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ARTFORUM-Online  August 2008

Critic’s Choice

Madison, Wisconsin

T. L. Solien

MADISON MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART227 State StreetMay 17–August 17

Over the past twenty-five years, T. L. Solien has given pictorial form to the mawkishness of human erring. This harrowing and self-deprecating feat is elegantly demonstrated in this survey exhibition, comprising image-laden canvases and a selection of works on paper. Madison-based Solien has become adept at composing impeccable, doleful narratives founded on a basic lexicon of signs, symbols, and tropes that range from the exotic to the mundane. Coloring-book kittens, fish heads, self-portraits, three-eyed ghosts, and Norwegian oxen secure their roles as metaphors in Solien’s disquieting orbit of still lifes, landscapes, and portraiture.

With a breathy visual vocabulary and deft brushwork, Solien integrates graphic elements with passages of painterly zeal and crude trompe l’oeil effects. His reach is best illustrated in Sap, 2006, a large canvas that deservingly occupies the gallery’s entrance wall. Though it unabashedly carries overtones of Donald Baechler’s heavy, leaden contours, as well as of 1980s pastiche painting, Sap is so much more than the sum of its appropriated parts. Generic totems, hanging socks, a reference to a Jean Dubuffet sculpture, a crucifix, and a whale-shaped club dangling from a mechanical female doll anoint a warm interior space that is familiar yet imaginary. With the mark of a good storyteller, Solien pulls viewers into his simultaneously naive and bookish pictures by commingling bits of lowbrow imagery with literary associations. Teaming forlorn narratives with Solien’s painting conceit, “Myths & Monsters” is a dark existential ride.

— Michelle Grabner

T. L. Solien, the Re-Enactor

Michael Duncan

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            For more than thirty years, T. L. Solien has raked his psyche over the coals, probing and prodding his role as an American citizen, husband, artist, and father in expressive paintings and collages that are at once intriguingly strange, weirdly beautiful, unsettlingly crude, meticulously composed, and soberly funny. Including referents beyond his immediate purview and composing in a variety of keys, he invites viewers to put together their own interpretations of his twisted allegories. Solien has provided wide-ranging contexts for his visual mélanges, incorporating references to Tex Avery, Chardin, the Wizard of Oz, Whistler, nineteenth-century silhouettes, Winslow Homer, the Campbell’s soup kids, Jean Dubuffet, Miró, and folk and children’s art. While deeply personal, his art speaks of universal anxieties, comforts, and phobias. A free-wheeling anthropomorphism imbues all his depicted objects with desires and motives. He is an egalitarian animist, open to the potentially hurt feelings of clouds and suitcases. Willfully crude collage elements—often cut-out dollops of color—underline a sense of the handmade. He prefers a flat picture plane without foregrounding, stating that he appreciates the tension created by the “collision between pathetic materials and loaded content.”1 Rarely employing illusionism, he keeps his process close to the bone so that the viewer can more easily track his thought.

            Solien’s deeply intellectual works are hard-won products of his assimilation of art and literary history. Adult and strange in the mode of paintings by, say, Jim Nutt, Nicole Eisenman, or Lari Pittman, they seem intended for sympathetic, informed viewers. His presentation is theatrical, usually consisting of a stage-set-like tableau on which are scattered loosely symbolic characters and props. His crudely rendered, kabuki-like figures reveal few emotions behind their exaggerated red lips, button noses, and clown makeup. Featured in starring and secondary roles, bits of detritus are stand-ins for disparate insecurities, further dramatizing Solien’s existential doubts. As Robert Cozzolino stated, “The paintings exorcise spirits inside him; the familiar and deceptively sweet imagery he appropriates from pop culture interrogates viewer and artist with questions of mortality and morality.”2 Solien’s series of fractured self-portraits (1993–99) are masks reflecting a host of disturbed personae. In addition to portraits, he has created many landscapes or still lifes, set in open plains and living rooms that seem undoubtedly Midwestern. Firmly rooted in rural Minnesota and Wisconsin, Solien addresses pointedly American themes of lost innocence, social responsibility, and conflicted individualism. For recent subjects set in the nineteenth century, he has provided an extensive reading list of historical and fictional accounts of westward expansion and natural disasters. Ambitious in a way that most contemporary art is not, his work speaks of the Big Picture.

            Since around 1970 (the year Philip Guston unveiled his shocking shift from abstract expressionism to crudely rendered figurative paintings), many of the best American figurative artists have tempered their serious content with humor. Robert Colescott, Peter Saul, and Llyn Foulkes, for example, have regularly used comic book conventions and exaggerated imagery to explore their profound discomfort with the standards and values of mainstream society. Saul’s frequent dismantling of the art world and his lampooning of the falsely elevated status of the artist in modern culture are engineered through a cartoon drawing style, what he calls “the modern way to draw—any other style is copying from the last century.”3 For these artists the assumption of styles and images familiar from mass culture offers a more direct pipeline to the culture at large. Outlandish imagery and a free-wheeling surrealist approach have proved more effective than self-righteous critique. An ironic stance toward cartoon caricature heightens the impact of their message.

            Following this maverick tradition, Solien’s bricolage style features acrobatic visual gambits slipping and tumbling in comic pratfalls. In the vein of the elaborate stunts orchestrated by Buster Keaton or Rube Goldberg, his compositions are skillfully jerry-built machines, assembled from make-do bits and pieces. Solien might throw anything into his paintings. In The Great Skate (2004), based on a whimsical and strange eighteenth-century still life by Chardin, Solien activates an odd array of stuff that includes an inquisitive cartoon cat with glued-on googly-eyes, several blobs and lozenge shapes, a stack of books, a dense cluster of flying letters, and a chair draped with fluffy fabrics. Disconcertingly weird, his not-so-still lifes are settings for melancholic daydreams, reflecting the puzzling messiness of everyday life.

            This dreamlike state pervades Solien’s work. His ongoing series of otherworldly collage paintings inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick spins off from his reflections on the novel, allowing incidents and details from this classic narrative to interact with personal memories and feelings. Solien’s penchants for the funny and awkward have been surprisingly nurtured by Melville’s epic, whose heavyweight drama is repeatedly alleviated by comic relief.4 Throughout the book’s seven hundred pages, Melville includes comic incidents, puns, and asides that keep the epic narrative afloat. As in Shakespeare’s tragedies, humorous interludes are ironic asides, temporarily interrupting the inexorability of the tragic denouement. Melville’s love of odd detail—evident in his exhaustive inclusion of seemingly every technical and metaphorical aspect of whaling—also suits Solien’s inclusive nature. But unlike other modern and contemporary projects that seek to emulate the energy and power of the novel, Solien’s art uses Melville’s tale only as a springboard for personal reflection.5 His paintings aren’t so much an homage as a quirky, intimate take on the book’s tragic subtext and how that relates to Solien’s life, occupation, and marriage.

            If paintings can be about something, why not about an artist’s personal response to a great book? We read literature and look at pictures to expand our consciousness and broaden our perspectives, finding insights to impulses and emotions in fictive places, situations, dialogue, and images. As we read or look, sometimes minor details and incidents hit home, sparking reflections and afterimages long after we’ve put down the volume or left the gallery. Despite our attention to plot lines, composition, and character development, small details—the color of a bathroom, a puzzled smile, a forgotten key—may be what stick with us and prompt changes. Like dreams, stories and paintings shade the everyday. In the egalitarian realm of consciousness, fictive particulars are as potent as those of reality. Given the structuring, rationalizing conventions of art and literature, it could be said that they have a more powerful force than the often inscrutable facts and implausible actions that surround us. The made-up is realer than the real.

            In S/Z, Roland Barthes’s multifaceted 1970 reading of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine,” certain details prompt Barthes to respond on social, psychological, cultural, and deeply personal levels. This analysis famously helped decenter strictly textual and interpretative literary investigations, opening the door to a wide panoply of reader responses and speculations. Yet although subsequent deconstructions of literary texts and theories about the “death of the author” may have eroded faith in the sanctity of fictional texts, nothing has obviated the way that literary incidents and details permeate memory and consciousness, melding and mixing with our sense of identity and individuality. We are what we’ve read.

            Drawing on this mix of impulses, Solien’s works spun from his reading of Moby-Dick conform to the methodology of proto-postmodernist literary pioneers such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Pound’s The Cantos and Williams’s Paterson are epic poems constructed from literary, historical, and autobiographical particularities. Like those poets, Solien treats even minor events from his own life as mythic occurrences. His consideration of classic American themes relates also to the art of midcentury painters such as Jacob Lawrence, Honoré Sharrer, and Ben Shahn, who often plundered mythic events in American history and literature for subject matter. Other contemporary artists have mythologized incidents from their personal lives: Georganne Deen’s harrowing paintings about her mother, Thomas Woodruff’s series responding to the AIDS pandemic, and Tom Knechtel’s fantastical tableaux based on folktales effectively mix myth and personal history. But Solien’s relationship to Moby-Dick seems surprisingly complex and personal.

