. A quick glance at his literary, artistic, and cultural associations would suggest he was a twentieth-century Zelig, living on the margins of important developments in a variety of fields without leaving a lasting mark on any. The two new books under review here recover the range and significance of Wilson’s artwork and life for audiences that had previously only had access to him through Elizabeth Schultz’s resurrection of his artistry in Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (1995). Schultz’s pioneering compendium of twentieth-century Moby-Dick art was a complete revelation. Rockwell Kent and Barry Moser were only two of eighty-two artists whose illustrated editions she discussed and documented. Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella were but two of fifty-seven artists whose free-standing artworks she discussed and illustrated. Among all these artists, Schultz’s presentation of the psychological range and pictorial force of the hundreds of works she had discovered in Wilson’s Kentucky barn was perhaps the greatest revelation. Her [End Page 109] book devoted 24 pages of text, 19 black-and-white figures, and 13 color plates to Wilson’s Moby-Dick art. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Bill Fletcher showing our Moby class the fourth image in Wilson’s Insanity Series in February 1996. Author’s photo. I first felt the power of Wilson’s artistry when teaching Schultz’s book only a few months after its publication in my first-ever course in “Moby-Dick and the Arts” in the Spring of 1996. The class turned to Unpainted to the Last in February after having studied Moby-Dick itself in January. After two weeks in which students presented on the book’s artists, we took the bus usually reserved for athletic teams to Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art to see the exhibition Unpainted to the Last during the last weekend of the show. At first, students moved freely through the gallery in search of the one work that spoke most strongly to them. When we reconvened, each presented and explained his or her choice. None of us will forget how Bill Fletcher, a first-year freshman, took us through the six images of Wilson’s Insanity Series depicting Ahab’s excruciating transformation from a hearty sea captain rendered in a rep-resentational style, to a fractured personality in an increasingly abstract style, to a dark absence lost in a broken cosmos (Fig. 1). My first direct encounter with Wilson’s art was over the shoulder of one of Bill’s classmates. During the week after our visit to the gallery, each student presented an analytic essay relating her or his favorite artwork to the novel itself. Before the semester was over, Bill and two of his classmates drove 300 miles from [End Page 110] northern Kentucky to Terre Haute, Indiana, where the Swope Art Museum houses more than 300 artworks Schultz had discovered in the Frankfort barn. Instead of writing research papers, the entire class of undergraduates asked if they could present an exhibition...

Since 2008, the Melville Society Cultural Project has been acquiring original artworks inspired by Melville's writings for the Melville Society Archive at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Limited to works on paper that can be stored in a flat file provided by the Research Library of the Whaling Museum, the Archive has nevertheless assembled a rich and diverse body of work that includes artist books and paper cuts, engravings and mixed media prints, and watercolor, charcoal, and mixed media drawings. Each of these artworks relates specifically to words or works by Melville visible on its surface or alluded to in its title. In each of these works, the white surface upon which the words or shapes were painted, printed, drawn, embossed, or erased is an active interpretive ingredient. The Archive artists whose works are discussed and reproduced here are from Greece, France, England, Canada and the states of Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Kentucky, and California.

Five of the nine prints from Herman Melville's collection of art in the Osborne Collection of Melville Materials at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, had not been included in the 1985 exhibition from that collection or in the catalog documenting its contents. They had not been exhibited or cataloged because they were in poor condition: "torn, foxed, or stained." Each of these prints, however, is an important addition to the 400-plus prints from Melville's art collection that have surfaced since the 1985 exhibition in Texas. Three are after paintings by J. M. W. Turner; the other two are etchings of images by Claude Lorrain and Jacob van Ruisdael. All five prints have since been restored under guidance from Duncan Osborne, Melville's great-great-grandson, who established the Osborne Collection in Texas. Each is reproduced here in its restored condition and analyzed, along with the four previously cataloged prints in the Collection.

