Know what’s fun? Picturing R. Crumb climbing on top of the
sturdy-looking wife of early Seattle power broker Horace C. Henry for
one of his famous erotic piggyback rides. Her formal oil portrait at
the Frye Art Museum hangs mere feet from Crumb’s crazed drawing of
himself with a third eye. Farther into the museum, the splayed crotch
of Crumb’s Devil Girl sculpture stares into a long gallery of
19th-century landscapes, Christian martyrs, and Bouguereau’s eroticized
virgins.
But Crumb’s work is as jittery next to old-fashioned oil paintings
as anywhere. It’s unnecessary for the Frye to set a green-and-orange
plaid couch in front of a table, where people who want to hold the
comics in their sweaty hands can do just that—Crumb’s
cross-hatched, paranoid-hearted drawings defy context. Even framed
behind glass and sitting at what feels to me like a historical distance
(the year I was born, 1975, Crumb and fellow artists Rick Griffin,
Victor Moscoso, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Williams, and
S. Clay Wilson drew the world ending in Zap #8) they still
emit electric shocks. The effect reminds me of the frightened, rapt
looks on society women’s faces as they read sublime gothic horror
stories by candlelight in James Gillray’s classic 1802 print Tales
of Wonder! The British satirist is as good as any for comparison
to Crumb.
The exhibition at the Frye, R. Crumb’s Underground, was
organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
After Seattle, the exhibition will go to Crumb’s hometown,
Philadelphia. (Remember the drive through the projects where he grew up
in Terry Zwigoff’s agonizing documentary Crumb?) Its stop here
makes perfect sense, since Crumb is the alpha and omega for
Fantagraphics artists. It’s hard to imagine Peter Bagge’s Buddy
Bradley, Jim Blanchard’s Trucker Fags in Denial, or Ellen
Forney’s big, soft women—have Crumb and Forney met? I’d love to
see that—without Crumb. Fantagraphics also publishes Crumb’s
daughter, Sophie.
The show is a 40-year retrospective, beginning with the juvenilia of
Robert and his brother Charles and quickly moving into the explosive
post-LSD drawings of the 1960s.
Haight-Ashbury in the ’60s and ’70s was Crumb’s feeding trough, the
place where he swallowed counterculture posturing whole and shat it out
as satire, even while maintaining his own counterculture relationship
with the mainstream. Unlike hippies, Crumb didn’t have to try to be
weird. He just was. And as anyone who watched Crumb knows, the
weirdness was not remotely willed or whimsical but came from an
unresolvable alienation, expressed even more starkly in his brothers,
one of whom committed suicide as a middle-aged, tranquilized virgin
living with his mother, and the other of whom was pictured in the film
meditating on a bed of nails, eating lengths of fabric to cleanse his
system, and detailing his public-molestation exploits. Their father, a
successful businessman and former soldier, was a horror-show
representative of postwar conformism.
In one panel in the show, Crumb addresses himself to his feminist
critics (he calls them “booshwah cunts”), who take issue with his
disturbingly sadistic portrayals of women: “Would you rather I went out
and raped twelve-year-old girls?” This hangs next to Crumb’s
Jailbait of the Month, Honeybunch Kaminsky, 13 (“what a little
yummy”) from 1968, suggesting that the question is not entirely
hypothetical. But the tendency to moralize about Crumb’s work is
shortsighted, like the belief that politically correct speech leads to
understanding. Crumb let it all out, and it’s ugly—but far from
unfamiliar. His racism and sexism are pure products of America.
The contorted big-busted ladies, sweaty perverts, and jigaboo
figures are all here, with nothing left out. There’s Angelfood McSpade,
“the dark-skinned sex bomb” who could arrest the stock market with the
scent of her vagina, and How to Have Fun with a Strong Girl from 2002, a semisadistic orgasmic allegory of an artist determined to
hang on to his creative juices. But the exhibition is comprehensive,
including Crumb’s relationships with other artists, his collaborations
with his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and his 1980s portraits of early
jazz greats. Patton, the story of a Mississippi Delta
bluesman, is suffused both with real feeling and with a sense of the
ridiculousness of the white connoisseur. (Crumb is a blues fanatic.)
Stocked in the bookstore, in addition to Crumb’s classic perversions,
are copies of The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics, drawn and
written by all three members of the Crumb family.
Still, the provocative drawings are more than just puerile. Hanging
over them is the cloud of failed revolution—the revolution of the
’60s, which Crumb saw the seedy underbelly of from the beginning. (One
of his comics is faintly echoed in the rape scene in T. C. Boyle’s
Drop City.) For him, love isn’t the answer. The answer is not
flinching from the unseemly. History is beginning to prove his point.
awesome! great article. wish i was in seattle to see this…