ROBERT CRUMB

ROBERT CRUMB

 

Mr. Natural's Creator Visits the World of Art

By RANDY KENNEDY

 

"The R. Crumb Handbook," by R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski (MQ Publications, Ltd.)

Still truckin': "The R. Crumb Handbook," a memoir, was published this month.

 

Joe Tabacca for The New York Times

R. Crumb, whose memoir was written with Peter Poplaski, listening to a question at the New York Public Library.

 

The cartoonist R. Crumb has never been sure what to make of praise for his work from the noncomics art world. He once drew a pitiful buck-toothed portrait of himself wearing a beret and a bewildered look, exclaiming in a half-literate word bubble: "Broigul I ain't ... Let's face it." And his view of most fine art is equally dismissive: he calls it a land of "cake eaters," rolling his eyes behind his trademark Coke-bottle glasses.

 

But in a rare public appearance on Thursday night at the New York Public Library, Mr. Crumb took the stage with one of the more famous cake eaters in the art world, the critic Robert Hughes, who has compared Mr. Crumb not only to Bruegel but also to Goya, one of Mr. Hughes's favorite artists and the subject of his latest book. In 1994 Mr. Hughes appeared as a talking head, a kind of lone voice from the establishment art world, in Terry Zwigoff's hit documentary "Crumb," but until Thursday night, the two men had never met. Introduced as "two very naughty boys" before a sold-out crowd, they made an odd couple.

 

Mr. Hughes, 66, barrel-chested and blustery, commanded the stage and in a mostly dogged manner tried to plumb the depths of the funny, disturbing cartoons that have honestly and bleakly chronicled Mr. Crumb's own life. Mr. Crumb, 61, still as thin and gangly as his cartoons portray him, often slumped in his chair, politely made fun of himself, Mr. Hughes and the whole pretense of an art discussion, and occasionally fumbled with his tie, making his clip microphone emit a loud thump that caused him to jump comically.

 

But as different as the men were, they discovered that they had a lot of common ground in their disdain for much of contemporary art. In fact, despite his subversive, counterculture reputation, Mr. Crumb came off as even more conservative in his opinions about art than Mr. Hughes, who generally likes his art "cake" well aged.

 

"I thought that nobody hated Warhol and what he stood for more than me," Mr. Hughes said at one point, "but my, oh my, you do."

 

The discussion was Mr. Crumb's only public speaking appearance in the United States to promote his new book, "The R. Crumb Handbook," a memoir in collaboration with his friend, Peter Poplaski, published this month. While Mr. Crumb, who now lives in southern France, has often shunned popular culture (he famously turned down offers to be the host of "Saturday Night Live" and to design an album cover for the Rolling Stones, saying he hated that band), he has ventured much further into public in recent years, partly because of the urging of his wife, the cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

 

Mr. Crumb, who has said he loathes the fashion world, recently helped the designer Stella McCartney make a limited-edition T-shirt with his comics on the front that sells for more than $150. He has appeared at lavish parties for the T-shirt in London and New York. He now has a Web site, www.crumbproducts.com, where fans can buy a Mr. Natural table lamp for $825. And to promote the new book, its publisher, MQ Publications of London, is conducting an R. Crumb look-alike contest in the United States. (The winner gets a "date" with Ms. Kominsky-Crumb.)

 

During the discussion with Mr. Hughes - which did not stint on classic Crumb references to fellatio, beheaded nuns, near-severed penises and throwing up while on LSD - Mr. Crumb often seemed to be of two minds about his fame and increasing acceptance in the gallery-art world, which ignored him for so long. He said that as a disaffected young man, if he had not had the outlet of drawing, he probably would have ended up sketching his lurid, big-bottomed female characters "on some prison wall or in a lunatic asylum someplace, or I'd be dead."

 

"Now I'm better," he said, adding that "getting famous helped." But then he immediately countered that it could be "hell on earth," and in one exchange with the audience - which included his fellow cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith - he mocked his contradictory needs.

 

"I want everyone to love me," he said, half-mockingly, after explaining that he was once shocked to learn that the racial stereotypes and violence toward women he portrayed in his work were hurtful to many people. "Please love me," Mr. Crumb added.

