![]() In the introduction to his Waiting for Food # 3, a collection of his restaurant placemat doodles (which I bought, dirt cheap, out of amazement that such a book could exist) he writes: Nor does Crumb conceal his contempt for these tossers. ![]() Perhaps Crumb moved into galleries as his original audience grew old and moneyed, although I suspect many of the rich folk collecting his cartoons had no idea who Crumb was until Hughes and co put an imprimatur of establishment respectability upon his work. That stomach-churning nostalgia trip has been going on for two decades now. But I was tired of his generation's self-adoration at 15, when the BBC dedicated hours of broadcasting to Woodstock's 20th anniversary. Perhaps to Hughes – who is an old geezer now, but was young and virile when Crumb burst on the scene – that underground work still seems timely. The same goes for much of Crumb's satirical work. I can appreciate what Zappa was up to, but those records seem really dated today. Zappa attacked the same targets as Crumb: bourgeois hippies and The Man. ![]() In this however they remind me not of Hogarth but rather early Frank Zappa records. Fritz the Cat and Mr Natural piss all over your Haight-Ashbury-Summer-of-Love counterculture tosh. Of course, Crumb has created some memorable images. Reading it, however, I was immediately unsurprised to rediscover that a goodly part of Crumb's output is repetitive grot featuring lassies with enormous thighs and buttocks in compromising positions with nerdy Crumb-surrogates. That book triggered a severe "must get into Crumb" attack, so I bought it. Indeed, five years ago in the Guardian Hughes wrote a long encomium to the artist to celebrate publication of The R Crumb Handbook. You may also recall a scene in which Robert Hughes (him again) declares that Crumb is our era's Hogarth. If you've seen Terry Zwigoff's Crumb documentary – which is a fascinating portrait of a bizarre family – you'll know the process was well underway in the mid-1990s when Crumb flogged some old sketchbooks and bought a lovely house in France with the proceeds. Poor old Spain Rodriguez, Victor Moscoso, even Gilbert Shelton – they've all been eclipsed by CRUMB, whose work hangs in prestigious galleries around the world and whose books now come to us via Norton, the respectable folk behind all those doorstopper anthologies English Lit students are obliged to buy.Ĭertainly Crumb was a better artist than Shelton et al, but even so I am not sure how he managed to reach this high plateau of fetishisation-deification. the one and only genius the 1960s underground produced in visual art, either in America or Europe" according to Robert Hughes, that perpetual bloviation machine. Four decades after the underground comix explosion, Crumb is practically the last man standing among his peers, ".
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