Robert Crumb - Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris.

Crumb in paris -

While I was in Paris I saw in a metro station that Robert Crumb the american illustrator famous for his prolific work in the underground comics from the sixties till the 80's or 90's .Now Crumb prefers to work on illustrations in collaborative printed projects such as 'Kafka' a book on the life of the writer and more recently his take on 'Genesis' from the bible not the band.

I have recently read 'Kafka' in spanish which like 'Genesis' is a graphic novel and I probably understood forty percent of it (being generous to myself) but the drawings were great and that kept me interested.I like Crumbs work but I am not an avid fan, I think I would be more interested in his life than his drawings.

The film documentry ' Crumb' directed by Terry Ziwgoff is a great insight into Robert Crumb and also into the american culture of the fifties pulp fiction and detective comic writers. I think it would be fair to say that Crumbs experience as a kid would have been if not ideal quite typical of the cold war America of the fifties.After seeing this documentry I found I had more time for Crumbs deranged sexual attitudes.

The show at the Musee d'art Moderne is an enormous retrospective of Crumbs work to date consisting of well over two thousand drawings. There were seven hundred drawings from the four year project of 'Genesis' alone.

Crumb is a crazy character really straight out of his own comic strips and then put back in. It was impossible to take in all this work in which ran in a chronological order from his beginings in Clevand through his numerous involvement with different underground comics like 'Zap' , 'Zoid ' and 'Weird ' and through his compulsive meanderings of creativity fantastic really. The most enjoyable for me was the designed covers of the rare blues records he has emassed over time.He lives now in France and also plays in a ramshakle banjo band called the ' cheap suit serenaders' and I have heard them and they are actually really good if you like that sort of stuff which ... which I do.It was a great show I wish I had more time to come back another day.