 

A woman in the audience then shouted, "We love you!," and Mr. Crumb held up his hands, cringing, to stop the applause.

 

"O.K., you love me," he responded, laughing. "You're killing me, you love me so much. You're choking me. Now back off."

 

After the discussion, Mr. Crumb quickly ducked out of the library, avoiding a throng of fans, and later joined Mr. Hughes for dinner, where they took a while to warm up to each other, but by the end were in a spirited discussion about Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, whom Mr. Hughes interviewed in the late 1970's.

 

Mr. Hughes told about an exchange in which Speer said that architecture was certainly one way to unite a people, but that if the Nazis had had television, there would have been no stopping them.

 

Mr. Crumb, finishing his plate of baked chicken, beamed. "Oh, that's great," he said. "It's true."

 

Art in Review

 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: December 17, 1993

 

R. Crumb Alexander Gallery 980 Madison Avenue (near 76th Street) Through Jan. 15 (closed Dec. 24 to Jan. 4)

 

This exhibition confirms the influential, obsessive, self-flagellating and highly productive talent of R. Crumb, one of the grandfathers of underground cartooning. It is not definitive, but with nearly 200 works -- ranging from the early 1960's, when Mr. Crumb was a talented teen-age malcontent in Cleveland, to the present -- it will give most people interested in his work more than enough to look at.

 

The show includes finished and published strips, erotica, and pages and pages from Mr. Crumb's many notebooks and sketch pads. It also has less familiar items, like some unsuccessful attempts at what he considered fine art (for his first exhibition, at an art center in Peoria, Ill.) and examples of his work for American Greeting Cards in Cleveland, his first job.

 

Especially noteworthy are several examples of the handmade comic book Arcade, the letters in the form of comics that Mr. Crumb sent to his best friend and mentor, Marty Pahls, after Mr. Pahls went away to college. They are interesting because they show Mr. Crumb using color, which is rare, and using it well, and because they indicate he was something of a prodigy.

 

The show's one incontestable masterpiece is "The Big Yum-Yum Book," the small bound book, each page meticulously drawn and colored, that Mr. Crumb gave to his first wife. ROBERTA SMITH

 

Art Review | R. Crumb

Mr. Natural Goes to the Museum

 

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By KEN JOHNSON

Published: September 4, 2008

 

PHILADELPHIA — What a long, strange trip it’s been. Over the course of his five-decade career the comic artist R. Crumb has gone from hero of the hippie underground to toast of the international art world. Founder of the deliriously psychedelic and ribald Zap Comix during the Haight-Ashbury wonder years, he has more recently contributed comic strips made in collaboration with his wife, Aline Kominsky Crumb, to The New Yorker. In 2004 he was included in the Carnegie International and had a career retrospective at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany.

 

Courtesy of Denis Kitchen Art Agency

 

R. Crumb’s Underground One of the more than 100 works in this exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

 

Now the Institute of Contemporary Art here offers “R. Crumb’s Underground,” an excellent opportunity to ponder Mr. Crumb’s incredible journey. This enthralling selection of more than 100 works from all phases of his career was organized by Todd Hignite, the publisher and editor of Comic Art magazine, for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where it was on view in 2007.

 

Mr. Crumb is not the only artist to cross over from the comic-book ghetto to the fine-art museum. Gary Panter, Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes are just three of the better-known contemporary cartoonists who have helped to make the comic book a form to be taken seriously by sophisticated adults. But Mr. Crumb — a draftsman of transcendent skill, inventiveness and versatility, a fearlessly irreverent, excruciatingly funny satirist of all things modern and progressively high-minded, and an intrepid explorer of his own twisted psyche — remains the genre’s gold standard.

 

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Mr. Crumb (first name, Robert) never went to art school. He learned to draw under the tutelage of his older brother, Charles, also an aspiring comic artist. In the early 1960s he designed greeting cards for the American Greetings Corporation in Cleveland. In 1967 he moved to San Francisco, where he would create some of the most memorable characters in cartoon history, including the irascible guru Mr. Natural and his hapless foil Flakey Foont; the suave, shamelessly randy Fritz the Cat; the angry amazon Devil Girl; and R. Crumb himself, a figure comparable to the autobiographical alter egos of Woody Allen and Philip Roth. Since the early 1990s Mr. Crumb and his wife have lived in the South of France.

