“Boggy, Soggy, Squitchy Pictures”: Adaptations of Moby-Dick in the Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Throughout the twentieth century, Moby-Dick has inspired countless visual artists. Painters, sculptors, illustrators, all tried their hand at reimagining Melville’s great whaling epic through their works. From Karl Knaths to Jackson Pollock, from Frank Stella to Matt Kish, a diverse plethora of creators engaged with Melville’s magnus opus, tackling its everlasting legacy by means of idiosyncratic and experimental art responses. Building upon the theoretical framework of adaptation studies (Elliott, Hutcheon, Rippl), this article investigates Jean-Michel Basquiat’s visual adaptations of Moby-Dick in Untitled (1986) and Melville (1987). Basquiat’s approach, I argue, transcends conventional adaptive techniques by producing works of art that challenge the (im)possibility of representing the real and respond to Melville’s epistemological and ontological concerns in original ways. This article seeks to explore how visual and verbal representation in Basquiat’s paintings can exist as part of an adaptive process that inevitably involves a dialogic reinterpretation of Moby-Dick. My contention is that Basquiat’s aesthetic endeavor mirrors Ishmael’s intellectual quest, and his fascination with Melville’s text may stem from the writer’s manipulation of narrative conventions and structures. As Ishmael’s narration, Basquiat encompasses Ahab’s, Queequeg’s, and Fleece’s character traits, all the while probing the boundary between reality and visual depictions in an existential manner, superseding the limits between diegesis and mimesis. Simultaneously, Basquiat attempts to deconstruct language, echoing Melville’s “careful disorderliness”.