The Old Switcheroo: R. Crumb and the Underground Aesthetic
Robert Crumb is the quintessential underground artist. His masterfully rendered comics and sketchbook drawings spanning nearly five decades, markedly lacking in concession or self-censorship, offer a profound cultural critique filtered through demanding psychological self-reflection. Crumb’s art, which pioneered the transformation of comics into an adult literary form, addresses a plethora of personal and political themes within a multidimensional narrative framework. The work starkly depicts sex, violence, and race, among other subjects, offering revelatory insight into the human condition within the snarled jumble of a radically changing America. He combines the keen critical voice of the master satirist with some of the most impressive draftsmanship seen in contemporary art, and his work has proved endlessly insightful, controversial, and provoking.
Although rejection of mainstream culture and high art has been a hallmark of Crumb’s adamantly alternative cultural vision, in the past decade the contemporary art world has embraced his work, which has been exhibited in many of the world’s most prestigious institutions and blue-chip galleries. The irony of an outcast being the center of such attention may signify to some an abdication of Crumb’s original iconoclastic fire. This sentiment misses the truth of the matter, which is that the art world, having moved beyond a pronounced prejudice against the twin embarrassments of narrative and illustration, has now caught up with Crumb and his earthy, hand-rendered passions.
Crumb was born in Philadelphia in 1943 and spent the better part of his youth creating hand-drawn comics with his older brother Charles. After contributing individual and collaborative drawings and stories to various fanzines and newspapers, and later working in the commercial art field, he arrived in San Francisco in 1967. Within this fertile cultural climate, Crumb’s idiosyncratic voice flowered: employing his prodigious drawing talent, he filled sketchbooks with imagery and narratives both increasingly personal and politically engaged. It was during the late 1960s that Crumb’s aesthetic sensibility took shape, giving voice to the zeitgeist by inextricably fusing sex, politics, and autobiography.
Building on the work of past cartoon innovators, Crumb exploded previously understood limitations of the form. Within the hippie milieu, for which he always felt a certain ambivalence, Crumb’s tales of funny animals and misguided souls in search of enlightenment vibrate with libidinal obsessions, mind-expanding (and mind-collapsing) drug use, political idealism, feminist empowerment, racial tension, militant action, counterculture paranoia, utopian delusion, government repression, and big-business commodification. All the lurking hustle and bustle beneath the American dream come bubbling up directly from Crumb’s id to the surface, transmogrified with a razor-honed quill. The thematic orgy is rendered more potent through the codified and symbolic language of comics, harking back to earlier, decidedly old-time modes of cartooning. Such a stylistic approach reflects an embrace of outsider traditions found in popular art forms such as caricature and folk arts and in fine art that specifically references the daily experience of the common man; a hallmark of Crumb’s work has always been a distrust of all “elite” systems of thought and artistic production.
“A whole new thing was emerging in my drawings, a sort of harkening back, a calling up of what G. Legman had called the “horror-squinky” forces lurking in American comics of the 1940s. I had no control over it, the whole time I was in this fuzzy state of mind, the separation, the barrier betwixt the conscious and the subconscious was broken open somehow. A grotesque kaleidoscope, a tawdry carnival of disassociated images kept sputtering to the surface.”
—Robert Crumb 1
Following a prolonged adverse reaction to a hit of notoriously questionable LSD in 1966, Crumb’s sketchbooks exploded with the sweaty American archetypes that he would come to use over and over in the ensuing decades. Repressed floating cartoon symbols are violently re-contextualized into the supposed progress of hip psychedelic culture. Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Angelfood McSpade, and his most enduring character, R. Crumb, all commingle, tripping and trucking from rural utopia toward America’s vast industrial wasteland. Subversively, these mesmerizing images became a huge visual component of the national consciousness, endlessly bootlegged, pirated, and appropriated, while providing source material for Crumb’s great outburst of comic creativity. His vision energized by this roiling cast of characters and a frighteningly perceptive expressway into the heart of the American soul, Crumb made stops in Cleveland and New York before settling in San Francisco.