Steering Out of the Haven Robert K. Wallace I was thrilled to be one of the 38th Voyagers on the June 25 transit of the whaleship Charles W. Morgan from Martha’s Vineyard into New Bedford. During a period in which the tugboat Sirius was towing us from Vineyard Haven out toward Vineyard Sound, we Voyagers were given an opportunity to steer the ship. I volunteered immediately. From reading a book about the Morgan, I knew that its archaic steering mechanism was notorious for being a “shin-cracker.” But on this beautiful morning, at the end of the Sirius’s tow line, I never had to worry for my shins. “Steer the ship?” you ask. “What is there to steering a ship when it is being towed by a tug that determines its course?” Much more than you might think, as I soon learned from “Skip” Wood, our steersman. I thought I would only have a turn or two, literally, at the wheel. But Skip saw how much I was enjoying it and he let me keep steering the ship for at least ten minutes, which turned out to be good exercise. The reason I had to work so hard, he soon explained, is that the Sirius was “all over the place.” Our task was to keep her directly in front of us, visible through a convenient gap in the railing just to the left of the bowsprit. The Sirius was bobbing up and down like an apple at a teenage apple-bobbing party. Worse for us, it was continually bobbing to the right or the left. My task was to keep it centered in that target hole up by the bow. The steering mechanism on the Morgan is very direct. If the Sirius veers left and disappears from view, you pull hard to the left and try to catch it. I learned this soon, but I could not always apply it. Sometimes the tug would slip off this way or that and I would pull the wrong way. Skip would respond by saying quietly, “You must go left, now.” The steering mechanism on the Morgan “answers” the wheel very quickly. I was amazed, given the size of our ship, how quickly the Sirius bobbed back into sight after I had turned hard to the left or right. I particularly liked trying to anticipate when I had to turn back the other way to hold her steady once she got into sight again. I enjoyed asking Skip all sorts of questions during what I had expected to be my brief turn at the wheel—until he, after one of my wrong turns, observed, “Usually, a sailor is quiet at the wheel.” What a great experience to be able to steer this ship, albeit in a second-hand way, given that the Sirius was out before us. [End Page 126] Click for larger view View full resolution Crew of the Tug Sirius, with its fast-fish, loose-fish monkey-rope, letting out line. Photo courtesy of Robert K. Wallace. Very few of my fellow passengers, unless they too had taken the wheel, would have had any idea what drama and sport there was in trying to follow the tug. The Sirius had me turning so often and so hard that I was glad I’d done some light upper-body lifting in addition to cardiovascular conditioning in advance of this voyage. I don’t shoot guns, but the way my target kept bobbing up and down and from side to side made me think of a moving target in a shooting gallery. Here, however, you are not trying to shoot or to hit it, but simply to co-exist. Thinking back now on my ten minutes at the wheel, I was like Ishmael at the other end of the “monkey-rope” in chapter 72 of Moby-Dick. Anything the Sirius did, I had to be ready to respond to at my end of the line. We, too, were a “joint stock company” whose existence and fate were interdependent. With our monkey-rope, as with Ishmael’s, “do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it” (NN...

Douglas Robillard (1928-2012) Robert K. Wallace and Douglas Robillard, Jr. Click for larger view View full resolution Left to right: Douglas Robillard, Jr., Joseph Robillard, and Douglas Robillard. Photo courtesy of Trish Robillard. Everyone who knew Douglas Robillard cherished his gift for friendship. His additional gift to me was to bring me into the world of Melville scholarship. My Ph.D. dissertation was on the Russian pianists Josef and Rosina Lhevinne. I had published a book on Jane Austen and Mozart in 1983 and was well into its sequel on Emily Brontë and Beethoven when an intuition about Melville's interest in the painter J. M. W. Turner led me to uncover nearly 300 engravings from Herman Melville's personal collection of art in storage at the Berkshire Athenaeum. I knew immediately that I wanted to publish an inventory of those prints accompanied by an interpretive essay and a sufficient number of reproductions. I do not remember how many journals had already turned me down, but I will always be grateful for the alacrity with [End Page 90] which Doug, as co-editor of Essays in Arts and Sciences, supported this project even though I knew nothing about art history or how to create a proper inventory. In June 1986, he published my essay and the complete inventory, accompanied by fourteen full-page illustrations, in a special issue on "Melville's Later Life and Work." During all of the back and forth required by this meticulous project, I had never met Doug in person. That pleasure came soon thereafter when I attended an interdisciplinary conference at Yale University and was able to meet Doug and his wife Grace in their nearby home. (Doug was then library director at the University of New Haven, home of Essays in Arts and Sciences.) What a pleasure to meet this man who had taught me so much about Melville and the arts before I had ever met him face to face. Everyone who knew Doug can picture the courtesy and quiet passion with which he greeted me as an unknown scholar from an unknown university, who might have something further to contribute to Melville studies. I don't remember everything we spoke about that long afternoon, but I am sure he provided me with capsule portraits of the other scholars in the special issue of 1986 in which my essay had appeared: Stanton Garner, Wyn Kelley, Bryan C. Short, Julian Markels, and Hershel Parker. My most precise memory of the time we spent speaking in his study is that he introduced me to the idea of using a sequence of binders, rather than manila folders, to keep track of one's work in large research projects. I hate to think what my own study might look like today had I not converted to his system. Doug must have been the person who informed me about the existence of a Melville Society and who told me that its forthcoming session at the MLA Convention in New York was being chaired by a young scholar named Chris Sten who was seeking papers addressing the subject of Melville and the Arts. That session introduced me to the Melville Society and to members interested in the arts. Doug remained my guide during the decade in which Sten's Savage Eye (1991) and my Melville and Turner (1992) were followed by Beth Schultz's Unpainted to the Last (1995) and Doug's own Melville and the Visual Arts (1997). Doug's book ranged through the entire breadth of Melville's career and applied a flexible array of interpretive tools, not only to Melville's early and mid-career fiction but to his later life and his poetry, opening up subjects and interpretive methods that would inspire many subsequent scholars. By the time Melville and the Visual Arts came out in 1997, everyone who knew Doug was aware of his prophetic passion for Melville the poet and his unending effort to enlist the rest of us in appreciating Melville's poetic vision and craft. Many have followed him in various ways, but Doug was a pioneer in publishing The Poems of Herman Melville in 2000 (when no other such...