            Moby-Dick is a strange behemoth, a whopping tale of darkness embodied in the symbol of the white killer whale. Written in 1851 when the imperialist notion of America’s “Manifest Destiny” was in full swing, the novel has been interpreted as a kind of cautionary tale about the illusions of power. Captain Ahab’s self-destructive desire to control a force wildly bigger than himself seems emblematic of deep psychological impulses fostered by a particularly masculine form of hubris. As Melville makes clear, Ahab’s idée fixe is fueled by a self-willed and self-destructive Faustian compact. His desire to kill the white whale festers and grows, consuming the energies and lives of all those around him. The obsessive quest ignores social responsibility and concern for others, casting its hero into manic madness. D. H. Lawrence aptly described the novel as recording “the extreme transactions of the isolated, far-driven soul, the soul which is now alone, without any real human contact.”6

            Certain postwar painters and sculptors identified Ahab’s quest with their struggle to reinvigorate art after World War II. Harold Rosenberg asserted that “the American vanguard painter took to the white expanse of the canvas as Melville’s Ishmael took to the sea.”7 Jackson Pollock, Seymour Lipton, Theodore Roszak, Paul Jenkins, William Baziotes, Sam Francis, and Theodoros Stamos all titled or dedicated works to the novel.8 Clement Greenberg found that Pollock’s muddiness of color was the “equivalent . . . of that American chiaroscuro which dominated Melville, Hawthorne, [and] Poe.”9 Commenting on how the novel had been espoused by her generation, Dore Ashton wrote, “The critics who turned back to Melville were justified . . . His wonder and despair of the human condition . . . [and] . . . the notion of art as a way of probing for answers to the riddle of the cosmos [are] the view of art that still dominates American painting.”10

            In the late 1970s, in graduate school at the University of Nebraska, Solien was instilled with that kind of intense ambition for painting by his teacher Richard Trickey, who had been a friend of Mark Tobey. But by then abstract expressionism had become a house style, considered by many a too-easy conveyor of inner struggles and psychological depth. Like others of his generation, Solien eventually settled on figurative imagery as a fresh direction. But while 1980s “Pictures” artists like Richard Prince and David Salle famously turned away from psychological insight in order to critique mass media and consumerist society, Solien stayed true to the motivating intentions of abstract expressionism. Although the referential and metahistorical aspects of his practice during the past two decades have been in line with postmodernist ideas, the introspective nature of his work has continued in the tradition of the postwar artists.

            Moby-Dick has provided a loose metaphorical structure for Solien to examine the ramifications of his role as an artist. He spoke of his first reading of the novel: “What really hit home is Ahab’s monomaniacal obsessivity. To me, that was a metaphor for an artist working in a studio.”11 Several of Solien’s Moby-Dick paintings represent the destructive effect on his life and marriage caused by the isolation and self-absorption of his career (Night Nurse, Reading with Laundry, Less, Sap, Long Branch). He is aware, however, that while his difficulties and ambitions as an artist might be as ineluctable as those of Ahab, his job is obviously less perilous. Solien addresses this irony through his cartoonish style and comic tone, thus sharpening the critique.

            The real hero of the Moby-Dick paintings is Ahab’s wife, used as a lens through which to view the illusions and pretentions of the artist/Ahab. Barely mentioned by Melville, the character of the wife has been mythologized by contemporary novelist Sena Jeter Naslund in a picaresque novel chronicling her heroine’s series of wild adventures before and after Ahab’s death. In several paintings, Solien follows Naslund’s lead, presenting the wife as anticipating and mourning the loss of Ahab (Less, Half Mourning) and moving on.12 Elaborating further on the character himself, he depicts her as an alternative artist figure, one more actively engaged in “post studio” activities like plein air painting (Her Easel Pelican Lake), gardening (The Greenhouse, The Cranberry Harvest), photography (The Photographers), and furniture decoration (Widows Painting Furniture). As he explains:

I am interested in establishing the protagonist in linear motion, affected by documented accounts of the westward expansion history, and in the position of “abandoning” the withered life as the widow of a wealthy ship captain in favor of entertaining her spirit of renewal and adventure.13

Solien’s images don’t simply track the wife’s liberating journey. As he delved into historical accounts of the period, he expanded the perimeters of his sources, including works referring to the turn-of-the-century cholera epidemic (C-Train), the transcontinental railroad (Standard Time), the 1888 Midwestern blizzard (Three Sons Thaw, The Children's Blizzard), Dust Bowl immigration (The Small Depression), and the Great Hinckley Fire (Waterlilies). Processing incidents of Americana through the subjective filter of his consciousness, he develops a new kind of history painting, one reflecting America’s darker heritage.

            In artist’s notes and remarks in interviews, Solien reveals that even minor objects in the paintings are weighty with personal meaning. Usually the viewer can puzzle out their significance, conveyed by Solien’s attention to details and acute sense of the uncanny. Disturbing personal revelations are part of the mix; he associates Three Sons Thaw and HDSTNVHCL with his stillborn child and Half Mourning and The Cranberry Harvest with the death of a colleague.14 As he puts it, the “consciously clumsy” elements of the works help “dissipate the personally cathartic within the appearance of play and entertainment.”15

            The play is purposeful. Midway through Moby-Dick, the narrator Ishmael focuses on the existential humor that keeps the narrative afloat:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. . . . There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.16

Behind the practical joke is Ahab’s death wish and Melville’s ineffable symbol of darkness. The open-ended, elliptical nature of what Ahab’s obsession represents has made Moby-Dick a profound examination of the pathology at the heart of this country. Rooted in Puritanical notions of good and evil, the “problem” of America stems from its status as a democratic republic born out of land-grabbing, genocide, and slavery. Solien’s work seems permeated by a similar rectitude founded on critique of the imperialism and unquestioned idealism that continue to stymie America’s spiritual and psychological growth. Finding in his own role as an artist an obsessive arrogance analogous to that of Ahab, Solien brings this questioning home.

            Re-enactor features a bespectacled figure with false beard and clown nose posing as a Civil War soldier. Solien’s notes relate his fantasy of participating in a battle reenactment, conjuring the experience of a great-grandfather who fought for the Union. The figure’s slim shoulders and small head suggest that the subject is a woman, thus obliquely referring to Ahab’s wife’s adventure as a cross-dressing cabin boy in Naslund’s narrative. Solien manages to pierce through the disguise with the sole indicator of the subject’s personality: her eyes. Her lucid, penetrating gaze transcends the stiff, cut-out forms and comic masquerade. Like this plaintive wannabe, T. L. Solien has looked deep within the guises of art history, literature, personal biography, and human psychology to find a fresh way to unveil the past and speak to the present. A masterful re-enactor, he conflates his own life with America’s past and makes his vision our own.

Notes

            1. Conversation with the artist, October 19, 2012.

            2. Robert Cozzolino, “The Naive and the Profane,” The DailyPage.com, Madison, Wisconsin, March 7, 2003.

            3. Unpublished recorded interview with Saul by Victoria Lautman, WBEZ, Chicago, circa 1996.

            4. Joseph Jones, “Humor in Moby Dick,” Studies in English (University of Texas Press) 25 (1945–46): 51–71.

            5. For an exhaustive survey of works derived from Moby-Dick by artists ranging from Rockwell Kent to Frank Stella, see Elizabeth A. Schultz, “Unpainted to the Last”: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

            6. D. H. Lawrence, “Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 147.

            7. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 55, no. 5 (September 1952): 48.

            8. See Evan R. Firestone, “Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ and the Abstract Expressionists,” Arts 54 (1980): 120–24. The other quotations in this paragraph were cited by Firestone.

            9. Clement Greenberg, The Nation 157, no. 22 (November 27, 1943): 621.

            10. Dore Ashton, The Unknown Shore: A View of Contemporary Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 65.

            11. Katie Vaughn, “Dark Matter: A Profile of Artist T. L. Solien,” Madison Magazine (August 2012).

            12. Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife; or, The Star-Gazer (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1999).

            13. T. L. Solien, “Ahab’s Wife and the Westward Expansion,” artist’s grant application, University of Wisconsin, n.d.

            14. Solien, unpublished notes, 2012.

            15. Conversation with the artist, October 19, 2012.

            16. Chapter 49, “The Hyena,” in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.

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Michael Duncan is a freelance writer and curator in Los Angeles. He has been a corresponding editor for Art in America since 1993 and also writes for Artforum, Aperture, Bookforum, LA Weekly, and New Art Examiner.

