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Robert Crumb
By E.B. KeehnIllustration By R. Crumb
A pen-and-ink libidinist. An underground newspaper pied piper to a ‘60s counterculture that never really understood the satire of his work. A nostalgist for early 20th-century jazz. A tireless public chronicler of his unsanitary obsessions and personal shortcomings. A promoter of his own peculiar brand of narcissistic ennui. A cringeinducing misogynist. And, in recent years, a highly collectable artist and contributor to The New Yorker. Robert Crumb is all this and more.
The chronicling of one’s inner obsessions is just one of the many possible ways that the public and private, and the commercial and artistic, now intersect. There was a rich history of this in literature in the first half of the 20th century (Henry Miller and William Burroughs come to mind here), but the writers’ obsessions and sexuality remained safely locked away from the general public, entombed in the written word. It was material for students and intellectuals; normal Americans rarely bothered to tread there.
Crumb changed all this in the 1960s, linking together the written word with rough-and-tumble, hand-drawn images that nonetheless showed artistic depth and great technical control. In doing this, he achieved something that Miller and Burroughs were never able to achieve: simplifying, popularizing, commercializing, and promoting his privately imagined acts of self-obsession. Whether it was depraved acts with a headless woman— calling attention to the self-serving dishonesty on the part of so-called hippies—or graphic depictions of male humiliation, Crumb’s work in highly disposable underground publications like Zap Comix, Snatch, Big Ass Comics, and The East Village Other has been there, done that—and with sardonic and surprising wit.
His more recent work is technically more refined than his earlier work. It’s also less about his inner obsessions than it is about the day-to-day life he lives with his partner, Aline Kominsky. After their more than 30 years together, the imagined (or perhaps autobiographical, not that this makes much difference) exchanges he chronicles are often wry and revealing about the quiet and lovingly ordinary insecurities that beset all couples who settle into that deceptive regularity known as the long-term relationship. Yet sometimes they can simply be sweet and mundane. As he told SWINDLE, “I’ve never spent a day in my life without a cat.”
As the years have passed, Crumb began to publish images without text. These can be interesting to look at, but they tend to have the emotional impact of a partially drawn breath – not enough to fully satisfy. This is not to say his drawings don’t stand on their own. They do, often demonstrating a level of complexity that rewards careful study. But while lingering over the intricate cross-hatchings and shadings found in this work, one impulsively longs for some sort of emotional payoff—the sort of payoff that was once delivered by the incisiveness of his text. Without this, his work feels more like artifact than art. The drawings become elegant, emotionally truncated curiosities. It’s as if their creator wanted to imbue them with more, but decided not to.
One wonders if Crumb just feels it would be too much trouble. Once there’s a built-in audience, it’s possible to take the graffiti of one’s mind and market it as serious work. The painter David Hockney began doing this in the 1990s, with his one-sitting portraits of numerous friends and associates, which he churned out in a number of hours and never extended or deepened. Crumb has also done something similar, releasing books of drawings he has made while sitting in restaurants or waiting for trains. They are meticulously rendered snapshots, not emotional statements.
And then there are the films, like the 1972 animated feature based on one of his characters, Fritz the Cat, with a 1974 sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat. In 1987, Crumb released a documentary about himself, The Confessions of Robert Crumb, which did little to build his audience. He was, however, depicted sympathetically in the 2003 hit film, American Splendor. But none of these were as powerful as the 1994 Terry Zwigoff documentary Crumb. The film marked a major turning point in the popular and critical evaluation of Crumb’s work. Six years’ worth of intimate footage was assembled into a rich narrative that provided a psychological context for understanding the sources of Crumb’s creativity.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and art critic Robert Hughes labels Crumb “the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century,” referring to the 16th century Flemish painter who produced stunning depictions of peasant life, and is perhaps best known for his painting of the Tower of Babel. Crumb later lampooned this comparison in a cartoon strip he titled “Broigul I Ain’t . . .”
Brueghel he may not be, but this hasn’t stopped others from elevating his work to fine-art status in recent years. Major museums have mounted Crumb exhibitions, from the Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, to the Whitechapel in London and the Carnegie in Pittsburgh.
And it would be wrong to see Crumb as an unwilling or passive participant in this transformation. He has taken quite deliberate steps toward serious high-culture pretensions himself, as when he illustrated Introducing Kafka, a serious-minded introduction to the life and work of Franz Kafka, written by David Zane Mairowitz and published to critical acclaim in 2000.
All of this success and lavish attention from critics has inevitably led some to wonder if R. Crumb has “sold out.” Can you still be a rebel when the very institutions and mannerisms you find repugnant adopt you as their own? Probably not. But in a world where rebellion is now sold to consumers one T-shirt at a time, it doesn’t seem fair to hold Crumb to a countercultural standard that no longer exists. We can forgive him for despising the pretentiousness and commercialism of the art world while also benefiting from it financially. In the end, his rebellion is no more profound than biting the hand that feeds him. But that’s better than no rebellion at all.
From where we sit today, it’s hard to imagine the impact Robert Crumb had on a young generation of first-time stoners in the 1960s with characters like Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Schuman the Human, and Angelfood McSpade. That generation was raised on a steady diet of mischievous yet carefully neutered cartoon characters like Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. Well, neutered for most of us. For Crumb, it has always been a little different. As he says, “When I was five or six, I was sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny.” The equivalent today? Being attracted to Paris Hilton.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.