Film director John Huston declared him “a brilliant artist and one of America’s foremost painters.”
Pearl S. Buck sponsored an exhibition of his work in New York.
Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about his work in her newspaper column.
Yet, during his lifetime, Gilbert Brown Wilson (1907-1991) never got his due and lived in relative obscurity. Despite a critical splash in the 1930s, he sacrificed financial security for artistic freedom. An acolyte of Diego Rivera and an assistant to Rockwell Kent, Wilson became recognized for his gargantuan murals at Indiana State University and Antioch College, and for the controversy sparked by his “social realist” style.
But Moby-Dick became Wilson’s lifetime obsession, for which he produced more than 200 paintings and drawings, and helped inspire Huston’s 1956 film adaptation starring Gregory Peck and Orson Welles.
Hat & Beard Press is celebrating Herman Melville’s 200th birthday and honoring Wilson’s singular achievement and life with an illustrated edition of Moby-Dick.
This 7½ × 9¼-inch coffee-table book showcases never-before-published artwork, notes and meditations on the novel—drawing from unprecedented access to Wilson’s estate. This book also provides a platform for the international art community to reassess and rediscover this remarkable man and his work.
Moby-Dick: Illustrated by Gilbert Wilson has been published in tandem with Edward K. Spann’s biography of Wilson, Unfinished and Unbroken: The Life of Artist Gilbert Wilson.
Even decades after his first 1947 paintings, Wilson’s take on Moby-Dick is still a decidedly modern one. In Melville’s tale, the whale was hunted for its oil which—before petroleum—lighted the world’s homes, street lamps and lighthouses. Wilson saw Ahab’s pursuit of the unknowable, all-powerful white whale as an allegory and cautionary tale about mankind’s own obsession to harness the atom and nuclear energy.
Wilson wrote that the White Whale symbolizes overwhelming power, “which bears disturbing resemblance in our time to the atomic bomb.”
He continued: “…if we approach the tremendous elemental force in the atom with hostile and destructive intentions as Ahab approached the White Whale, perhaps we too are doomed, just as Ahab and all his microcosmic crew on the Pequod were doomed and destroyed.”
This edition pays homage to Melville’s original text, but breathes new life into the story via Wilson’s vibrant, timeless artwork. Critics have called Moby-Dick “the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer”—and Wilson’s version will be the most ambitious illustrated edition of that book.
MORE ABOUT WILSON and MOBY-DICK
Although Wilson painted murals for public and private spaces, his central obsession became Moby-Dick. It was, in short, his Bible. He originally envisioned a film or an opera to be titled The White Whale, and produced not only paintings, but set designs, scripts, and a libretto.
He found some small success in illustrating Jerry Winter’s 1955 short film, Moby-Dick, narrated by the actor Thomas Mitchell (most famous as Scarlett O’Hara’s father in Gone with the Wind). It won the Silver Reel Award at the Venice Film Festival, though it’s since faded from cinema history.
He joked to friends that his production of The White Whale “is the only child my parents will ever have.” Unfortunately, no one ever produced Wilson’s opera. John Huston was unable to hire him as a production designer for his film and no collection of Wilson’s work was ever published.
He saw Moby-Dick as both a “wicked” and deeply profound book that could bring cultures—and countries—together. He dreamt of a international production with music by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which “might help end the cold war and ultimately unify mankind.”
“I will never cease to see Moby-Dick as a catalyst,” Wilson wrote in his journal in May 1954, “for welding one small link in the world’s oneness.”
Moby-Dick: Illustrated by Gilbert Wilson and Spann’s biography of Wilson can be bought on the Hat & Beard Press website, here.
All images courtesy of the Swope Art Museum.