Art reviews: R. Crumb @ UCLA Hammer, 'India's Comics' @ LACMA
Cartoons have been art's most common language going on 50 years, ever since Roy Lichtenstein painted Mickey Mouse and Edward Ruscha conjured Little Orphan Annie.
Make that 140 years if you believe (as I do) that the brushy, broken, unfinished-surface look of Impressionist paintings derived from the oil sketches that artists of the French Academy used to map out the slick, highly finished surfaces of their often grandiose canvases. They called those preparatory sketches cartoons, and the Impressionists latched onto their raw energy.
Two small museum shows put current cartoons in our sights. In different ways, both use the form as a method to consider ancient texts.
The more bracing of the two is “The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis” at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Robert Crumb spent nearly five years thinking about and drawing 206 sheets to illuminate the first book of the Old Testament — chapter by chapter, scene by scene — inside rectilinear panels (as many as six per sheet) whose wavy contours frame events with nervous visual energy. At the Hammer, the sheets are lined up edge to edge around one gallery, as well as around a circular wall built in the center of the room.
As a general rule manuscript illumination has long-since gone the way of lighthearted children's books. Crumb, however, takes on the daunting task with a fierce intelligence and the graphic skill one expects from a founding father of the radical underground comics movement. (His first issue of the counterculture masterwork, Zap Comix, was published in San Francisco in 1968.) Crumb's familiar drawing style — black ink, a tremulous line, dense cross-hatching that darkens the field and electrifies the light through contrast — gives Genesis the punch of a heavy graphic novel.
