On the one hand, Crumb is an international cultural treasure, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, profiled in BBC documentaries and a feted documentary feature film and, next month, the subject of a major tribute season at the National Film Theatre, a prestigious exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, a sale at Bonhams and even a special T-shirt designed by Stella McCartney.
Also waiting in the wings is The R. Crumb Handbook, a giant 440-page hardback of both old and new drawings and cartoons, plus photographs, a CD of his music and freshly unearthed material from his personal archives, claiming to be ‘ the most comprehensive presentation to date of the life, trials and ideas of one of the most influential artists of the last 40 years.’ Crumb originals are so highly prized that he was able to finance his 1991 relocation to France by selling half a dozen of his old sketchbooks, and even a doodle on a restaurant placemat can fetch as much as $5000.
On the other, he has been vilified by feminists, pursued by censors, confiscated by HM Customs and accused of racism even by old friends and colleagues like Art Spiegelman. One strip, When The Niggers Take Over America, intended by its author as a bitter satire on American racism, walked such a fine ironic line that it was reprinted as propaganda by the American Nazi Party. “It shows how dopey they are,” commented the artist. “It was a joke on them and they don’t even get it. They are so caught up in their own nonsense that they don’t see the absurdity …”
Nowhere was this dichotomy between hero and pariah more clearly exemplified than in the 1995 controversy which erupted over his 1990 collection, My Troubles With Women. As Tony Bennett of Knockabout Comics, Crumb’s UK publisher and distributor since the late Eighties, recalls, “My Troubles With Women was widely reviewed and sold well in high street bookshops such as Waterstone’s. We later made a co-edition with Last Gasp of San Francisco, and when our stocks were exhausted we imported copies from Last Gasp. The high spot of my year is the French Comics Festival in Angouleme where the art of comics is celebrated by 200,000 visitors, covered by 300 journalists and attracts 10 hours of TV. In 1995 the French Minister of Culture (M. Toutbon) visited our stand, which featured Crumb and My Troubles With Women, and shook hands, saying he was pleased to see British exhibitors and Crumb there. On that same day a fundamentalist Christian Customs Officer was seizing the copies we had imported at Heathrow Airport, copies of a book that had been freely on sale in the UK for some years previously. Despite my arguments to this effect, Customs insisted on taking us to court a year later. We won the court case with the help of expert witnesses and a good barrister and Customs not only got their wrists slapped for being silly but also had to pay all our costs. We later received a nice letter from Customs head office outlining which sex acts we could or could not show in comics.”
In Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb, art critic Robert Hughes appears comparing Crumb to Bruegel. Hughes has also cited Hogarth and Goya as Crumb precursors, but in pop-cultural terms, we could just as profitably compare Crumb to Frank Zappa and Woody Allen. Like the former, he is a hippie hero who despised hippies, and whose art is forever tainted for some by deep-seated misogyny and a leering, prurient attitude towards the sleazy side of sexuality. (Plus Crumb, like Zappa in his final years, has allowed his trademark moustache to be subsumed into that flowing, patriarchal white beard).
And like the latter, he frequently portrays himself in his work as a slavering, goddess-chasing geek: bespectacled, weak-chinned and wracked with equal measures of lust and guilt. Also like Allen, he is both a fervent collector and a gifted amateur performer of notionally archaic vernacular music. Allen has, for decades, played clarinet in a New Orleans jazz ensemble. Similarly, prior to his relocation to France, Crumb sang and played assorted instruments including banjo in the Cheap Suit Serenaders, specialising in Twenties and Thirties pop, blues, country and jazz. Indeed, his friend and cinematic biographer Terry Zwigoff is himself a former Serenader. In his new location, he now performs bal musette, French folky stuff and his beloved blues in Les Primitifs Du Future, playing ukelele and banjo alongside two accordions, two guitars, a drummer and what Tony Bennett describes as “an attractive female musical saw player.”
Plus ca change. Crumb may have turned down the Stones, but in 1968 he was happy to do the business for San Francisco stalwarts Big Brother & The Holding Company’s album Cheap Thrills: partly because he and the band had a common homebase and fanbase, partly because he and the band’s vocalist Janis Joplin shared a profound and abiding love for Bessie Smith and other classic blueswomen of the Twenties and Thirties, but also because Joplin physically matched the template of the archetypal Crumb Babe: thrusting of nipple, bounteous of butt and wild of tresses. According to Joplin biographer Ellis Amburn, Crumb’s reaction to the band’s approach was, “Yeah, I’ll do your album cover, but the only thing is, when I meet Janis, I want to be able to pinch her tit.” Months later, he did indeed encounter Joplin and, true to his word, he did just that. Joplin’s response was to coo, “Oh, honey!” The next time they met, at a comics show in Berkeley the following year, she snogged him passionately for the benefit of assembled photographers.
