http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/arts/design/05crum.html
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.
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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