From Ancient Rome to Modern Italy:Italian Art in Melville’s Print Collection Robert K. Wallace Italian art was important to Melville in the fiction and poetry he wrote, the lectures he gave, the travels he took, the books he collected, and, perhaps above all, in the visual art he collected in his brownstone in New York City during the last twenty-five years of his life. At least one fourth of more than four hundred prints and engravings that have now been documented from Melville’s personal collection feature Italian subjects, painters, or engravers.1 Sixteen of Melville’s Italianate engravings are after works by Claude Lorrain, the French artist living in Rome in the seventeenth century, whom Arthur Stedman in his 1891 obituary declared to be Melville’s “favorite” among the “fine assortment of prints” he collected (Stedman 100). The sixteen prints after Claude that Melville is now known to have collected also represent a fine sampling of Claude’s career. Five of the prints depict marine scenes: Embarkation of Queen of Sheba, View of a Sea Port during Sunset, The Sea-Port, The Beacon Tower, and Harbor with a Large Tower. Three of them are pastoral scenes: The Herd Returning in Stormy Weather, Pastoral Landscape, and Le Berger Galant. Melville’s prints after Claude also include two classical Roman scenes (The Roman Forum and Roman Edifices in Ruin), two biblical subjects (The Flight to Egypt and Landscape—Christ Tempted), and four mythological ones (The Enchanted Castle, Europa, and two versions of Cephalus and Procris). Three of the sixteen prints had been engraved by Claude himself; others are interpretive reproductions by French, German, or English engravers. The entire group gives added interest to the image in “The Banker” canto of Clarel of “Holbein’s Dance of Death / Sly slipped among his prints from Claude” (NN Clarel 2.12.30–31).2 By the second half of the eighteenth century, when many of the above prints after Claude Lorraine were being engraved in London, English painters such as Richard Wilson took up extended residencies in Rome, Naples, and the intervening coastline in search of their own images of serene pictorial classical beauty. Melville collected an engraved portrait of Wilson in Italian garb. He also collected engravings of Wilson’s Morning and Evening, Italian landscapes [End Page 41] inspired by visits to the Bay of Baiae, between Rome and Naples, in the 1770s. Each expresses pictorially the exact quality that Melville expressed in words after visiting the Bay of Baiae and its environs in 1857: “a singular melting together of art in ruins and nature in vigor” (NN Journal 104).3 In the first half of the nineteenth century, English landscape painters such as J. M. W. Turner made their own visits to Italy in the tradition of Claude and Wilson. Of more than thirty engravings after Turner acquired by Melville, a significant number address subjects of Roman and Italian history: Ancient Rome, Regulus, The Decline of Carthage, and two different renderings of The Golden Bough. Others depict contemporary Italian scenes more directly reflective of Turner’s own travels in the country: Florence, The Grand Canal—Venice, Venice—The Dogana, and Venice—The Bridge of Sighs. Turner’s subtitle for Ancient Rome, painted in 1839, indicates that this painting envisions “the Palace of the Cesars restored” as well as “The Triumphal Bridge and Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus.” Turner’s The Golden Bough, painted in 1834, was directly inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid as well as by the painter’s visit to Lake Avernus. Melville’s deluxe engraving by J. T. Willmore is one of the few today that survives in Melville’s own frame. Its 1856 date brings us to the year in which Melville embarked on the Mediterranean voyage during which he visited Italy in February, March, and April of 1857.4 Melville collected engravings of Italian scenes by many other French, Dutch, German, and English artists.5 But this essay, prompted by the occasion of the International Melville Society Conference in Rome in June 2011, will focus on those engravings more directly expressive of Italian art, history, and culture as encountered in Melville’s own...