Working at a breakneck pace, he contributed to underground newspapers on both coasts and within a year completed his first sustained group of published comics (in Yarrowstalks no. 3) and released the seminal Zap Comix no. 1 and no. 0 in 1967. Crumb’s now iconic work from this period shows a wildly energetic and inspired young artist at the top of his form, using all of his storytelling skills to project topical social critiques through the lens of cartoon stereotypes. As his inked hatch expanded into cross-hatch, and his cartooning mastery reached full pitch, the sketchbook drawings flowed into seemingly traditional format comic book narratives. Using the deflation of the American ideal found in Harvey Kurtzman’s 1950s MAD comics as a model, Crumb took the specific history of genres and the drawing and storytelling styles, and engaged the absurdity of American commercial culture.
Crumb’s stories from the first two issues of Zap are as definitive a statement about the zeitgeist as he ever made: a deflation of counter-culture platitudes counterbalanced by a much more frightening view of American patriotism built on barely euphemized power and sex domination fantasies—and through it all a spiritual search for a means to navigate this world. His sharp mastery of a populist, seemingly humorous style serve as a fluid entry way to a disturbing portrait of a contemporary America off the rails.
Comics are a unique language, and they possess characteristics—both formal and with regard to their historical cultural standing—not found elsewhere, and they are capable of an expression not found in other mediums. The symbolic manner of representation that is in large part ingrained in the popular imagination as the language of cute animals and big-footed gagsters was shocking in Crumb’s satirical hands when dealing with decidedly adult content, and he was canny enough to play with such preconceptions. His comics possess an oft-mentioned freedom that has come from “flying beneath the radar,” injecting the medium with an unmistakably potent—often visceral—jolt that again plays on the collective memory of what the form is subconsciously thought to represent. However, as the 1960s came to a close, Crumb’s always double-edged humor was no longer funny, it was venomous.
“What is at the root of the need to draw such pictures as this? Why do I harbor such compulsive anti-social feelings? Sex, death & the class struggle are all mixed up inside o’ me… I can’t help it… Is it good? Is it bad? What’s to be done??”
—Robert Crumb 2
“Even art becomes ‘applied art’ just as soon as it gives up its freedom from function and sets out to convey a message. Art is human only in its absolute refusal to make a statement.”
—Gerhard Richter 3
Much popular art during the late 1960s flew the flag of protest, and advocated specific positions regarding specific causes. However, there is an undeniably integral aspect of Crumb’s work that will always remain problematic when looking to art for a definitive answer, particularly when taken out of context, a favorite tactic of those not wishing to be bothered with the messy loose ends of multivalent work. As with the most successful socially engaged work (think Philip Guston’s shockingly personal paintings from the same time period), this richness is what makes the comics continue to reverberate. Crumb’s unflinching honesty and lack of easily pegged or marketable position are hallmarks of his aesthetic and are crucial to his output as a whole: to lay bare and eviscerate the tangled contradictions of our often hypocritical social fabric and continue to explore what it means to be a thinking, conflicted human being in this culture. An integral aspect of Crumb’s shape-shifting responsiveness to his times and community, and a great strength, is that it does not lend itself to being viewed as an illustration of any single theory.
Contrary to the idea of Crumb as solitary genius, his voice has always been realized through inspiring relationships with his era, community, and family, however radical, idiosyncratic, and alternative such influences may be. Collaborations from an early age—within the underground press and up to his current work with his wife, pioneering autobiographical cartoonist Aline Kominsky -Crumb—are key, as is the broader language of the comic book underground, an oppositional visual arena far removed from the confines of the art gallery.
Crumb was indeed an isolated youth, but even at an early age, always at least marginally involved in the nascent community of 1950s comic book fandom. Avidly interested in—and supportive of—fellow travelers, Crumb quickly opened up his Zap to work by other Bay Area cartoonists. The regular roster included Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, and S. Clay Wilson, who were soon joined by Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, and Robert Williams. San Francisco became the epicenter not only of the period’s youth-culture upheaval in general but also of the related burgeoning underground comix movement.
