http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/arts/ ... s-003.htmlIn a recent essay in The New York Review of Books about R. Crumb’s illustrated “Book of Genesis,” the literary critic Harold Bloom seems bemused by Mr. Crumb’s graphic style, which reminds him unpleasantly of Mad magazine. He thinks Mr. Crumb’s muscular, full-bodied women are ugly. But he does rightly admire Mr. Crumb’s total lack of piety.
Indeed. Loaded as they are with sex, violence, hallucinatory visions and miracles, the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Lot and his daughters, David and Goliath (not to mention Bathsheba) and many others seem custom-made for Mr. Crumb’s bawdy sensibility and earthy draftsmanship.
Mr. Crumb may be irreverent, but in his attention to every detail of word and image he is as devout as any medieval manuscript illuminator. Scanning the 207 drawings on gallery walls is not the best way to take in the epical narrative, but it is good to see them in the original, undiminished by the inferior reproductive quality of the $24.95 book published by W. W. Norton. The inks are blacker, the pages whiter and the artist’s touch visibly subtler.
The real thrill, however, is in how Mr. Crumb’s richly hatched, firmly delineated drawings bring to unruly, comical life people and events that often seem puzzlingly abstract in the Bible, from the seven days of Creation to the happy death of Joseph at 110 in Egypt. If you wanted to interest a youngster in the Good Book, you could do no better than “accidentally” leave a copy of this terrifically entertaining, R-rated masterpiece lying around the house.