Moby-Dick, Ahab’s Wife, and “the All-Grasping Western World” in T. L. Solien’s

Toward the Setting Sun

Elizabeth Schultz

            A reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in 2003 prompted T. L. Solien to begin the series of collages and paintings that ten years later became the exhibition Toward the Setting Sun at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota. During the course of these years, Solien’s concept for the series expanded and deepened. The first iteration of this exhibition in 2006, titled Insulatus, focused on a series of collages specifically related to Moby-Dick.1 Subsequently the works expanded and came collectively to be called To the West, a title suggesting more fully and explicitly Solien’s concerns and the shifting loci of his interests in this narrative series. In an interview in 2012, the artist admitted that he had “never pursued a topic as long as he had this one,”2 the topic being his evolving perception of the relationship of Melville’s Moby-Dick and Sena Jeter Naslund’s popular novel Ahab’s Wife to the history of westward expansionism. Understanding this connection through a series of collages and paintings became an obsession for him, very much as the White Whale was for Ahab. My concern in this essay will be to elucidate not only how Moby-Dick provides the trajectory for Solien’s art in Toward the Setting Sun but also how he brings his own multilayered, tragicomic aesthetic to create a visual response to Moby-Dick that differs from that of other Moby-Dick–inspired artists.

Solien explains that his initial understanding of Moby-Dick became complicated by his reading of Naslund’s novel Ahab’s Wife, which led him to consider the difficulties (economic, social, psychological) for New England women left alone with their children on shore for many years while their husbands were at sea, hunting whales. Naslund’s narrative helped him to realize that these women, adventurous, courageous, fully capable of living by themselves or engaging in their own explorations, might well have been otherwise occupied than endlessly waiting for and on their husbands. Contemplation of his own personal life and an intensified interest in American history further enriched the narrative themes Solien was beginning to develop in his works inspired by both Moby-Dick and Ahab’s Wife. On the one hand, he recognized that his own intense dedication to an artistic career had alienated him from his wife and children, just as Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick had led to his isolation from his community and family. On the other hand, American history led Solien to an awareness of the persistent exploitation of land and peoples in the United States in the interests of profit. The paintings in Toward the Setting Sun were initially prompted by Moby-Dick, a novel with few women characters, but Solien found himself increasingly relating Ahab’s monomaniacal quest for the White Whale to the impact of his personal quest for artistic achievement on his own wife and family. Solien came to see that a cultural endorsement of male domination over women could be related to the national quest for domination over western lands and people. While drawing on literary and historical sources, Solien’s work in Toward the Setting Sun is also intensely personalized and deeply felt.

Solien brings an exceptional range of antecedents—aesthetic, literary, historical, cultural, psychological, and personal—to his work, thereby creating his own aesthetic: a fusion of the abstract and symbolic with the realistic and narrative, the tragic and the comic. It is not surprising to learn that Solien takes Picasso as his most important mentor, not only because of Picasso’s staggering innovations in establishing new forms in art but also because he drew repeatedly for inspiration from historical and contemporary images as well as his own life. Toward the Setting Sun is littered with allusive images from Solien’s life and from art history, which, in being repeated in his work, become iconic. Comic-book images juxtaposed with allusions to nineteenth-century American painters such as Winslow Homer and James Abbott McNeill Whistler consistently destabilize the viewer, inviting her to look more closely. Solien’s dependency on nervous lines, spatial distortions, miscellaneous objects, cutout forms, and off-beat colors gives his paintings an agitated vitality.

Since the 1930s, Moby-Dick has been the source for numerous paintings, illustrations, sculptures, installations, and cartoons in increasingly diverse styles.3

The challenge of painting a whale definitively (that which Melville seeks to do in his novel even while recognizing that it “must remain unpainted to the last”)4 might well be the catalyst for this ongoing and spectacular creative response to Moby-Dick. In discussing the works in Toward the Setting Sun, Solien explicitly dissociates them from Rockwell Kent’s realistic and iconic Moby-Dick illustrations and from the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock. Kent’s work, he claims, is “too journalistic.” Solien’s relationship with abstractionism is more complex. He acknowledges his familiarity with Moby-Dick’s Chapter 34, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” regarded by many readers as epitomizing Melville’s engagement with philosophy, psychology, and theology and inspiring several abstract expressionists, including Pollock, Paul Jenkins, Sam Francis, and Frank Stella, to visualize their response in paintings or sculpture. Believing Melville comes to no conclusion in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Solien explains that his interest in Moby-Dick is not with “mystery and the unknown, not with the unanswerable.” He asserts that his intention instead is to reflect on “the ethical, the life we are living now.” By complementing his literary allusions with references to his own personal history and to American history and by generating his own vocabulary of abstract and graphic forms in Toward the Setting Sun, T. L. Solien shapes and colors his response to the material and the transcendent, the intellectual and the emotional, the comic and the tragic in “the life we are living now.”

Solien’s Moby-Dick Narrative

            More illustrated editions exist of Moby-Dick in the United States and globally than of any other American literary work. Given that Melville’s now classic novel was largely ignored when it was first published in 1851, it is not surprising that it was not illustrated until the end of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that the nineteenth century was the heyday for illustrated editions.5 Since the Melville Revival of the late 1920s, following the discovery of the text for Billy Budd in a Melville family bread box and a resurgence of interest in Melville’s writing, many of his books—most especially Moby-Dick—have been illustrated repeatedly, in full-length editions, abridged editions, children’s books, and comic books. A new children’s edition with illustrations by Andrew Glass was most recently published in 2012.6 Distinguished American illustrators of Moby-Dick include Mead Schaeffer, Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson, LeRoy Nieman, and Bill Sienkiewicz. Numerous artists in the United States and abroad have created single, independent paintings or sculptures inspired by Moby-Dick, and many others, working in realistic or abstract modes, have recognized the compelling nature of Melville’s narrative and generated visual narratives that stand independent of the text. Stella’s Moby-Dick series includes a monumental, dynamic, many-layered sculptural piece for each of the novel’s 135 chapters, thereby creating an immense and powerful visual narrative.7 Recently Matt Kish produced a stunning drawing for each of the 552 pages in the 1990 Signet edition of Moby-Dick.8

Collectively, Solien’s Moby-Dick–inspired, mixed-media collages on paper, each thirty by thirty-six inches and created in 2005 and 2006,9 form a compelling visual narrative related to Ishmael’s and Ahab’s whaling experiences, which then becomes the springboard for developing images related to Ahab’s wife and to ideas of American expansionism in later paintings in Toward the Setting Sun. Through Melville’s characters Solien reflects on “the ethical, the life we are living now.” Rather than emphasizing the full spectrum of the novel’s characters and the White Whale, Solien directs his attention toward Ishmael and Ahab. Focusing his Moby-Dick lens on these two, he perceives in Ishmael the psychologically insecure youth, embarked on discovering life’s meanings, and in Ahab the obsessed captain, whose absolute ideology leads to his extreme isolation. Solien is not alone among artists in his interest in these signature characters: this allegorical interpretation of Melville’s characters has been projected by Rockwell Kent, all Moby-Dick movies, most comic books and children’s adaptations, and the highly acclaimed 2010 Moby-Dick opera, with a score by Jake Heggie and libretto by Gene Scheer. 

Solien’s representations of Ishmael and Ahab move well beyond allegory to suggest complex psychological and cultural characterizations. Many of Solien’s Moby-Dick–inspired works are drawn from Chapters 1 through 21, take place on land before the doomed Pequod sets sail, and address Ishmael’s condition at the beginning of the novel. Ishmael, who opens Moby-Dick with the memorable line “Call me Ishmael,” does not visually appear in Solien’s works although images in the collages based on early chapters develop an iconography of anxiety, disintegration, and loss, reflecting the feelings of Melville’s narrator. As these images appear in collages representing later chapters, they perpetuate this sense of malaise.

Drawing at random on diverse chapters for his depiction of Ahab, Solien portrays him unlike other artists who project him in his isolation as the embodiment of monomaniacal power. Other Moby-Dick–inspired artists, such as Gilbert Brown Wilson, Claus Hoie, and George Klauba, also reveal Ahab to be multifaceted. Wilson’s images reveal an Ahab capable of loving, Hoie’s a visionary seeker, and Klauba’s a deeply tormented birdlike man. Sharing in the Ishmaelian iconography of anxiety, disintegration, and loss, Solien’s Ahab appears dazed, timorous, and desolated. In discussing the relationship of his art to Moby-Dick and to the characters of Ishmael and Ahab, Solien repeatedly recognizes a correlation between their lives and his own: he and Ishmael are both haunted by the passing of time, the inevitability of death, and the confusion of materiality and spirituality while he and Ahab pursue their visions obsessively with immense loss—Ahab in seeking Moby Dick’s death, Solien in seeking to become an artist.

Other artists have represented the range of characters in Moby-Dick, especially Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner, and increasingly the African American characters, but Solien depicts them only in selected images. Other artists devoted themselves to visual interpretations of the White Whale (Norman Ives, Robert Del Tredici, Robert McCauley, Mark Milloff, and Richard Ellis, for example); given Solien’s interest in the psychological, cultural, and historical rather than the philosophical, cosmic, environmental, and scientific, the White Whale that embodies the “mystery and the unknown” is largely absent in his work. When a cetological image does appear in his collages, it tends to evoke amusement.

