Extra Credit - Hammer Museum

I went down to the Hammer Museum near UCLA to look at some of the exhibits being presented. Since every Thursday, admission is free, I thought it was a good idea to go check it out. The facility was very modern, and huge. I was impressed just by the architecture when I first stepped into the museum. Then I walked around and visited the Adam and Eve exhibition by R. Crumb. The room itself was almost a maze, with every wall in the room filled with his drawings of the Old Testiment: The book of the Genisis. It was like a comic book illustration but each page was framed individually and put up against the wall. R. Crumb's interpretation of the Old Testiment was created as a comic book format and took him over five years to complete. There were over 200 framed illustration throughout the exhibition, each page had about six panels of comic drawings. All the drawings were in black and white and the frames covered all 4 sides of the walls and continued onto a wall-like circular divider in the center of the room. In the center of the room (inside the circular divider), were modern couches, with a coffee table in the center, displaying R. Crumb's comic presented in a book format. This version was fully colored and it was interesting to see the contrast from the ones displayed on the wall to the actually book.

What really caught my eye during this exhibition was the style R. Crumb had on illustrating such characters. Although they were very stereotypical comic-like illustrations, I noticed that his way of drawing females were portrayed as very masculine. The body type was very similar to the male drawings in the story and in a way, distracted my attention of art as a whole. I was really trying to read the story and his intake on the popular Adam and Eve story; however, the way the women were drawn really distracted me from doing this and in a way bothered me. With that said, that was my only criticism of the book. I do admire him for his consistency of the overall look of all the comic panels over the five year period he spent on this project. I give him respect for the patience he had to complete this piece.