 

The exhibition is full of wild sex. Mr. Crumb makes no bones about his lust for big, muscular women, and his uncensored erotic fantasy life is not only entertaining but also liberating. See “How to Have Fun With a Strong Girl” (2002), a suite of 12 drawings in which the scrawny Mr. Crumb climbs like a monkey all over a powerfully built young woman. We should all be so open to, and forgiving of, our libidinous fantasies.

 

But sex is not Mr. Crumb’s only preoccupation. He is also a great lover of early-20th-century popular music and a fanatical collector of old 78-r.p.m. records. A section of the exhibition devoted to his musical interests includes extended narratives about the sadly foreshortened lives of the blues musicians Charlie Patton and Tommy Grady. There is a humane, deeply moving tenderness to these works.

 

The influence of LSD, which Mr. Crumb has called his “road to Damascus,” is evident in works of funky surrealism from the ’60s and ’70s. The classic “Meatball” (1967), in which ordinary people from all walks of life are hit from out of the blue by consciousness-altering meatballs, is mysteriously trippy.

 

But what is also appealing in Mr. Crumb’s work is how often it is grounded in mundane reality. “Lap o’ Luxury” (1977), at 10 pages one of his longer productions, tells in detail all the events in one afternoon in the life of a little boy at home with his mom and his pesky younger brother. At one point he becomes sexually aroused by the cowboy boots on a woman who comes for a brief visit, but otherwise it is all good, clean fun.

 

Viewers should set aside two or three hours to take in this show. It requires a lot of reading, which brings up another of Mr. Crumb’s virtues: he is a gifted writer with a great ear for vernacular speech. An argument can be made that Mr. Crumb’s work is best consumed in book form. But there really is no substitute for seeing the original drawings, most of which are made with a fine black Rapidograph pen. The liveliness of his curiously old-fashioned draftsmanship comes across in print, but no reproduction can capture his subtlety of touch and alertness to the act of drawing.

 

Whatever the aesthetic and formal attractions of his work, Mr. Crumb’s penchant for barging past the limits of good taste and political correctness into psychologically juicy and dangerously complicated territory is still the main draw. His most amazingly provocative creation is Angelfood McSpade, a young, inky black, big-breasted African woman in a palm leaf skirt who was inspired by racist caricatures of the ’20s and ’30s. Sweet-tempered and dimwitted, the long-suffering Angelfood is subjected to all kinds of sexual abuse in various episodes Mr. Crumb has drawn. In one hilarious strip in the exhibition she is abducted and molested by aliens in a U.F.O.

 

Mr. Crumb’s outrageous play with the Angelfood character hinges on a theory that all people are at least unconsciously racist and that bringing racist fantasies fully to light is the best way to expose how stupid and cruel yet insidiously compelling they can be, especially when mixed with sexual fantasies. Kara Walker and Robert Colescott have toyed with racist stereotypes to similar ends.

 

But Angelfood represents something else for Mr. Crumb too. At the end of a zanily eventful four-page narrative from 1968 we see her dancing in the forest. “She spends her time bopping around in the jungle,” reads the caption, “just a simple, primitive creature! But if you dig her, go get her! If you dare!” In the final panel a man in a suit and tie hurries along a path in the opposite direction from a sign pointing to “Schmarvard Law School.” The words on his suitcase say, “Darkest Africa or Bust!”

 

Angelfood, in other words, is a symbol of modern man’s yearning for reconnection to his own misplaced instinctual life. In a sense that has been Mr. Crumb’s own lifelong mission: to stay imaginatively alive to his own deepest and most urgent desires, however embarrassing, distasteful or offensive they may appear to polite society. Angelfood is R. Crumb’s soul.

 

“R. Crumb’s Underground” continues through Dec. 7 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia; (215) 898-7108, icaphila.org.

 

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