Solien’s collages, haunted as they are and evoking the tragic dimension in human life, are not without their comic aspects. Ahab’s quest, interpreted by literary critics from the 1930s into the 1960s as heroic, is represented by Solien as savage at worst, bizarre at best, with Ahab at times appearing as a buffoon. The random representations of the White Whale in Solien’s works, as a toy cutout, a childish sketch, or an abstract assemblage, seem to parody “the ungraspable phantom of life” or “one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air” (5, 7)—phrases from the first chapter by which Ishmael anticipates Moby Dick’s awesome appearance at the end of the novel. With his consciously simplified images of Moby Dick, Solien seems to be intentionally spoofing the object of literary critics’ adoration and the subject of numerous illustrations, paintings, and sculptures, to be playfully tweaking the mystic of the unattainable White Whale, possibly suggesting that it has become overinflated.10

Although numerous artists have depicted the exterior of the Spouter Inn in New Bedford, where Ishmael spends the first night of his voyage in Chapter 2, “The Carpet-Bag,” no previous artist uses this scene to create the sense of desolation and ominous foreboding as fully as Solien does in his collage Spouter (Plate X). Devoid of characters, his painting, done primarily in grey and white, foregrounds several personal objects that all seem abandoned near the dock—a small braided rug, a box of envelopes ready for the post, a trunk, an overflowing carpetbag.11 Acknowledging that he is “deeply affected by refuse in piles” (S 16), Solien creates chaotic heaps in many of the collages in Toward the Setting Sun, evoking a pathetic human dependency on material possession.12

A tiny ship is frozen into the background of a snow white sea in Spouter. The hotel, combining a western storefront with one-story outbuildings, dominates the background. “Pragmatically eccentric, from an architectural standpoint,” according to Solien, the inn appears “ghostly and forlorn” (S 2). Melville calls it “a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly” (12). It is linked to the viewer by peculiar drainpipes, extended into the foreground and resembling nineteenth-century speaking tubes. Rising from the branches of the patched-together inn is a single, tall chimney, resembling, as Solien comments, one from a crematorium. It sends up oddly shaped black blobs of smoke; here they are blank comic-book speech bubbles, offering no information. A full moon hovers in a grey sky, evoking either dawn or dusk. Solien’s Spouter thus becomes a synecdoche, standing in for the feelings of isolation, depression, purposelessness, and suicide that Ishmael expresses at the beginning of his voyage.

Scholars interested in Melville’s reflections on art often note Ishmael’s encounter, on entering the Spouter Inn, with the “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture,” a painting with “a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant” (MD 12–13). In Moby-Dick, Ishmael becomes engaged, first, with interpreting this picture, then with interpreting Queequeg’s tattoos, and increasingly with interpreting all whales, but especially Moby Dick. Few artists attempt to represent the picture that so intrigued Ishmael at the beginning of his journey.13 Solien not only creates an unusual representation of the Spouter Inn painting in his work Blue Poles but also explicitly determines to differentiate it from the other works in this series: “It was my intention to try to make an image that did not present itself in a way similar to all other images from this body of work” (S 4).

Solien’s Blue Poles (Plate X) mocks abstract expressionism in general and abstract interpretations of Moby-Dick particularly. In his discussion of this collage, he references both J. M. W. Turner’s paintings14 and Pollock’s 1952 painting Blue Poles, after which he named his own work and which he speculates was “inspired by Melville’s description of the mystery of romantic abstraction” (S 4). Although there is no evidence that Pollock referenced Moby-Dick per se in his Blue Poles, it is likely that Melville’s novel was on his mind when he titled his 1943 work (Blue (Moby Dick)). With a conscious pictoriality, created by its broad frame and its lack of any realistic shapes, Solien’s Blue Poles stands apart from his other collages. Centered in the middle of the collage is a cutout of a squash-like whale,15 perhaps alluding to Ishmael’s own recognition of a whale leaping over a ship in the center of the Spouter painting, but certainly parodying representations of Moby Dick as mystical, scientific, or humanized. The other disparate and overlapping cutouts in the collage have no definitive shapes—some appear as fish, others as leaves. They all seem intentionally aged, mildewed, dusty. In his picture of the picture, Solien determines to subvert a cultural predilection for abstractionism by creating a spoof that he believes is “virtually unreadable,” an image “like a relic of the Abstract Expressionist historical past even though [this past] is, in reality, from the Future, compared to the historical implications of other works in this series” (S 4).

In Shrunken Heads (Plate X), Solien depicts Ishmael, the young Yankee, in bed with Queequeg, the seasoned Polynesian harpooner, a scene frequently appearing in illustrated editions of Moby-Dick and beloved by readers who are heartened by its evocation of deep friendship and the hope it implies for attaining democratic ideals of equality. Yet Solien’s rendering of the friendly pair is more disturbing than comforting. With red smeared on the walls of the bedroom, he evokes the horror of whaling, the bloody “butchering sort of business” (MD 108) for which both men are headed. Solien emphasizes the room’s chill, depicting a threadbare blanket and melting snow and ice seeping through the cracks in the door and floating across the floor. Swinging ominously above the bed are the tattooed heads (rendered as gigantic and each with a full head of black hair) that Queequeg has been peddling about New Bedford. Visually reflecting Solien’s debt to Jean Dubuffet,16 the heads, together with the colorful, totemic, and emphatically phallic bedposts, dominate the bed. Unlike other artists who visually ennoble Queequeg, Solien chooses to sexualize the Polynesian. Although Melville describes Ishmael and Queequeg as becoming “bosom friends” as a result of their bedtime talk, Solien, who shows their “nocturnal conversation as existing in the blackness or transparency of ‘thought bubbles’” (S 5), specifically suggests that they might be discussing the dangers of whaling and the more ponderous subject of death.

             Spouter Breakfast (Plate X) focuses on the meal served to the whaling men at the Spouter Inn, a subject based on Chapter 5, “Breakfast,” which infrequently appears in illustrated editions of Moby-Dick and which few artists have undertaken to represent. Solien states his conviction that Melville’s chapter not only evokes for him a Last Supper for the whalers as well as for the whales, who provide the steaks for this meal, but also emphasizes the body’s materiality, its separation from the soul. With no characters in this collage, Solien gives his viewer a still life that includes a roughly drawn cup and torn scraps of paper heaped on a plate, suggesting slabs of multicolored, desiccated meat. In Solien’s view of the whalers’ world, a breakfast plate slides toward the viewer, underscoring life’s instability.

            In No Suicides, another image from Ishmael and Queequeg’s early adventures together, Solien links the suicidal tendencies of whalers and artists. This collage references a sign that the innkeeper of The Try-Pots in Nantucket plans to post. Although oblivious to Ishmael’s depression and suicidal proclivities, the innkeeper is affected by the suicide of a previous guest, a whaleman just returned from an unproductive four-month cruise. She now worries that Queequeg will stain her bedsheets and her reputation by killing himself with his harpoon. Solien’s collage, with its phlegm-colored yellow and grey background, conjures a moldy wall, a diseased atmosphere. None of the objects in this room—the pile of massive tomes; the rickety, once elegant table; the heavy kettle, which floats curiously above the sign—expresses vitality; rendered in black, these miscellaneous items appear disconnected, adrift. The sign, with its sardonic imperative, “No Suicides,” has slipped from its frame. A roughly sketched cross and an arched window, which in another context might signify Christian inspiration, offer no illumination. In discussing No Suicides, Solien identifies himself with Ishmael as “a longtime sufferer from chronic depression” and indicates that the painting explicitly alludes to the fact that many artists have tragically been “incapable of surviving their long-term ‘journey’” (S 3).

From the early chapters of Moby-Dick, Solien has also chosen to illuminate the chapel, a scene perhaps better known through film representation than through its artistic depiction.17 The pulpit in Chapter 8 is sturdily built to resemble a ship’s prow, leading Melville to comment, “the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage is complete; and the pulpit is its prow” (MD 40). Pulpit (Plate X), Solien’s collage of Father Mapple delivering his sermon from the pulpit of New Bedford’s Seamen’s Bethel, presents material and spiritual chaos. Acknowledging Melville’s description of the pulpit as “fashioned from the wreckage of former whaling ships” (S 6), Solien concocts his pulpit from a hodgepodge of lumber, the arched window from No Suicides (now turned upside down), strips of tape, and tattered drapery. In the pulpit, along with Mapple (represented as a dignified nineteenth-century clergyman), a black canoe paddle is incongruously placed. Behind his head is a dilapidated sail, spread out like a ghostly scarecrow. Large thumb tacks and post-ems hold the walls of the chapel together. In an arch surrounding Mapple’s head is one of the few allusions to the White Whale in Solien’s collages, a form also constructed from strips of white tape. Although Solien insists this is only “a reference to the architecture of the chapel” (S 6), this awkward arch may also be interpreted as dominating the future of everyone pictured. Below the pulpit stand white slabs resembling the cenotaphs set in the chapel in memory of men who had drowned at sea. Among them, Solien places a rabbit from his previous work, a bonneted woman evoking Ahab’s wife, a diversity of dark silhouettes, and a dramatic representation of Queequeg. The recycled images from previous works in this collage strengthen the connective narrativity of Solien’s series while also exacerbating the material and spiritual chaos.