LeviathanVolume 13, Issue 2 p. 66-90 The Ache of Longing and the Song of Redemption: An Interview with Jake Heggie, Composer of the Opera Moby-Dick ROBERT K. WALLACE, ROBERT K. WALLACE Northern Kentucky UniversitySearch for more papers by this author ROBERT K. WALLACE, ROBERT K. WALLACE Northern Kentucky UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 May 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-1849.2011.01479.xCitations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume13, Issue2June 2011Pages 66-90 RelatedInformation

Book Review| March 01 2010 Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville's Early Works; African Culture and Melville's Art: The Creative Process in “Benito Cereno” and “Moby-Dick.” Robert K. Wallace Robert K. Wallace Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2010) 82 (1): 190–192. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-077 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert K. Wallace; Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville's Early Works; African Culture and Melville's Art: The Creative Process in “Benito Cereno” and “Moby-Dick.”. American Literature 1 March 2010; 82 (1): 190–192. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-077 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

I first saw paintings by George Klauba at the New Bedford Art Museum in June 2005. Stubb was one of many that immediately caught, and held, my attention (see fig. 1). Few paintings have depicted humankind's carnivorous essence in such a visceral way. Klauba's transformation of Melville's characters into bird-like creatures is inspired, and Stubb's tearing beak is entirely appropriate for the surreal way in which Stubb is ripping raw meat from the body of the miniaturized whale, rendering the utensils in his blood-stained hands nearly superfluous. I first met the man who created this work at his home in Chicago in December 2007. When I next met Klauba at the Rockford Art Museum in Illinois in April 2009, the nineteen Moby-Dick paintings he had exhibited in New Bedford were joined by eighteen more he had painted in the subsequent four years.1 George Klauba, Stubb, 2003, acrylic on panel, 18 × 14.5 inches. Collection of Lorry and Cara Lichtenstein. Klauba's bungalow in the North Park section of Chicago is a twenty-five minute ride from O'Hare Airport. George and his wife Judith greet me at the door. They are a well-matched couple, tall, amiable, and responsive. They have been jointly interested in Melville since their marriage at the Seaman's Bethel in New Bedford in 2006. Before lunch, George gave me a tour. We lingered in the living room maybe longer than he planned, for I could not take my eyes off a brand-new painting, Ahab Dismasted (fig. 2). This image was taking George's adventure with the novel in a new direction, although he was not yet sure quite where or why. Ahab is standing full-length, alone, against the dark brown inner wall of the ship. He is tall and gaunt, bending down, about to attach his whalebone leg to the stump of his living leg. The gap between the two leg shapes holds your attention, until your eyes rise. There, around the shoulders, are the transparent bluish arms of an angel wrestling to pull Ahab away from the obsessive fix on what he has lost. The angelic blue shows brightly against the deep brown wood beams, as does the flesh of Ahab, who in this painting is fully human in his nakedness except again for Klauba's distinctive avian face. Later in the day, Judith said this new painting made her wonder if human evolution were taking place in reverse, a question that could be asked of the series as a whole. Ahab Dismasted, 2007, acrylic on panel, 24 × 18 inches. Courtesy of Ann Nathan Gallery. The picture's dark brown bulkhead connects Ahab Dismasted with a work that George now showed me down the hall in his study. This tiny room is a powerhouse of blended sensibilities. On the highest shelf just behind the doorway are two model ships that George made as a young man after returning home from service on a destroyer in the Navy. Around the room are other inspirations—a large Rockwell Kent poster of Moby Dick ascending, images from George's history as a tattoo artist, a lovely reproduction of a tattooed Maori face, an early sculpture George made in his human-shark-spirit phase. These and more surround a narrow desk supporting two dark upright wooden panels, one a space primed for action, the other, under a black protective cloth, already under way. What you see when George lifts the cloth is a deep brown painted ground. Black lines, mostly horizontal, are beginning to block out a weighty bulkhead similar to the one in Ahab Dismasted. This will be the space in which Pip will swing in his hammock in what George currently projects as the first of three paintings showing the successive stages of a dream in which Pip moves from his immersion in the open sea, to a surrender to the elements, to a spiritual rebirth. At present these stages exist only in the form of pencil drawings of Pip, in his hammock, on successive sheets of tracing paper.2 Like Ishmael , George Klauba went to sea more or less out of desperation. Born in 1938, the grandson of Lithuanian immigrants, he was drawn to the Navy by the example of an uncle who had survived direct hits by kamikazes on his ship in World War II. George had considered joining the Marines because “I wanted to be a real he-man—at that stage you want to be.” But he felt more suited for the Navy, so he shipped out on a destroyer for three years during the Cold War, mostly in the Mediterranean. What he recalls from his time at sea are various kinds of fear. At first “it scared the hell out of me” just “boarding ship and going out to sea. There was so much rough weather. We were either in a moderate sea (where you see white caps and you're slightly pitching and rolling) or else a stormy one. I was sick quite a bit. Horrible feeling.” At times, he feared the ship would actually capsize. Once he was on watch “from twelve to four in the morning. We were in a hell of a storm. The ship took a 60-degree roll. (After the storm the bridge personnel said they marked it down in the log book—the inclinometer showed a 60-degree roll.) I was standing on deck with one foot on the bulkhead and one foot on deck. And suddenly I was like a flag in the wind hanging onto the ladder. The ship kept going over and over, and it hit a point, and it kept shuddering, and it just