A very modern Jewish scholarly translation, an older Jewish translation that was the most widely used, and the King James.
You don’t have to make fun of it, it’s so strange and compelling in its own right. But I couldn’t satirise it that well, so I decided to just do it straight from the original text. First, I was going to do a take-off on Adam and Eve. It’s an idea I played around with for years. Probably starts around $5m.”ĭid The Book of Genesis start out with satirical drawings of Adam and Eve? Everyone’s standing around eating snacks, and there’s this Cy Twombly painting on the wall above the mantel in his living room, and to me it just looks like some two-year-old child’s scrawls, and I asked this guy who worked at Zwirner: “How much is that worth?” And he said: “Oh, I don’t know. They had a show of my “Genesis” work, and after it they had a big fancy dinner party at David Zwirner’s house, a big elaborate house in Manhattan. I’m involved with David Zwirner Gallery, in New York, and they are very good to me, a high-class operation. I can sell a ten-page story for $50,000 if I’m lucky-for cartoonists that’s a lot-but a single oil painting by Cy Twombly goes for millions of dollars. It’s the printed work that’s the final product.ĭo you find it strange that people pay a lot of money for originals of your work? For an illustrator who works for print, the printed work is the art object, not the original. There’s a Grand Canyon between these two worlds. I started showing him stuff, books of 18th- and 19th-century popular caricaturists and illustrators, James Gillray and Thomas Nast. He could tell you what Andy Warhol had for breakfast every day of his life, but he knew nothing about the background of illustration and cartoons. When Alfred Fischer from the Ludwig Museum first came to my house to look at my work in 2003, he was a nice guy, very conscientious and hard-working, and I liked him. I try to explain the popular culture that I come from, and they kind of paste my explanation onto their view of art. When they write about it, they try hard to crowbar it into the fine art context, force it in there, like putting a square peg into a round hole. They don’t understand the cultural context of my work and what it comes out of. With both the Ludwig Museum and this museum in Paris, the directors and curators have no familiarity with the work of cartoons or illustrators and popular arts. I haven’t consciously promoted myself in that world.Īre people in the art world familiar with cartoon work? I’m one of the few cartoonists who mainly work for print who is now finding their way into the fine art world, and it’s the choice of the fine art world it’s not my choice. They started to embrace me and have big fancy gallery shows and museum shows. The contemporary fine art world has never particularly interested me. Having big retrospective shows in museums is not my big thing.ĭoes that relate to the ambivalence you’ve expressed before about fine art? I try to get as little involved as possible. With shows like this, are you involved or hands off? People tell me this Museum of Modern Art in Paris is a really big deal, and that it’s very prestigious to have a show there.
The Art Newspaper: How significant is your Paris retrospective? Crumb: from the Underground to Genesis”, opened last month at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (until 19 August). He has shown with Paul Morris and, recently, David Zwirner in New York, and had his first museum retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2004. Since the early 2000s, Crumb has become increasingly visible in fine art circles. In 1991, he moved to the south of France, where he lives to this day. There, characters such as the mystic Mr Natural were born, and Crumb became a key figure in the counterculture and a fixture in Zap Comix, fashioning racy images that raised the eyebrows of conservatives and feminists alike, but gradually acquired a loyal fanbase across the world. After school in Delaware, he found work in Cleveland, Ohio, illustrating for the American Greetings card company, but his comics flourished after he moved to San Francisco in 1967. By the age of ten, Crumb, born in Philadelphia in 1943, was an avid fan of comic strips, and by 16, he was sketching the adventures of the family cat, Fred, who eventually became Fritz, one of his best known comic-book characters.
0 kommentar(er)