            In Our Things, Solien again focuses on Ishmael’s and Queequeg’s possessions. Based on Chapter 13, “The Wheelbarrow,” Our Things depicts a large red wheelbarrow loaded with Queequeg’s bulky canvas bag and Ishmael’s smaller carpetbag. The overloaded wheelbarrow and the bags indicate the persistence of material chaos as well as the jumbled and diverse baggage humans carry in their psyches. The wheelbarrow contains one of Solien’s black thought balloons, a red mitten on a fishing pole, slabs of meat from Spouter Breakfast, a mirror, a book, and other miscellaneous shapes, while Queequeg’s bag carries an alarm clock, a sock, a roll of paper, a picture frame, and a small teapot. A miscellany of abstract forms and shapes sits alongside the wheelbarrow and bags, including a head of Queequeg and a small portrait bust of George Washington, conveying, as Solien says, “the silly and the innocuous” (S 60).18 As in a barren Giorgio de Chirico cityscape, some of these objects cast strange shadows. Although Solien maintains that Our Things is a reworking of Picasso’s Minotaur Moving House, a gleeful, rambunctious print of the Minotaur pulling a wagon full of his goods and chattel, Solien’s collage is far more ominous, with smokestacks on a distant horizon and a black sun overhead.

            The only character from Moby-Dick for whom Solien creates a portrait is Ahab; he follows the tradition of other Moby-Dick artists who select the Pequod’s captain for particular attention.19 The iconic characteristics of Ahab’s face with his intense gaze and his livid scar as well as his body with its whale-bone leg are absent in Solien’s image (Plate X). Solien generically titles his portrait of Ahab He to associate him with masculinity at large. He crosses out his eyes with Xs, the conventional comic-book sign to designate a man who has lost consciousness. The flatness of Solien’s image does not reflect the complexity he contributes to Ahab’s characterization, however. By emphasizing Ahab’s pipe,20 which the captain tosses overboard in Chapter 30, and his hat, which a sea-hawk carries off in Chapter 130, Solien suggests Melville’s nuanced portrait of the Pequod’s captain. By giving up his pipe, Ahab intentionally relinquishes sensuous pleasure and serenity; the loss of his hat to the sea-hawk one hundred chapters later is an omen of his forthcoming death. If other aspects of He mock his power and strength, Solien undercuts the foreboding solemnity and insanity given to Ahab by other Moby-Dick artists by assigning him a rakish beard and a saucy, cutout toupee, which, he says, reminds him of the hairstyle of a character from the children’s television show Little Rascals.

            Parodying Whistler’s staid and balanced portrait of the British philosopher Thomas Carlyle and titling it The Leaking Room, Solien mocks the painter, the philosopher, the whaling captain, and the writer in this “‘formal’ portrait of Ahab” (S 11). In the center of this collage, he places a melting snowman wearing a jaunty red bowler. The large brimmed hat, which Whistler shows tilting on Carlyle’s knee, here tilts instead on the snowman’s head, and the coat that covers Carlyle’s knee is replaced by the melting snowman, from which pieces of coal, denoting his face and buttons, are slipping onto the floor. Solien’s leaky Ahab sits upright, dressed in somber black. He is paradoxically the only “stable” element in The Leaking Room, yet Solien explains that “Time collapses in Ahab’s lap. Sogginess compromises all surfaces and objects as Ahab holds his pose” (S 11). Although most nonabstract representations of Ahab show him scrutinizing his maps or gazing intently at the horizon, Solien places him here in a room comparable to that in Shrunken Heads. Water drips from the ceiling and oozes across the floor. In creating The Leaking Room, Solien not only parodies Whistler’s upright philosopher but also seems to have taken a clue from Ahab’s comment to Starbuck: “‘I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship’” (MD 474). Despite acknowledging his mortality, Melville’s Ahab continues his pursuit of Moby Dick, even as Solien implies the artist continues to pursue his vision. In The Leaking Room, Solien replaces the paintings neatly hung on the wall in front of Carlyle with small, actual reproductions of four of his own works, asserting that “Ahab and the artist in [his] creative process are synonymous” (S 11).

            Although Melville usually describes Ahab on deck, intensely engrossed in watching for Moby Dick’s appearance, he also shows him inside the ship at two tables: presiding imperially over the dining table of the mates and harpooners and pondering the charts spread out on his cabin table. In Captain’s Table (Plate X), Solien conflates these two tables, superimposing Ahab’s personal table on a long dining table. He again connotes this long table, which is set with various beakers, with the Last Supper, sketching a cross over it to clench that association. Ahab’s personal table looms large in the place where Jesus would have been expected to sit. Lying beneath the tables are signs that Solien uses in other images to suggest the ungodly nature of the Pequod’s voyage: a bloody spade for desiccating whales and Ahab’s hat, which is symbolic of his mortality. This table stands on an elaborately designed but unsteady peg leg, by which Solien implies Ahab’s own moral and psychological instability. On the table’s surface is a whimsical sketch of the White Whale that so obsesses him. In Captain’s Table Solien not only signals the overwhelming threat of Ahab’s dominance but also undermines him comically.

            Solien’s representation of Pip, the Pequod’s black cabin boy and a castaway in the sea—“in the intense isolation of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity” (MD 414)—is perhaps his most realistic image and certainly his least cluttered. In its stark simplicity, it is heartbreaking. Seldom depicted by earlier Moby-Dick illustrators or artists, Pip has recently been signaled out by George Klauba and Kathleen Piercefield, each of whom devoted a sequence of images to Pip’s narrative in Melville’s novel.21 Although Melville describes the day when Pip is abandoned at sea as being blue and beautiful, Solien casts his collage in nightmarish colors, the sky a bilious yellow and the sea a mottled green. In this “heartless immensity,” Pip turns his “ebon head” (MD 413) while a whale ship rides on the distant horizon in a miasma of grey haze. The unusual spareness of this collage draws attention to the horror of Pip’s abandonment. Solien recognizes that Pip, following his rescue, accesses “his irrational self” (S 18) or, in Melville’s words, “heaven’s sense . . . that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic” (MD 414). Solien thus perceives that Pip gains wisdom similar to that of artists who risk alienation from society in their struggle to achieve a personal vision.22

            In the collage titled Omen, in which a sea-hawk flies off with Ahab’s hat, Solien expands on his understanding of Moby-Dick as a narrative exposing the problems of living with depression and the knowledge of death’s inevitability. The sad-eyed bird at the center of Omen, which Solien describes as “dingy, meek, and pathetic,” even comical (S 17), is hardly a sea-hawk. A goose, it seems to be drinking from a cup—whether a cup of water or of hemlock, Solien leaves to the viewer’s reading. He specifically interprets the sea-hawk in Melville’s novel as “an image signifying Death” and his own image of the goose as “the personification of Depression” (S 17). Astonishingly, Solien affixes a pair of small, dainty white wings onto the back of his goose, hinting that this bird could have redemptive possibilities: “the ‘little wings’ . . . keep the condition [of Depression] from being all-consuming . . . a surprising glimmer of health in the corpus of disease” (S 17).

            Two of Solien’s collages evoke the conclusion of Moby-Dick. As in other Solien works, through heaps of colorful refuse, layered with images “inspired by Art Historical collisions” (S 16), they expose the accumulated detritus in human lives. In both collages, Solien envisions the debris from the Pequod’s wreck at the novel’s conclusion as “the great shroud of the sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago” (MD 572). Once again, Solien emphasizes an aspect of the scene few other artists have visualized in their attention to more dramatic events—either the White Whale’s destruction of the ship or Ishmael afloat on his life-buoy coffin.23 Among contemporary Moby-Dick artists, only Mark Milloff in his series depicting the concluding events of the novel conveys a comparable sense of the chaos and pressure from multiple, colliding objects. In Flotsam (Plate X), among the floating barrels, bricks, pumpkins, and a picture frame that might have held an image of Ahab’s wife, Solien also imagines a sacrificial lamb and a child’s coffin. The title for the second of these elegiac collages, Masthead (Plate X), comes from Chapter 35, early in the novel, in which Ishmael envisions his own death on the ship.24 With a midden of assorted colorful shapes in the basket of the masthead, Solien reflects on the demise of the entire crew. The bright, largely unidentifiable objects here not only overflow from the masthead but also seem to be drawn downward by heavy streaks of darkness. Solien comments about this image: “I think not to consider it to be an image of a crucifixion would be to miss an aspect of the drawing’s intentions” (S 16). Rising from the debris of the Pequod and of Solien’s artistic life is a gaily banded pole that suggests transcendent possibilities in the midst of desolation.

