An Unlikely Illumination: R. Crumb does the Book of Genesis

Every morning on my way to my current freelance gig, I pass the UCLA Hammer art museum. Recently, I've been intrigued by the displays featuring illustrations of the Book of Genesis by underground comics icon R. Crumb. I have yet to get myself to the gallery, but this morning I checked out the Hammer's website and watched this great video about the exhibit:

I think I'll make plans to go on Jan 24th for the lecture/walkthrough which I noticed advertised on the site.

I've had a vague awareness of R. Crumb from a young age, having grown up with two older brothers and a couple of cousins who were all way into underground comics. My vision of him was solidified by the 2003 movie American Splendor, in which Paul Giamatti brilliantly plays the comic book author Harvey Pekar. Crumb is portrayed in that movie as a sort of guru and collaborator to the main character. Still, I have pretty limited knowledge of this incredible artist, and I can't wait to know his art a little better through this ambitious project of his.

In an interesting way, it seems to me to represent how the relationship between art and the Bible have come full circle, with the supposedly recent form of the graphic novel actually playing a central roll throughout the past several thousand years. The graphic novel, which straddles the two worlds of art and literature, has struggled for full recognition in both. Which is odd, because its roots are intertwined with the legitimized academic histories of art and of literature. I remember several days in darkened art history classrooms learning about "illuminated manuscripts," which seems to me to be simply an art-historian term for the graphic novels of the Middle Ages. Virtually all the slides we were presented in class were of biblical themes. In more recent years, graphic novels have tended to be anything but biblical. Which makes the subject of this exhibit initially surprising, but with any further thought, it makes perfect sense. Not only does the incredible literary drama of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, naturally lend itself to graphic representation, but there is such a rich history in the marriage of pictures and the words of that particular text.

Well, thanks for indulging me if you've read this far – I suppose being taken back to art history class in my mind must have triggered a reflexive launch into "essay mode!" ;-)