Review by Robert Crumb – Sexual deviance amounts to an art form | art

IIt’s disconcerting to walk into a gallery and see all your deepest fears and anxieties splattered on the wall, but that’s the power of Robert Crumb. For more than half a century, the lean, strange, difficult, and infuriating artist (he’s now in his eighties) has been producing underground comics that reveal his deepest neuroses, and reflect your own neuroses back in the process.

Now he is being celebrated in a prestigious London gallery, where pages are being torn from his notebooks and framed as if they were the finest fine art. Except this isn’t good, he’s dirty and angry and paranoid. It’s classic Crumb: skinny men shivering with anxiety, fear and hormones in a cruel, uncaring, meaningless world – full of towering women in thigh-high boots.

The best work is the simplest, the visual lines. Crump throws himself into the toilet, with graffiti on the wall saying: “Here I sit and I can’t get started, I tried to poop and I just farted.” Abject failure, wretchedness, and gross humor, this is Crumb’s world. In other selfies, he shows a gun pressed to the back of his big, goofy head, or complains that no one can understand him. “Maybe self-flagellation,” one sketch reads, “or maybe it’s true!” It’s a terrible, highly interconnected mix of self-loathing and extreme arrogance.

How could it not be? The world he sees is bad, brutal, and politically suffering. An alien laments the greed and deceit of the human race in one image. A miserable man with a dripping nose cries: “You have ruined my life, I am doomed.” Everywhere you look you see happy, healthy humans ignoring and dismissing the poor, tormented little weirdos in their midst.

The only solace in all this comes from the women: giant, towering, buxom Amazons. The crumb worships them, worships them, clutches desperately at their thick legs. He’s a broken, terrible fool, but these women are something good in the world, something pure. In one almost cute sketch, a little bald man in a hospital gown tells a large woman that he’s very happy and full of love. “Every moment matters!” Written in big, bold letters in the sky. Where is the paranoia, resentment and self-flagellation? It seemed like everything was over the moment the girl appeared.

Downstairs, all the works are prints from a notebook dating from the 1980s, but upstairs they are mainly original drawings. Direct, fun, and experimental: he has a great compositional eye, a great way with line, and an incredibly unique style. Here, there’s more paranoia, more fetishism – with men either suffocating their genitals or pulling out their hair. There is no in between: it is complete sexual perversion or complete suffering. What a life.

A portrait of his wife, Aline Kominsky Crump (who was also a famous comedian), swimming in the Mediterranean, looks different. It’s not sexy or paranoid or gross or intense, it’s just loving, pure and simple. A small moment of flawless joy in a very despicable world.

I don’t know what there is to gain from seeing most of Crumb’s works in the context of a gallery, framed and mounted on a wall rather than published in print. At best, it gives you time and space to look at each picture, and to regard each picture as one important and sublime thing rather than just another anxious page in a long line of anxious pages. At worst, it destroys the experience of reading through the work, undermining the original intent and form. Comic-style narrative images don’t work well when placed on a wall. Crumb clearly deserves to be displayed in a swanky Mayfair gallery, but likewise, there’s nothing wrong with comic books. It’s cheap, easy, dirty and real, just like Crumb.

Either way, Crumb remains unique and funny. “There is no end to this nonsense,” is written in large letters on one of the walls in the basement, and let’s hope it doesn’t happen. Because when this shit is written by Crumb, it’s pretty damn cool.