Solien’s Narrative of Ahab’s Wife

            Linking Melville’s nineteenth-century Moby-Dick with Sena Jeter Naslund’s twentieth-century Ahab’s Wife, Solien maintains continuity, creating a dynamic visual experience and an evolving commentary on American society. Many of the works related to Ahab’s Wife were made during the same period as his Moby-Dick–inspired art (2005–6), are the same size, and are also mixed-media collages.25 Pursuing his vision, Solien continued working on his Mrs. Ahab pieces from 2006 into 2011, including several large paintings.26 Whereas his Moby-Dick works reflect on the novel’s male characters (Ishmael, Queequeg, Pip, Ahab), his works evoking Naslund’s principal character, Una Spenser, create a feminist narrative.

Connecting both narratives is Solien’s intensely critical examination of his own life. In the Moby-Dick collages he reflects on being a lone and often traumatized individual as well as an artist, and in the Ahab’s Wife collages and paintings he considers his wife’s life as she is rendered dependent on him but becomes an independent and triumphant individual, courageous, creative, and involved with her own companions. As Naslund, in Stacey D’Erasmo’s words, “is, in the most non-aggressive way, rewriting American history, revising American literature and critiquing traditional masculinity,”27 so is Solien in his collages focusing on Ahab’s wife. Although his collages explicitly honor the plot and characterizations in Ahab’s Wife and reinforce Naslund’s own assertion of intention regarding her novel (“I’m making a statement that there can be an epic story of an American woman that ends in peace and harmony with the universe. . . . This woman can be one who has lived a very full and adventuresome life and has found her own way spiritually”),28 Solien, in his most recent portraits of Ahab’s widow, questions that she has achieved a fully meaningful life.

Having created a formal portrait for Ahab based on Whistler’s portrait of Carlyle in The Leaking Room, Solien creates “portrait partner” for Ahab’s wife based on Whistler’s Mother in his Composition in Black and White (Plate X).29 Composition in Black and White represents Ahab’s “homebound wife” (S 12), static in her position as a nineteenth-century “angel in the house.” Her smiling profile, with clown nose and triangulated eye, immobilizes her in a conventional childlike profile that remains constant in the majority of Solien’s Mrs. Ahab works. In a seated position, her hair coiffed with white scarves, her body slumped, her hands and her skirt weighted with books, she is static. Motionless, she is suspended not only in a particular period in time but also in her social and gender status. Solien imagines that, as a whaler’s wife, she is perpetually waiting for Ahab’s return. Yet he also includes signs of change in her situation: behind her is a long rip in the yellow wallpaper, which might signify that she is “gnawing herself out of her domesticity” (S 12),30 and opposite her a framed picture illustrates a man vigorously chopping down trees with a hefty axe. This figure, who appears in other collages, is, according to Solien, “an acknowledgement of the irreversible damage my way of thinking has done” (S 12). Solien’s commentary reveals that his “way of thinking” resulted in his not being “present” for his wife and family—like Ahab, who was always away at sea. Solien accuses himself of being similarly absent by living too often in the past or the future or his art.

In Night Nurse, Sap, and Reading with Laundry, all of which involve bedroom scenes, Solien’s characterization of Ahab’s wife is more fully developed. Her figure in Night Nurse (Plate X), where she is again encased in nineteenth-century dress, glows luminous against the dull grey of this collage. Despite her stiff shape and face, she appears alert in contrast to Ahab, who, Solien writes, “is anemic, comatose, and reduced to line and shallow volume” (S 1). Above him hovers a large dream that contains a sketchy, “vague white-ish lump” (S 1), resembling the White Whale drawn on the paper on Ahab’s desk in Captain’s Table. At his desk or in his sleep, Solien’s Ahab is controlled by his obsession for Moby Dick, while his wife is more of an “adventurer” than he, “more vital and alive in the world” (S 1).31

In Sap (Plate X), Ahab’s wife again approaches a bed in which an anemic Ahab is stretched out. This bed is the duplicate of that which appeared in Shrunken Heads; not only is it equipped with Dubuffet-inspired, phallic bedposts, but a startling Dubuffet figure rises above the sleeping body of Ahab, evoking a sexually vital Queequeg. Mrs. Ahab dominates this painting and is represented as a robotic figure. Drawn in a childlike manner, she is stiff, her perfect, bouffant hairdo down around her shoulders, her waist pinched, corseted, and constricted by the immense white skirt billowing around her that Solien replicates in several other collages.32 In Sap, her robotic nature is emphasized by her multiple feet, one of which might be attached to a wheel. Represented here and in other images only in profile as if she is living a half-life, she retains her masklike facial expression. Apart from her face, the only other part of her body shown here is an arm; in Sap, this arm has morphed into a “sap,” a kind of club used by gangsters, which in turn has morphed into a whale. Both her life and her husband’s have evidently been sapped by the occupation of whale hunting, which has obsessed him and depressed her, leaving them both unable to glory in the energy and vitality of a Queequeg. Both Ahab and his wife have become “saps” in the sense of their idiotically succumbing to this half-life.

In Reading with Laundry (Plate X), Ahab’s wife, once more identified by her clown face, is in the bed, reading beneath a quilt made of cutout, multipronged stars in gold and green that alternate with black coffins. The foot of her bed is weighted with pieces of cut paper in different shapes and colors, signifying the laundry that she ignores as she reads. Her books, also cut from paper, lie scattered on the floor alongside the bed. Intent on her reading, she is indifferent to the small, manic, Ahab-like figure roughly sketched at the end of the bed, who appears to be hopping mad. Solien’s notes for this collage are a commentary on marital discord, past and present, in which the husband, quite possibly a self-absorbed artist like himself, is emphatically held to blame:

After years of Ahab’s physical absence, coupled with his predisposition for preoccupation and emotional distancing, the marital bed has become a domestic dumping ground, and a place of emotional and physical separation . . . rather than a place of joyful intimacy. . . . Ahab’s conscience might be saying to him that domesticity, and perhaps monogamy, cannot compete with a life of adventure-seeking and other forms of self-gratification . . . Ahab is perpetually unconvinced that life in either the domestic realm or the autonomous life [where] he characteristically lives are, in and of themselves, adequately fulfilling. To discover the answer to this question is to risk all that Ahab has created. Ahab’s emotional paralysis and frustration is, therefore, eternal. (S 21)

Three complex collages—Standing Masthead, Long Branch, and Croquette—take Ahab’s wife out into the open air, where she continues to appear in stiff profile and voluminous skirts. In all three collages, her image is replicated by numerous other women who resemble her exactly and suggest the similarity of her situation to that of other women. In Standing Masthead (Plate X), Solien places her in a curtained masthead that looks more like an opera box than a whale ship. Here she is engaged in spotting an elegant version of Moby Dick with symmetrical, leafy tendrils emerging from his blowhole. Naslund’s Una, like wives of many nineteenth-century captains, actually does go whaling, albeit unmarried and disguised as a boy. The women in Standing Masthead are not looking for the White Whale, but, according to Solien, are frenetically and hyperactively seeking husbands. Using the imagery of the lopsided arched window and the cross-tie, which appeared in both Pulpit and Masthead, Solien again projects the cross, explicitly “urg[ing] the viewer to consider crucifixion and sacrifice as imbedded in the role of the wife” (S 13).

In Long Branch (Plate X), Solien references Winslow Homer’s painting of upper-class, nineteenth-century women in their ballooning dresses, some with parasols held high as in Standing Masthead, promenading along the edge of a cliff while gazing seaward for their absent husbands’ return. Ahab’s wife is singled out by being projected from the cliff on an L-shaped shelf bracket along with her tiny house. Solien describes her as being mounted like the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock (S 20), where her dependent and mechanical position dooms her to perpetual waiting for her absent husband. Despite its focus on the limitations of women’s lives, Solien’s version of Homer’s Long Branch, New Jersey conveys buoyancy and vibrancy. Not only are the women’s dresses brightly patterned, but the collage’s natural setting evokes vivacity. The cliff, while precarious, is covered with multiply colored, energized shapes, collectively suggesting a system of hieroglyphs, such as Ishmael sees as characterizing those on his beloved Queequeg: “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth” (MD 480). The blue sky is filled with clouds that, in the diversity of their shape and color, echo the hieroglyphs on the cliff. Two small, ominous black clouds and a small black ship on a black sea maintain tension in the collage.

