Robert Crumb

Armies of reporters have recently been visiting the supposedly reclusive Crumb in his house in the South of France, as a prelude to the forthcoming exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, and the publication of a new biography/anthology, The R. Crumb Handbook. Simon Hattenstone visited, as a prelude to a week of Guardian Crumbiana, the BBC's Culture Show sent a team down, and now the Times' Stephen Dalton turns up chez Crumb.

While he's entirely deserving of all this attention, there's always a certain unease about the mainstreaming of such a cult figure. One of the problems here, apart from the generally humourlessness of it all, is that, as they can't focus on the more explicit offensive stuff, they end up emphasising what is most congenial to them: the satirist-of-the-American-way-of-life angle. As a result Crumb is portrayed, and is happy to be portrayed, as above all a critic of the US, another exhibit in the anti-American worldview. From today's interview in the Times:

Crumb feels at home in this libertarian enclave of France, which he proudly notes has been a haven for “outlaws and bohemians” since the Cathars of the 12th century. He decamped here with his second wife, Aline, 15 years ago, disgusted with small-town California’s rising tide of right-wing Christians and suburbanised mall culture.

“It isn’t true that I became disgusted,” says the creator of Fritz the Cat, Mr Natural and countless ample-thighed dominatrix fantasies. “I was always disgusted and alienated with the US since adolescence.”

Crumb and Aline, who is five years younger, regularly return to the States. But they increasingly feel like aliens there. Crumb considers most Americans “debased” compared with Europeans. Aline likens the Bush-voting masses to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “Karl Rove is like Goebbels with a Santa Claus face,” she says. “And Rumsfeld is like Himmler,” Crumb adds with a grimace. “It’s the worst it’s been in my lifetime, that country. The Bush people are seriously, scarily fascist.”

And this must have gone down a treat with the Guardianistas:

It's getting worse and worse over there in the US. Every time I go back it seems worse. More corporate logos everywhere, people are more afraid, more rules and regulations, everything is more expensive. Most of my adult life I had this towering contempt for America. I guess it was based on familiarity. But George W Bush is playing a dangerous game, nurturing the Christian fundamentalists - this beast, this monster, could rise up like nazism and wreck everything. Apocalypse.

Well, good luck to Crumb if he's happy now, but all this fascist-Bush boilerplate is surely just giving the people what they want so they'll leave him alone. It's what he's expected to come out with.

The Guardian piece ends with this, which puts a different light on things:

I have never addressed politics directly in my work. I'd be unsure of my ground if I did. I used to work a lot for a leftwing newspaper, and found it so difficult. They had very specific ideas about what they wanted, and just wanted you to draw their particular political angle, and if you didn't they were not happy with it. They were never happy with the stuff I did for them. There were these giant, scary-looking farm machines to farm these vast tracts of land, huge ploughing machines, and I had a hippie guy with a beard standing in front of one with a sword, and a thing coming out of this giant farm machine, and I did this for one of the issues for the cover and the people that ran the paper said, "No, this is not good because it will alienate the farmers." There was always something, you could never win with them.

You'd have to ask Aline why we moved to France. It was her decision. I'm passive, and just went along with the whole thing. I'm in two minds about it. For one thing, I miss all those large-butted American women. French women are just too small and skinny. I know they are feminine and people think they are sexy but they don't do anything for me. Too elegant. In England, you just look at the women, and wow! England and Scotland, great-looking women. They stride down the street unself-consciously. You'd never catch a French woman doing that.

So...he's not political; he just wants a quiet life, to be left in peace to ogle; his wife is more the one with the agenda.

As with a great deal of anti-Americanism, Crumb's target is surely not so much America, as people in general. America, being the richest and biggest and brassiest, is where you see humanity most clearly in all its glory and all its squalor. Well okay, yes, it is all about America, because he's American, and anyway what would Robert Crumb be without America? But just as, say, Hogarth is inseparable from London but really is satirising humanity in general, so Crumb's America is just humanity writ large.

Robert Hughes provides an appreciation of Crumb, and wonders why he alone of the Sixties underground generation continues to flourish and develop. I'm not so sure that's true though. It's more a case of his best early work gradually coming out into the open. Much is made of his recent collaborations with wife Aline, but if you've seen these it's clear that it's pretty poor stuff. Juxtaposition with the master sadly only serves to emphasise that Aline really isn't very good, and the storylines are plodding.

Times cartoonist Peter Brookes gives the best appreciation:

Ironic, isn’t it? This paper of record wouldn’t in a million years print what Robert Crumb is really all about: outrageous, sexually explicit and politically incorrect cartoon strips that have pervaded alternative America’s consciousness since the late 1960s and made him into a counter-culture hero.

Yet here we are celebrating his genius in these pages to mark a major Crumb-fest of exhibitions (one even at Bonham’s, for God’s sake). There’s also a new compilation, The R. Crumb Handbook, but all we can show here is Crumb-lite, not Crumb hardcore.

But pornography it isn’t. The cartoonist has always held that there is a difference between what he does and straight porn, which is interested only in titillation. One difference is humour. Crumb is very funny, with a ribald drawing style to match, and the sexually explicit is hardly dangerous when you can laugh at it.

Robert Hughes, Time’s distinguished art critic, has compared him with Breughel. Well, anyone with half an art school education (and most of us got only that in the 1960s) knows this is nonsense.

No, he’s much, much better than that.

Comments

[Solomon]

Anyone who holds Crumb's political utterings out with approval is playing a rather dangerous game. Recalling the film about his life, "Crumb," "R." is the most sane member of his family - and to say that that's not saying much would be an understatement.

[Erg]

Ahh, but if anybody who hates the US is demonstrably irrational (and that's not rare), why then doesn't that just prove how awful the US really is, that it drove him batty?