The Book of Genesis Illustrated By R. Crumb HCPublisher: W.W. Norton
Release Date: October 2009
Price: $24.95
Creators: Jehovah, Robert Crumb
Format: 224 pgs.; B&W; Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Age Rating: Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors
ICv2 Rating: 5 Stars out of 5
In his illustrated adaptation of The Book of Genesis, R. Crumb has created the most powerful set of Biblical illustrations since the work of William Blake. Unlike the mystical fervor of Blake’s fevered designs or the dramatic bombast of Gustave Dore’s mid-19th Century illustrations, Crumb’s drawings reflect the artist’s brutal honesty, reverence for the past, and modern humanistic perspective.
Crumb makes no bones about the fact that he does not believe that the Bible is the work of men not the “word of God” (in his introductory material) and yet, such is his respect for the text that he includes every word of Genesis. His objective was to treat this as “a straight illustration job with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes,” and he has succeeded admirably. This is a painstaking, literal attempt to illustrate this venerable text and to make it understandable for modern readers. Rather than use the poetic (but often opaque to modern readers) King James Version, Crumb opts for Robert Alter’s highly readable recent translation.
Crumb’s heavy-legged figures are earthbound and all-too human in their elemental emotions of fear, anger, jealousy, joy, sorrow and ecstasy that the artist takes great pains to capture. It is in the conveying of the emotions of Genesis’ myriad characters that Crumb manages to make this ancient text accessible to modern readers.
Crumb’s is a humanistic vision that sees these stories as the creations of man in the service of a primitive and patriarchal society. From time to time Crumb attempts to undermine what he considers the text’s patriarchal message by lavishing his artistic attention on the guile of Genesis’ occasional strong female characters such as Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. Crumb also includes numerous panels depicting women performing the kind of food gathering, preparation, and preserving tasks that, along with vital child-rearing chores, allowed the primitive semi-nomadic herding societies whose histories are intertwined in Genesis to survive. But mostly the artist remains fully devoted to illustrating Genesis as precisely as possible.
Crumb doesn’t gloss over the text’s numerous “begettings,” which he illustrates by including several pages of 40 or more highly individualized headshot portraits to illustrate the text’s recounting of the various generations descending from Abraham.
By placing himself in service to the text but remaining true to his intellect and artistic vision Crumb has created a unique and powerful presentation of the Book of Genesis for our times. The cover indicates that “Adult supervision is recommended for minors,” and that makes sense since Genesis is an earthy, elemental tale fairly seething with sex, both licit and illicit, and Crumb neither shies away from nor overplays the text’s many couplings. If Crumb’s Genesis were a movie, it would be rated “R.”
-- Tom Flinn
