Two years ago Robert Crumb's 1993 parody of US race relations When the Niggers Take Over America appeared at the Venice Biennale inside the Danish Pavilion that focused at the time on thought-provoking creative forms of resistance.
This year Crumb is back in Venice with The Book of Genesis, a graphic novel that could be considered genuinely "encyclopedic", like the theme of the 55th International Art Biennale.
Published in 2009 by W. W. Norton & Company in book format with the title The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb, thsi is actually considered as his most ambitious work.
Crumb, whose mother was a devout Catholic and who was brought up a Catholic but gave up on his faith when he was 16, mainly used as reference Robert Alter's translation of The Book of Genesis from 1996 and the King James Version of the Bible.
When it was announced that Crumb was working on this text, many fans thought it was going to be a satirical version of the book or that his wilder LSD induced visions may have become part of the grahic novel. But Crumb opted instead for a literal representation of the story, going as far as incorporating all the fifty chapters of The Book of Genesis and each word of the Biblical text in his graphic novel.
This is the main reason why it took the cartoonist and comic book artist almost five years to complete this work. Though it was still considered controversial since it featured illustrations of scenes of sexual intercourse (described anyway in the text itself), The Genesis is definitely not as explicit or controversial as in the rest of his work and won Crumb the Best Artist prize at the 2010 Harvey Awards.
The 207 black and white pages that form the entire ouvre are showcased in one of the Arsenale halls.
The framed drawings cover not just the walls of one of the halls, but also the walls of circular structure that hosts other works of art. The pages were already exhibited in other institutions all over the world, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
One of the most interesting points behind this work is the way Crumb approached The Genesis: as he recounted in an interview in 2009, he had to decide line by line what could be illustrated and how to draw it and to portray ancient costumes, cities and weapons he often watched old Hollywood Bible movies. It would actually be quite interesting to study his work from a cinematic point of view and try to spot which films he used as references, especially costume-wise.
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