kept shuddering. You didn't know which way it was going to go, until it righted itself, slowly.” On his first trip across the Atlantic, when the ship was occasionally being harassed by Russian submarines, he was stationed on the port look-out during a storm that made “everything black” in the middle of the day. He was “standing there, and the ship kept rolling all the way, and there was this shudder. The ship shook and I fell toward the edge of the bulwark and grabbed the life line. Just looking over was this big gray shape.” At first he thought it was a submarine. “It was so smooth, so long, like a big giant cigar shape almost, a black-gray color, with the water rolling off it.” The next second he expected to hear “a shriek of metal, an explosion, or something. But then, all of a sudden, it just sort of quietly rolled over and disappeared and I thought, ‘Christ, it's a whale.’” Klauba had seen whales in pictures and comic books, but they were never “anything like that.” This experience “locked something in me. It made me start thinking about what is down there: the invisibility, and the life, and the size and everything. I still keep thinking about that a lot.” George's momentous encounter with this whale prompted me to mention the moment in which the narrator of White-Jacket, after falling from the mast-head into the sea, is jolted back to life by the “coiled fish of the sea” that brushes up against him. George immediately caught the import, “Wow, like a touch of God.” A few minutes later he was telling me the story of a shipmate who was not so fortunate. “When I was first crossing the Atlantic, it was a beautiful calm day. We were four ships in a squadron formation, and we all executed a turn. A sailor fell off one of the ships, and all four ships got the word to stop and turn around and lower the motor whaleboats and go pick the guy up. As the guys from his ship got closer to him in the motor whaleboat, they saw shark fins coming. As they got closer and closer, the guy disappeared. Nothing. Just nothing. They cruised around in their whaleboats; no sign of anything. Something like that sinks into you.” Klauba had thought of that episode a lot when painting The Castaway. Now, in the Pip triptych, he is trying to imagine “what the feeling would be for that guy in the water. I just keep thinking, over and over, that if he disappeared like that, a shark must have grabbed him and pulled him down, and if they pulled him down, there were other sharks devouring him at the same time, and they are probably all spinning around deep, so that is why there is no blood coming up or anything. And the guy: how conscious was he? what would he have felt? One minute he is sitting on the edge of the bulwark (where he shouldn't have been) and then we turn and he just falls over. So one minute he's probably joking around with his mates and all of a sudden he's in the water and a second later he's dead. I mean, with sharks.” Klauba now wishes he had read Moby-Dick when he was a sailor. At that time his only exposure to the story had been the comic-book version he read when he was about six years old. “Like any kid, you're supposed to go to bed at night and you take the flashlight when your parents are sleeping. You're looking, turning the pages, you can't get enough of it before going to bed. But it was a fearful thing too. I remember that chapter where a German whaleboat was hunting the same whale, and they were fighting. In the comic book they were bad Germans—because that was the war years. One German sailor got knocked out of the whaleboat, and here he was in the water, and you see the sharks coming—oh, man, that sort of spooked me a little, too.” After his stint in the Navy , young Klauba decided to study commercial art at the American Academy of Art in downtown Chicago. The first year was the basics: “figure drawing, a bit of watercolor, a little bit of pen-and-ink, pencil work.” The second year was “advertising layout, line, lettering, that type of thing.” He does not remember being particularly proud of anything he did in those classes, but he does remember his classmates asking, “Why are you always doing things violent? Why are you always doing everything with the sea?” The subjects he remembers from that time include “Fighting. Sharks. Women struggling underwater with octopuses wrapped around them. Barroom brawls. Things like that.” At that time his goal was to be a commercial, not an interpretive, artist. Klauba worked for nearly thirty years as a graphic designer for the Chicago Sun-Times. He lost his job in 1990 when the paper hired an influx of younger people. The death notice at his job was his lifeline as an artist. He could now devote himself to the art he was beginning to make on evenings and weekends. Interested in Japanese prints, he taught himself woodcuts, printmaking, and drawing. He showed his work “at art fairs, and all of a sudden a gallery here and there, and people started to get interested.” He was “building and painting imaginative stage-set scenes” until he had major surgery on his back and “couldn't do constructions any more.” So he “started doing tattoo paintings.” These led to a series of Spirit-Sailor paintings that were another step in the direction of the Moby-Dick paintings that he began in 2003, more than a decade after losing his job. Just as a whale had provided an unforgettable revelation for the young sailor in the middle of the Atlantic, so did two birds on the step of his Chicago bungalow influence the direction of his art as a retiree. One spring day, “I came home and there were two birds right on the step there. One was on top of the other—they were facing each other. The bottom bird had its wings open, and you could look under the wing. It had an indentation like an armpit. Like a woman's armpit. I really felt like I was watching human beings making love. I felt like a voyeur, in a way. I didn't want to get close to her, or disturb them. I started to back off and move away a little bit, and one bird turned around and looked at me, and they just flew off. Again, that locked something in my mind. It seemed so human that I kept thinking about it. And then with my art work something started creeping in, something about the idea of making a human form with wings or a bird's head, of combining it somehow. “I began to see that if you're showing one person doing something, and if you're showing a person that has a bird's head doing something, you're going to lock in on the bird-person more. You're going to wonder, ‘What is that person doing?’ And that's exactly what I started to do by making the people bird-people. It wasn't just for the sake of shock value with the bird's head. It's a way to pull you into a person, to think more according to whatever the person, or the bird-person, is doing. This was before I began the Moby-Dick series. At that time I was doing drawings and paintings of women with bird's heads and wings.” Once Klauba began to paint bird-people, he became more attentive to actual birds around his house. “One time I was in the back yard. I heard some screeching in a tree back there. There was a sparrow upside down in a branch, flapping his wings, making all this noise. He had a thread around his leg, wrapped around the branch of the tree. He couldn't get out, he couldn't fly away. And all these other birds were around watching, trying to do something. So I ran into the house and got a little pair of scissors and I carefully held him and snipped off the thread. I set him down close to the ground, and he just flew off, and all the other birds flew off too. That was sort of interesting. I liked that.” A more disturbing encounter came after he had begun the Moby-Dick series. “One day I was sitting here in the living room and looking out the window. I saw something fall from the tree in the front yard. What the hell was that? I couldn't figure out what. It looked like something fell fast. I couldn't see from the windows, so I went out into the front of the lawn, and it was a bird without a head. It was just laying there with the blood coming out of its neck. I looked up, and there's this peregrine falcon looking down at me; he must have bit that off, you know [nervous laugh]. I came back in the house and sat down and just kept looking out the window, and he came down and swooped down on that bird. And he started to chew, just like the painting Stubb, pulling the tendons out like that. And while he was doing it, he was looking right at the window towards me. I don't mean that he saw through the window, but his face and eyes were right at me while I was sitting here, and he was doing that. That made me think of the painting I had already made of Stubb eating the whale. That was sort of weird. I mean a good weird. I like things like that. It makes you feel that you are on the right track. It reinforces what you are doing, saying, ‘Do more of this.’” Since Stubb was one of my favorite paintings, I wanted to know how George had come up with the idea of Stubb eating the whale raw in such a vicious way. I also wondered how he got the idea of the miniature whale that Stubb was peeling as he ate. Both depictions seemed “natural” to Klauba. “If you are eating dinner, you want to have a plate with a knife and fork. But he's eating a whale so you can't have, obviously, a whole whale. You have to have a whale, so it's a miniature whale, which is actual size; it's just surrealism, in a way. And the way Stubb is pulling with his beak is the way he and the other whalers would actually strip the whale when they had it alongside the ship. So that was falling into the painting too. And then I really wanted to put the moon in there, and make it a weeping moon. It's like the thing is against nature. The moon is feeling the hurt of the destruction of the nature.” I wondered how Klauba compared Stubb's violation of nature in the painting with what the falcon had done out in his front yard. “I think we're animals, you know,” he quickly answered. He then told me about an incident in the Navy in which he had been animalistic. Again, “it was real rough weather. You're so sick all the time, and it's so painful, and you keep throwing up and nothing comes up, and it just hurts every time you do it. And then you start throwing up blood. You don't want to do that. And you just can't stop it. But you've got to get something in your stomach to stop it, to stop you from tearing your stomach out. Aboard ship, above our compartment, was the chief's quarters. The junior officers had their own refrigerator in there, their own little kitchen and everything. So I knew there was food in there. This was in the middle of the night, and I just had my skivvies on. I got out of the rack and was going for the john, and heaving and everything, and I didn't want to go back down below. I was so hungry I just opened the door to the chief's quarters, and made my way to the refrigerator. There was this hunk of cheese and stuff, and I grabbed that cheese, and I put it in my mouth, and I was standing there eating it like an animal and one of the chiefs staggered by. He was a little green-looking also, and he didn't say anything. He just looked at me, and I just kept eating. And I thought, good, for a couple of hours I won't be throwing up. But this also made me aware that I was like an animal. I was so desperate that if he would have said something I would have fought him. So that was a funny realization in a way, although I hate to say it, where I felt this animalistic-humanistic quality coming over me when you really need it.” When I asked Klauba what inspired him to make paintings in response to Moby-Dick, he spoke first of the exhibition he had called Love, Desire, and Retribution (Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, February 2003). In that show, he used human figures with bird's heads to “get something out from under my skin.” The Retribution element was “against the harlot-chasing” as a young man in Mediterranean ports. The Love element was “finding the love in Judith and exploring that as we started going together.” After “saying something with the bird thing about love,” he was not sure where to go. He “kept thinking back to the comic-book years, and all of a sudden it just popped into my head. I'd always had a funny feeling about Moby Dick or Ahab. Why not do a portrait of Ahab? Do one portrait of Ahab. Do a real nice painting and do him as a bird because that's what I was doing around that time. “So I thought, Ahab's an eagle, the American eagle. So I did a portrait of Ahab, and I did it really good and careful and lovingly, but where do I go from here? That's when I started thinking of the other characters. If I did the other characters, I would probably have a show at the gallery, and then maybe I could fill in by doing whaling scenes with bird-people. But I wasn't sure I was capable of doing whaling scenes, because they really call for a good artist who can really illustrate