Who is Robert Crumb? A Short Introduction for Readers of his “Genesis”

The loathing Crumb inspires in a few, the accolades he receives from others, cast shadows and light on his most recent work, introduced here, here, and here. Crumb is a satirist. Satirists offend. Satirists offend by exaggerating truth. Remember what happened when a Danish cartoonist satirized the deployment of Muslim beliefs in the incitement of Muslims to fashion themselves into lethal bombs? 

Satirists lampoon others and, if they are well-rounded artists, lampoon themselves. Robert Crumb has always done this. He is aware of his own obsessions, at least to a point. Still, Crumb is not for everyone. Regardless, the history of 20^th century art cannot be understood apart from Bizarre, Zap Comix, Motor City Comix, Yellow Dog, and Snatch Comix, and the whole movement he helped inspire.

A number of people misunderstand Crumb. For greater insight, here is an excerpt from a review by art critic Robert Hughes:

Crumb is a genuinely democratic satirist, in the fierce over-the-top way of a James Gillray - hyperbole and aggression relieved by brief intermissions of tenderness. He gets into the domain of shared dreams and does so in a language that doesn't pretend to be "radically new". Why on earth should he pretend? If he did, people wouldn't know what he was drawing about. As he pointed out in an interview 30 years ago: "People have no idea of the sources for my work. I didn't invent anything; it's all there in the culture; it's not a big mystery. I just combine my personal experience with classic cartoon stereotypes." Rather than fitting him into some notion of an avant-garde, it is better to see Crumb as a dedicated anti-modernist. At the end of The R Crumb Handbook is a list of the artists (fine and cartoon) who have influenced him. The fine artists include, for more or less obvious reasons, Bosch, Pieter Brueghel, Rubens (them Flaimish blondes with fahn big laigs), Hogarth and Goya; among the modern ones are Reginald Marsh, George Grosz and Otto Dix; but there are no living ones at all.

If you don’t get Crumb’s art, you probably don’t get the fierce satire of “As Good as It Gets,” with Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear, either. It’s satire that cuts all ways. The film satirizes misogynists, and satirizes women at the same time. It satirizes homophobia, and satirizes gay culture with the same flair.

Crumb, to be sure, is not so deft and not so universal. But his genius is greater precisely in its obsessiveness.

For the piece from which the Hughes’ quote is taken, go here. Robert Crumb has been featured on NPR several times. Go here for the latest, and a list of earlier features.

Comments

[J. K. Gayle]

Here's an interesting juxtaposition, (1) Hughes's final paragraph and (2) a paragraph [an interview clip] from Brandon Cesmat's review of the documentary on Robert Crumb.

(1)
Now that he has been "kicked upstairs" into the museum, Crumb professes not to get it. "I don't understand how they can fit me into the same mental space with Cy Twombly. It's a mystery to me." Presumably it is to Twombly, too. But no matter. What counts for Crumb, and should continue to count for his fans, is that he gets on with what has always been, for him, the immediate job at hand: continuing to make the kind of drawings that his mother and father would never, not in a month of Sundays, have allowed him to see

(2)
When journalist Peggy Orenstein tells Crumb how frightened she felt as a girl of eleven when she found a sexually explicit a Zap Comix in her brother's room, Crumb--now a father of a daughter--nods and squirms. "I do this stuff, and then I'm horrified and embarrassed when I see it on the paper, and I say, "Oh, my God,' but somehow I can't stop doing it," Crumb says. "I have this hostility toward women," Crumb admits on camera. "Somehow revealing that truth about myself is helpful, but maybe I shouldn't be allowed to do it. Maybe I should be locked up and my pencils taken from me."
http://www2.csusm.edu/profe/lynch.htm

The child and parent contrast in what Crumb admits is fascinating. The interviews reveal from Crumb's own statements what Cesmat calls "the shards of a life" behind the art.

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Kurk, for drawing our attention to the interchange in (2).

It's part of a wider issue in our sexually explicit culture, isn't it? In my household, we don't watch, or allow our children to watch, nor do we receive at all, MTV and channels that show one sexually explicit music video after another.

Crumb is very tame compared to what many, many people, boys and girls and men and women, watch on a daily basis. My only point is that it makes no sense to target Crumb specifically on this score.

I once ran a Christian coffeehouse on a large university campus and was delighted to hire a convert to Islam among my staff. A striking blond, blue-eyed woman, she became Muslim, married a Muslim, and wore a simple head covering because she grew up in a very liberal but also very threatening (to her) environment, the one with which we are all familiar, in which she was constantly hit on. What many of her peers enjoyed and sought out, she hated.

She wanted out, and appreciated the alcohol-free, smoke-free, relatively testosterone-free environment of the coffeehouse. Were those her only options, a traditional marriage in a religion that protects her from her point of view, and the so-called Christian world in which Beyonce sets the tone?

Crumb is conflicted about what he does. As he should be. Yes, it is the shards of his life that show through in his art. I can think of many great works of art in which this is the case.

[steph]

I liked this post and all the other sensible reviews you and others have provided. I'm looking forward to my own real copy for the coffee table.

[JohnFH]

Hi Steph,

I certainly am enjoying my copy.

[Sue]

This is off topic but relates to a discussion that you have been a part of elsewhere.

My question is this. Are the biblioblogs on your list at biblioblogs.com restricted to only those who have a doctorate in biblical studies, or is there some other criteria? And if there is some other criteria, will this criteria be made public, or will the bibloblogs list continue to be a matter of private selection?

[JohnFH]

Sue,

Your comment is off-topic, but I will respond to it briefly now, and more extensively next week.

Brandon Wason and I at biblioblogs.com plan to implement, with the help of others, transparent criteria with a view to the creation of a set of blogrolls divided into subjects. We have a draft set of criteria in mind, subject of course to revision. We have yet to make the draft criteria public just yet. Once we do, we have no doubt that they will generate debate. In fact, they already have.

The criteria are meant to ensure that blogrolls on biblioblogs.com will be far more inclusive than they are now, but also more selective, in the sense that the lists will consist of blogs by academics or academics-in-training who engage in / are being trained to engage in *peer-reviewed peer-to-peer publication in biblical studies* alongside of peer-to-public communication like blogging. Another criterion: anonymous blogs will not be listed.

There are hundreds of biblical bloggers who fit the criteria we are developing. There are of course other bloggers, and excellent ones at that, who limit themselves to public-to-public communication.

No one denies that the distinction between the two kinds of communication exists on the ground, and that some people choose to engage in one or the other but not both.

In my view, the true elitists would be those who are perfectly capable of engaging in both kinds of communication, but choose to engage in one of the two only, and refer to those committed to furthering the community of those who do both as elitists.