Like Standing Masthead and Long Branch, Solien’s Croquette features only women. A fantastical revision of Homer’s 1865 Croquet Players, Croquette eliminates male players from the scene. Their presence in the collage is implied by a plurality of phallic images, including the posts from Queequeg and Ishmael’s bed and a masthead, all of which are lined up along the horizon. Shrubs in Croquette become vaginas. The numerous striped, round balls rolling over the grass and among the curved hoops also balance the bizarre totemic images that replace both men and trees in Homer’s work. Although Croquette is haunted by sexual imagery and women who are proactive, Solien writes that they “are strangely transfixed . . . as if their paranoia and emotional preoccupations have generated a being more mechanical than human” (S 21). Although she holds a croquet mallet, Ahab’s wife, surrounded by her white ruffled hoop, ultimately seems a bridal cake decoration.

            Deck Shoes and Skirt (Plates X and X) place Ahab’s wife onboard the whaling ship. Thus she succeeds in adventuring forth as she does in Naslund’s novel, yet both collages comment generally on the savagery of whaling as a commercial enterprise and specifically on the ways in which women’s dress continues to signify cultural stultification. Solien explains that Deck Shoes illustrates that women’s fancy footwear (chopines) elevated them above the detritus of city streets, just as clogs lifted whalers above the detritus of slaughter aboard a whale ship. One of the bizarre, stacked shoes he creates in Deck Shoes is nailed to the deck, immobile amid the “blood and innards awash on a whale ship deck” (S 8),33 implying that Ahab’s wife, like other women, remains stuck in her gender-determined situation. A dainty watering can nearby, which evokes more feminine pursuits, proves useless in cleaning up the slaughter.

Playing on the whalemen’s name for a piece of whale blubber as well as the derogatory synecdoche for a woman, Solien’s Skirt depicts the lower half of a woman’s torso wrapped in a skirt. Although this short, tight-fitting skirt might be more comfortable than a hooped skirt, Solien comments on its lack of pockets (a feature of much women’s clothing past and present) by adding an ink-stained pocket from a man’s shirt and a piece of denim, perhaps further hinting that women might be comfortable in jeans. The bulging skirt reveals the woman to be pregnant, not with a child but with a tree full of pink blossoms. The tree’s trunk has been pierced by black lances, which Solien describes as harpoons. A many-barbed harpoon is attached to her left side, and a white trailer enclosing a smaller pick trailer is attached to her right side, perhaps emblematic of the polarities of victimization and domestication between which many women’s lives are stretched. Solien’s iconic images press against the surface of this collage, and a red blob curls out from the skirt’s lower edge. Although Solien indicates that it might convey “the psychic and physical damage” (S 9) of the whaling environment, it undeniably resembles a soaked menstrual pad. Incongruous pink waves of femininity lap the bottom edge of Skirt.

             Man on Island (Plate X) brings together several images related to Ahab’s wife. Consolidating and concentrating them in the center of this collage, Solien enclosed them within a ring as if forming an island in the picture. In the middle of this ring, a man raises an axe against an apple tree—an image similar to that in Composition in Black and White and which appears in utero in Skirt. The ink-stained pocket from Skirt is also part of the collection of objects within the island’s ring. Solien explicitly associates the damaging effects of isolation—of an island mentality—with an episode in Ahab’s Wife as well as with “the life of a studio artist” (S 15). He recalls that the survivors of the whale ship in that novel, including Una, in moving from island to island, “devour everything” in their greed and desperation to survive. Island images are thus associated for Solien with “self-inflicted isolation, loneliness, barrenness, and self-exhaustion” (S 15). He might well have recalled that in Moby-Dick, Melville points out that the members of the Pequod’s crew were largely islanders, and as such “Isolatoes, too, . . . not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own” (MD 121). Melville simultaneously sees these isolated island men as “federated along one keel” (MD 121), as individuals collectively comprising a democracy, but Ahab remains alone, “the quintessential ‘Insulatus,’” which, according to Solien, is his subject here (S 15) and was the title of his 2006 exhibition of works related to Moby-Dick.

Ahab’s wife makes her escape from nineteenth-century domesticity in general and from the life of a whaler’s wife, in particular, in Honeymoon, a 2009/2010 collage. Recalling Naslund’s Una, Solien writes that “the widow’s history prior to her marriage to Ahab was one of self-expression, self-reliance, and adventure” (S 41). In Honeymoon, she is in a 1940s car that has been loaded on top with a diversity of colorful bundles, reminiscent of Queequeg and Ishmael’s overflowing wheelbarrow and carpetbag as well as of 1930s Dust Bowl cars. Among the widow’s possessions are a pitchfork and a pair of skis, which would not be included in a whaleman’s belongings. A sign scrawled “Just Married” hangs aslant on the door of the car, and she sits in the backseat. A man’s dark shadow, which Solien identifies as belonging to Ahab, is sketched on the pavement outside the car, implying that women can never be entirely free from the baggage of their cultural history and its psychological oppressions. Yet Ahab’s wife is freer here than she was in Solien’s other images: the billowing skirts are gone, and she is detached from the little pink trailer. Additional paintings (Bleachers, Black Horse, and The Jockey) present her in entirely new settings, expressing her independent and adventurous spirit by associating her with crowds of people and with horses, indicating her engagement with the new century and the movement westward.

Finally, Ahab’s wife seems to haunt Solien more than Ahab does. Two late portraits, both completed in 2011, place her through her clothes and hairstyle in the early or mid-twentieth century and imply that despite her capacity for adventure and reinvention, she is alone without community and thus comes to resemble Ahab. In Less (Plate X), a large acrylic on canvas, she sits hunched over a table, resembling Edgar Degas’s Absinthe Drinker, an ashtray of cigarette butts, empty glasses, and a small desiccated chicken her only company, her eyes glazed. In an explicit link to Solien’s Ahab, Xs mark her eyes, evoking her oblivion and misery. She stares but seems incapable of seeing the cloud of shimmering moths, hearts, and bows that Solien has painted into the darkness in front of her. All that remains of the widow in Solien’s Gone (Plate X) is a mirrored reflection or a framed painting: an image of an image. Despite an elusive beauty and dignity, she has become an object, surrounded by a variety of objects in an antique mall, whose ownership, history, and intrinsic value are unknown or determined by commerce.

“The All-Grasping Western World”

Throughout Moby-Dick, Herman Melville makes his readers aware of  “the all-grasping western world” (MD 380), obsessive in its desire to dominate, control, colonize, exploit. The western world, as Melville generalizes about it, is greedy not only for whales but also for other natural resources, for lands, for peoples. In Solien’s early collages based on Moby-Dick and in the long shadow he lays on the future through his later depictions related to the settlement of the American West by Europeans in Toward the Setting Sun, he interprets Melville’s response to western development. Although his more recent paintings in this series do not directly engage Moby-Dick, Solien has testified that Melville’s novel opened the nineteenth century to him, and that “this has changed my view of the world in which I live.”

The paintings directly connected with Moby-Dick and Ahab’s Wife, discussed throughout this essay, provide a trajectory for understanding T. L. Solien’s subsequent work, which evokes historical and personal episodes from American and Solien family history. Ahab’s wife in these later works participates in western expansion across the continent, witnesses war and colonization, experiences disastrous weather, disease, the death of children. These works suggest the multiple ways in which women have continued reinventing themselves from the nineteenth into the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, enduring devastation and desolation but becoming astute observers, adventurers, and artists. Permeating all of Solien’s art is his tragic–comic sensibility—a nagging sense of chaos, uncertainty, depression, and loss, generated by fragmentation and disintegrating forms, fused with the possibilities for whimsy and satire, change and transcendence through stunning colors and startling characterizations. Solien’s ethic lies in this tragic–comic sensibility, one comparable to Melville’s own but rare among the countless artists who have illuminated Moby-Dick.

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Notes

            1. The collages, created during 2005 and 2006, were first exhibited at the Luise Ross Gallery in New York City.

            2. This comment and subsequent statements by T. L. Solien regarding the development of the ideas for his paintings in the Fargo exhibition were made during a telephone interview with the author, October 26, 2012.

            3. See my book “Unpainted to the Last”: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

            4. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1988 [1851]), 264. Subsequent references to quotations from Moby-Dick are cited parenthetically in the text.

            5. Moby-Dick was first illustrated in 1896 by A. Burnham Shute.

            6. Eric A. Kimmel, Moby Dick: Chasing the Great White Whale (New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2012).

            7. See Robert K. Wallace, Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Stella created more than one artwork for several of the novel’s chapters.

            8. Matt Kish, Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page (Portland, Ore., and New York: Tin House Books, 2011).

            9.  The exception among the works discussed here is Carpetbag, which was created in 2008.

            10. In 2011, Tristin Lowe created Mocha Dick, a fifty-two foot white whale with a vinyl inflatable understructure sheathed in white industrial felt. The sculpture, made in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, has been displayed in several galleries. Regarding his creation, the artist said, “It is not about Ahab’s quest for revenge, and not even about the whale itself, but more about Ishmael’s search for the unattainable.”