This context jelled Crumb’s work into a skewed combination of masterful formal comics storytelling and the flagrantly disreputable elements of crass commercials of the past—made all the more potent as adult satire rife with over-the-top depictions of race, violence, and sex. Extravagantly inventive comics from the period abounded, and Crumb was transformed by both his relationships with the city’s cartoonists and his plunge into the wider cultural current. His lifelong themes reverberated from head shops to the hinterlands. Story after story from this period represent perhaps the most trenchant statement on his generation’s untenable hopes, dreams, and aspirations, and provided a cathartic unraveling of the darkest parts of the repressed social subconscious.
While the painful alienation of his adolescence may have given way to his reluctant status as countercultural spokesperson—a jarring transition—the informing outsider temperament of Crumb’s earliest work remained intact, honed by his continued technical mastery and research into related artistic sensibilities. His career may be seen as sustained metaphysical autobiographical introspection manifested in many genres and formal approaches to narrative. For example, through the biographical stories of beloved blues and jazz musicians, Crumb creates a veiled, or collaborative, autobiography. The marginal position of the artist within the cultural landscape is an ongoing theme, and early-twentieth-century popular music has been perhaps his most important source of inspiration and joy, as seen in his participation with the band The Cheap Suit Serenaders throughout the 1970s.
In his work from this time period, Crumb continued to eviscerate the dominant-culture machine. He exposed the mechanisms of Madison Avenue’s repackaging of black culture (and sex) as a crude puppet show of marketable roles, which parallels what became of the counterculture on the heels of its 1960s heyday. In numerous biographical stories, Crumb’s work becomes more poignantly meditative. Intricately rendered landscape and cityscape backgrounds, always an important character in their own right, begin to push to the foreground and envelop stories. Following his permanent move to the country in the 1970s, the symbolic rural/urban dichotomy becomes more pronounced. Crumb began directly collaborating on comics with Aline Kominsky during the early 1970s, and the role of family, recalling his earliest collaborations with brother Charles, is a touchtone for his subsequent work, notably the anthology Weirdo, which Crumb edited in the 1980s.
In a larger sense, Crumb’s collaborations, including celebrated short stories with comic writer Harvey Pekar and drawings based on images from the history of art, represent an artist continuing to see the world from other perspectives rather than settling into an identifiable style and predictable way of viewing. In 1990, Crumb and his family moved to a small village in the south of France, where he and Kominsky-Crumb (the couple married in 1978) worked on autobiographical stories for The New Yorker, exploring their new life and culture.
While the underground moment was historically specific, recurring themes in Crumb’s work of the time (and in stories that reflect back on it) continued to dominate his vision. Deep within the heart of his lovingly cross-hatched protagonists, sexually conflicted, flailing for human contact, lies Crumb’s ultimate achievement and most important legacy: a wide-ranging, if distrustfully critical, humanity. Such devotion, verging on penance, is perhaps the sole possible “underground” of honest expression within the throwaway violence and technological alienation of today.
Crumb is at once artistically gregarious and a social recluse, an underground hero and pop icon, an American and an ex-patriot, a visionary and a champion for the everyday. By completely exploding any subject matter restrictions that had previously existed in American genre-based comics, and through his unflinching autobiography and multi-layered culture critique, and his dogged devotion to comics as personal expression, his influence cannot be overstated. The great themes of art from any period are all present in his vision, and his work continues to be rewarding on a number of levels, particularly as a deeply personal statement regarding a ever more troubling culture constantly feeding on itself, filtered through a demanding and highly critical intellectual and emotional self-reflection.
Notes
1: “Introduction,” page viii, The Complete Crumb Comics, Volume 4: Mr. Sixties. Gary Groth and Robert Fiore, editors (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 1989)
2: Caption for a sketchbook drawing titled “Psychotic Revolutionary Boy Goes To A Bourgeois Cocktail Party and…” June 23, 1975. R. Crumb Sketchbook November 1974 to January 1978, page 115. (Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1978).
3: From 1988 Notes. Gerhard Richter The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, page 170. Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, ed. (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1995).
This essay was originally published in the exhibition catalogue R. Crumb (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012).