the sea, can illustrate everything, and I couldn't do that at that point; I was just doing portraits. That's when I felt a little put off, and I almost quit or didn't know what to do. At some point, oddly, there was a feeling that would come across me as if someone was breathing down my neck, prodding me to keep pushing, keep working. We called them spooks, or the old spirits of tattooed and tarry whalers. They kept saying to me, ‘You have to get this out and tell our story.’” Klauba's action scenes on the sea were soon as successful as his character portraits. The Castaway, The Pod, and The Funeral all generated intense interest at the New Bedford exhibition. The Chase was reproduced on the cover of the Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville in 2006, and Ahab's Boat Seemed Drawn Up Towards Heaven soon followed on the cover of the Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick. I was struck by the way he had exposed the peeled flesh of the whale as a huge mountain of white against a blood-red sky in The Funeral (fig. 3), so I asked Klauba how he had arrived at that image. The Funeral, 2006, acrylic on panel, 18 × 14.5 inches. Private Collection. “I just pictured this big loaf of a whale to begin with. But I wanted it right in the middle of the painting because it's surrounded; there's got to be the birds above and the sharks below. The shape I made of the whale, if you look at that painting again, above where there's the red sky, and then there's the dark greenish gray bird shape, that's the same shape of the whale. The way I envision it was, those birds, with the claws and the beaks that are coming down, you can sort of imagine, as you bring them down lower, that the red is the top of the whale, and they are biting into it and eating it. So the red, in an abstract or surrealist way, is like the red body of the whale.” Beyond the violence of the death of the whale, I wondered if Klauba was thinking in our modern ecological sense of the peeled remains of this massive creature being left behind as, essentially, garbage on the sea. This was part of his intention. The color of the sky is “a red in mourning” for the death of this creature. “It's almost like an obscene picture. A creature is killed for a certain percent of its elements only and the rest is just waste or turns into garbage, which is basically obscene, with a living creature. So that in itself is almost shameful. I get the feeling, when the ship in the background turns its back to you, that it's skulking away shamefully.” Since that was the feeling I had when first seeing the work, I wondered if Klauba thought that had been Melville's intention in the chapter itself. “Yes, I think so. Because he did love whales so much. He was so sensitive and into everything with nature. He knew it was an obscene thing. As much as it was important to hunt for the whale, which was part of the livelihood of the country, there was the obscene part that came out of it.” Given all of the carnage in Klauba's Moby-Dick series, painted with a visceral edge that few of his predecessors had captured, I wondered how he managed to balance the carnage with a sense of serenity or transcendence. I was particularly interested in how he had achieved this balance in The Pod, his response to “The Grand Armada.” On the high horizon line of this vertical painting, the whalers in the whaleboats are striking as many whales as they can in a frenzy of murderous action. Directly beneath them in the sea, as if unaware of the action high above them, mother whales and their calves are disporting in pure delight, as seen by Ishmael when he looks deep into the water. How did Klauba get the idea to show the surface action and the life in the depths at the same time? His first answer was to say, “Isn't that the book? That's Melville's writing, isn't it?” Well, yes and no, because Melville does not combine the surface and the depths in a single vertical image. So how did Klauba get the idea to picture everything from that one inclusive angle?“That's how I looked at the chapter. I was seeing this rectangular board of painting with the carnage up on top and the serenity below, with the mother and a calf. You have the happiness of the calves just frolicking around, while the adults are up there knowing what's going on, knowing they need to protect them and their surroundings, but the little ones don't know. They are like we are, you know.” I asked how he worked out the scale between the surface and the depth. “The best way I could—smaller receding, larger in the foreground. It's all surrealistic. It's all surrealistic. It has to be.” So it just came out in the scale, that the carnage is minimized, the serenity magnified?“Otherwise, how would you do it? You could do the carnage larger, but then there would be no room to show any tenderness in the painting anywhere whatsoever. So that has to be minimized, the carnage, actually.” Did you emotionally want the serenity larger than the carnage?“That's the important thing. The serenity.” Many of us feel like that's the charmed moment of the entire book, when we look down and see the baby whale. It saves the whole book in a way. “Sure. It has to. It has to.” When I mention my theory that the rise of the baby whale in “The Grand Armada” is an answer to the pitiful old bull whale who had sunk out of sight a few chapters earlier, Klauba agreed that this “was a rebirth, in a way.” But he could not clear his mind of the image of “the baby whale coming up, and the umbilical cord being caught. That was pretty wrenching.” The first time Klauba read Moby-Dick, not the comic book, “I sort of read it fast. I didn't retain a lot of it. Maybe about a year later I read it again, and then I read it again and again over the years. Now I like to say I read the book about seven times because when I started doing the paintings of the chapters, I kept going back—all the time—rereading and rereading all of those parts again.” I wondered about the process by which he visualizes the scenes he paints. “Sometimes, just reading the book, a striking image comes into my mind. You see the whaleboat getting closer; clouds changing into bird shapes; you see the dark fins sprouting here; it really becomes clear and you start thinking about putting it down in pencil and paint.” When you paint something like that, how much of the image do you think is from words in the book and how much gets filled in from your own memory of things you have seen?