            11. In a later and much larger painting, Carpet Bag (2010, 60 x 72 inches), Solien focuses solely on a suitcase similar to Ishmael’s, associating it with a bag in the Wisconsin Historical Museum as well as one his own immigrant family might have used in traveling westward across the United States. The carpetbag in this painting is closed and does not reveal its contents.

            12. Solien adds that he is interested “especially in images of piles of similar objects like suitcases in the Holocaust Museum, Guston’s piles of legs and shoes, and images of the living spaces of those who are afflicted with a pathological hoarding impulse” (S 16). Through Colleen Sheehy, curator of Toward the Setting Sun, I was provided with notes written by Solien in 2007–8 on his early paintings. These will be quoted extensively and indicated parenthetically with S.

            13. Two artists who have re-created the Spouter Inn’s painting are Robert Del Tredici and Mary Klayder. Both of these works are in the Elizabeth Schultz Melville Collection at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

            14. Solien expresses his conviction that Melville embodies the qualities of  “a typical Turner . . . in the mysterious Spouter painting” (S 4), revealing his familiarity with Robert K. Wallace’s magisterial study of Melville’s knowledge of Turner, Melville & Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992).

            15. In Chapter 55, Melville describes an 1836 representation of a sperm whale by scientist Frederick Cuvier as resembling a squash (MD 262).

            16. Solien writes that Jean Dubuffet’s paintings and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian influenced his creation of the “all over tattooed” (S 5) bedposts and heads.

            17. Orson Welles (in John Huston’s 1956 version of Moby-Dick) and Gregory Peck (in the 1997 Moby-Dick television miniseries) have delivered notable performances of Father Mapple.

            18. The larger head in this image appears in another collage from this series, Andirons, and is identified by Solien as Queequeg. Melville describes Queequeg as “George Washington cannibalistically developed” (MD 50).

            19. Other characters in the novel are frequently depicted, but perhaps because Melville’s description of Ahab is so detailed he appears prominently in all illustrated editions. Such Moby-Dick artists as Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson, and Gilbert Brown Wilson repeatedly illustrated the Pequod’s captain—as if through repetition they might understand him. It is notable that Barry Moser was prohibited by the publisher of Arion Press, Andrew Hoyem, from representing any of the novel’s characters. That contemporary artists have increasingly depicted both Queequeg and Pip suggests a growing interest in these non–European American characters.

            20. Solien cites his debt to both Picasso and René Magritte for his image of the pipe in He (S 11).

            21. Klauba’s Pip sequence consists of The Castaway (2003) and Pip’s Dream Trilogy: Immersion (2008), Surrender (2008), and Rebirth (2008). Piercefield’s sequence is Pip Alone (2009), Surrender (2009), and Transcendence (2009).

            22. Solien also compares Pip’s experience to Adam and Eve’s “banishment from the Garden . . . and continues as a metaphor for the outcome of non-conformity or existing outside the societal/cultural structure” (S 18). Solien adds that “Pip’s experience and resultant transformation is a testimony to the power gained by risking isolation or existing untethered to institutions, as many artists do, as well as a warning of what one might expect if one chooses this path” (S 18).

            23. Notably, two artists have illuminated the underwater scene of the Pequod’s sinking: Mark Milloff in his immense pastels Queequeg’s Last Long Dive and Fata Morgana, both 2002–5 and reproduced as glicée prints, and Alan Drummond in the concluding pages of his children’s version of Moby Dick (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

            24. In this chapter, Ishmael meditates on the sea through a transcendental lens. He speculates on the possibilities of falling from the masthead to a very real death in the inscrutable sea.

            25. This is true of Night Nurse, Reading with Laundry, Composition in Black and White, Long Branch, Croquette, The Greenhouse, Deck Shoes, Skirt, and The Jockey.

            26. Solien also made 30 x 36 inch collages inspired by themes related to Ahab’s Wife in later years: Bleachers (2009), Her Easel Pelican Lake (2009), Black Horse (2009), Honeymoon (2009/2010), and Gone (2011). Sap, an oil on canvas, was created in 2006–7 and is larger than the collages (60 x 72 inches). A second, larger version of The Jockey (78 x 96 inches) was created with oil and acrylic on canvas in 2010, and Less, his largest work in the series (84 x 96 inches), was created in acrylic on canvas in 2011.

            27. “Call Me Una,” H Books, The New York Times on the Web, October 3, 1999.

            28. Quoted by Jamie Allen, “A Twentieth-Century Response to a Nineteenth-Century Novel: Author Says ‘Ahab’s Wife’ Is an ‘Epic Story of an American Woman,’” CNN, November 8, 1999.

            29. Whistler’s full title for his portrait of Carlyle is Arrangement in Black and White, No. 2: Thomas Carlyle; his full title for his portrait of his mother is Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.

            30. Solien’s suggestion perhaps indicates his awareness of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), a short story in which a young housewife is confined to a room with yellow wallpaper where she becomes increasingly mad.

            31. In Chapter 44, “The Chart,” Melville describes Ahab as being so obsessed and so tormented by anger and hatred he is unable to sleep.

            32. In 1998, a year before Naslund’s publication of Ahab’s Wife, Ellen Driscoll, sculptor and multimedia artist, presented an exhibition and performance in which the character of Ahab’s wife was enacted wearing a ballooning, hooped skirt with a map of the world painted on it. 

            33. The images of slaughter here have been recycled from the slabs set out for Queequeg in Spouter Breakfast.

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Elizabeth Schultz is professor emerita of English at the University of Kansas, where she taught for thirty-four years. She is a founding member of the Melville Society and a renowned scholar of Herman Melville and Moby-Dick. She is the author of “Unpainted to the Last”: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art, which accompanied an art exhibition she curated of American art inspired by Moby-Dick.

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Captions

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Rockwell Kent, [Moby Dick Rises], in Moby-Dick (New York: Random House, 1930), 265. Rockwell Kent Legacies.

Frank Stella, The Whiteness of the Whale (IRS-1, 2X), 1987. Mixed media on etched magnesium and aluminum, 149 x 121 ¾ inches. Cat. no. 82. Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Matt Kish, Ahab is for ever Ahab, man., in Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page (Portland, Ore., and New York: Tin House Books, 2011), 539.  

Jackson Pollock, (Blue (Moby Dick)), c. 1943. Gouache and ink on composition board, 18 ¼ x 23 7/8 inches. Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan. c. 1994 Pollock–Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Paul Jenkins, Hommage à Melville, 1953. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas, 46 7/8 x 24 3/8 inches. Collection of Paul and Suzanne Jenkins.

Richard Ellis, sketch for Moby Dick Mural, 1984. Acrylic on illustration board, 6 x 24 inches. The Elizabeth Schultz Collection, New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Robert Del Tredici, And if you be a philosopher . . . , 1965–66. Photo-offset of pen and ink drawing on paper, 8 ½ x 11 inches. The Elizabeth Schultz Collection, New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Rockwell Kent, [Ishmael and Queequeg], in Moby-Dick (New York: Random House, 1930), 36. Rockwell Kent Legacies.

Jean Dubuffet, Seaside of the Virtual, 1963. Oil on canvas, 220 x 190 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Kathleen Piercefield, Queequeg in His Own Person, 2008. Collage, monotype, polyester plate lithography, etching, hand-coloring on paper, mounted and stretched on canvas (eight panels), 92 x 40 inches.

T. L. Solien, No Suicides, 2005–6. Mixed-media collage on paper, 30 x 36 inches.

T. L. Solien, Our Things, 2005–6. Mixed-media collage on paper, 30 x 36 inches. Collection of James Dyke.

Pablo Picasso, Minotaur Moving House, 1936. Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

Rockwell Kent, [Ahab], in Moby-Dick (New York: Random House, 1930), 307. Rockwell Kent Legacies.

Gilbert Brown Wilson, Insanity Series #3: I Am Madness Maddened, c. 1950. Gouache with colored pencil on paper, 21 x 29 inches. Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana. Gift of the artist.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black and White, No. 2: Thomas Carlyle, 1872–73. Oil on canvas, 1711 x 1435 mm. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland.

T. L. Solien, The Leaking Room, 2006. Mixed-media collage on paper, 30 x 36 inches. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Schwarz.

T. L. Solien, Pip, 2006. Mixed-media collage on paper, 30 x 36 inches. Collection of Merritt Dyke.

Mark Milloff, Fata Morgana, 2002–5. Giclée print, 21 ½ x 32 inches. The Elizabeth Schultz Collection of Melville-Inspired Art, New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Winslow Homer, Long Branch, New Jersey, 1869. Oil on canvas, 16 x 21 ¾ inches. Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

T. L. Solien, Croquette, 2006. Mixed-media collage on paper, 30 x 36 inches. Collection

of Mr. and Mrs. Alan Stevens.

Winslow Homer, Croquet Players, 1865. Oil on canvas, 16 x 26 inches. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.

T. L. Solien, Honeymoon, 2009–10. Mixed-media collage on paper, 30 x 36 inches.

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