“I think it's a mixture of both. I can see certain things that he's writing starting to give me an idea where to go, but then it might change a little bit. But then there's the other thing where it's almost direct, too. Like Pip, when he's caught in ‘The Castaway,’ going down into these depths again, where he sees the jewel-like things and everything. The writing is so beautiful, and you can really picture his writing. That's where I'm starting to picture that whole scene, in a way, in my mind. That person sinking and getting where you are probably blacking out and dying, where you aren't feeling any pain, and feeling euphoric, in a way—which is almost a close-to-God kind of feeling, maybe.” I asked Klauba about his portrait of Moby Dick in which monstrous creatures seem to be tattooed all over his body (see fig. 4). Are you suggesting that he is monstrous himself, or that mankind has projected such images onto him?“In a way, they are projected, because I have more or less copied those images from old engravings.” George Klauba with Moby Dick at the Rockford Art Museum, April 17, 2009. Photograph by Christian Hardy courtesy of Ashley Theissen. So you are staying as close to those images as you can?“Yes, to almost make them go back in time, like a history. And into the future, always timeless. This is all background; what people portrayed, what he is, and what he's become.” Is it possible that someone could look at that whale with all those beaks and talons and think that he is himself a monster, rather than a projection of mankind's idea of the monstrous?“I guess that someone who's not too familiar with Moby-Dick could see it as just a monster whale, with all his inner feelings coming out to the surface.” But, of course, Moby Dick really is ferocious, too, because he needs to be. “Yes, that's right. He's a killer. But he's a killer to preserve—preserve the other whales. I call him the protector of whales. They don't have anybody else. They have themselves, and they don't have too good luck fighting off the whalers. They have to breathe, they go so deep, they come up to breathe, and then the whalers pounce on them when they're trying to breathe. So he is the strong one, the big one, that will really intervene if he has the opportunity to. He's their protector. But it's also protecting nature and everything else. Just like we know today with ecology and everything, the whale is connected with the sea, the air, everything, so it has to be protected. So it is the same thing, the protector, the good guy. And a good guy wields a tough sword and slaughters people too.” So, what does that make Ahab?“Ahab is a vengeful, angry, terrible man who did not see the right way and cannot get out of it. That's what I'm trying to do here in the painting of Ahab and the angel. Like Father Mapple says, ‘If we obey god, we must disobey ourselves.’ Ahab is feeling the angel there for a moment, wrapping, coming around, and he's got doubts. She is putting this thing into him to come back, like the talk with Starbuck when the tear drops into the sea. So he is at that point there with the angel, but then obviously he turns on the angel and goes his way after Moby Dick. So he's disobeying God. That's where he's evil, the way I look at it.” I have always felt that Moby Dick, Ahab, and Ishmael represent different sides of Melville's own personality—with his Ishmael side telling the story as the observer, the Ahab side being obsessive in the quest for artistic success, and maybe the Moby side as the elusive life force. I wondered if Klauba felt that similar elements of his own personality were activated by this project?“I don't know. I could say I could identify with Ishmael in a way, being the artist, the outsider, the observer, putting things down. And the greenhorn, going aboard ship with all these brawny people who are more hard-boiled and tougher. I can identify with that. As far as Ahab, I feel there are parts of me that are not too good that I strive to change, knowing there is a better, higher self to reach for. I can see that with Ahab. And parts of me can identify with the whale. Moby Dick is good, the protector, but, as Melville writes, he is also elusive, intangible, the phantom you can't really grasp. He has a dark side you can't get in touch with, that you can't understand or don't want to, or see clearly enough. Maybe I can see a bit of that in myself.” So do you see working on this series is a way of exploring that elusive side, those darker areas of the psyche that are otherwise hard to get at?”Yes, definitely. A lot of thoughts seem to surface as I'm painting. Past dealings and interactions with people that I wish could have been different. There must be an adjacent door to the artistic one, an analyzing door. Once the creative side opens up, all the garbage and whatever spills out also. The sour comes with the good. But I have to hold on to the good and realize I'm doing something worthwhile here. I'm really saying something that others may feel, and cause them to think, and hopefully with some moments of pleasure.” Can you speak a little about the satisfaction you feel when you know you've got the thing just right?”Oh, yeah, it's great. But it doesn't last too long. [We both laugh] After a while it doesn't look too good.

LeviathanVolume 12, Issue 2 p. 100-106 Moby-Dick Art in the Heartland, 2009 Robert K. Wallace, Robert K. Wallace Northern Kentucky UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Robert K. Wallace, Robert K. Wallace Northern Kentucky UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 May 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-1849.2010.01415.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume12, Issue2June 2010Pages 100-106 RelatedInformation

LeviathanVolume 10, Issue 2 p. 3-8 Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville on Deck: An Introduction Robert K. Wallace, Robert K. Wallace Northern Kentucky UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorIvy G. Wilson, Ivy G. Wilson University of Notre DameSearch for more papers by this author Robert K. Wallace, Robert K. Wallace Northern Kentucky UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorIvy G. Wilson, Ivy G. Wilson University of Notre DameSearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 June 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-1849.2008.01292.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume10, Issue2June 2008Pages 3-8 RelatedInformation