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New York Times
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Cartoonist Who Tapped His Own Psyche and Found America's Unruly Id
R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist, bumped into things when he was young. Before his eyes were tested in first grade, and he was fitted for Coke-bottle glasses, he could perceive neither depth nor distance. His parents thought he was clumsy. With no sense of spatial dynamics, he had to think his way into the world rather than enter it the way most of us do, by simple intuition. When he began to draw, it was as if he was already dipping into a deeply personal and self-replenishing reservoir. He was unusual — a weirdo, to borrow the name of one of his comic book series — right from the start. It's been nearly 60 years since Crumb helped define the visual iconography of late-1960s psychedelia, with surreal imagery that's as instantly recognizable as a Deutsche Grammophon record label and that seemed to come from the past and the future at the same time. His Zap Comix, not for kids, read like a stoner version of the Sunday funnies and gave us the loping and big-footed dudes in his 'Keep On Truckin'' panels and the bald, bearded and semi-baffled mystic Mr. Natural, who in one strip was kicked out of heaven for telling God it was 'a little corny.' There was his version of Felix the Cat, later adapted into the first X-rated animated film, and the cover he drew for 'Cheap Thrills,' the hit second album from Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin — the one with 'Piece of My Heart' on it. It's been more than 30 years since Terry Zwigoff's eye-popping documentary 'Crumb' (1994) reintroduced him to the world and fleshed out his sexual fetishes (notably his inclination to ride piggyback on big women's backs, occasionally uninvited), his demons and his obsession with old-timey 78 r.p.m. records. The movie humanized him — it made him seem like an earnest citizen out on a peculiar limb. The documentary also, as if interpreting the freak-show nature of many of his cartoons, the coarse Russian fairy tale vibe of them, set him alongside his troubled and profoundly eccentric family, which included his often institutionalized mother and a sibling who reclined on beds of nails and regularly passed a 29-foot strip of cotton through his digestive system, in the mouth and out the anus. Is the world ready, as if in every-30-years installments, for another rocky wagon ride into Crumblandia? I was, if only because Dan Nadel's new book, 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life,' is a definitive and ideal biography — pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I've ever read. He's latched onto a fascinating and complicated figure, which helps. But there's more going on here. Nadel, a museum curator who has written two previous books about artists and cartoonists, is an instinctive storyteller, one with a command of the facts and a relaxed tone that also happens to be grainy, penetrating, interested in everything, alive. He knows exactly when and how long to pause and tweezer in background information, a skill that flummoxes so many biographers. This machine kills boredom. 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life' is an official biography, written with Crumb's permission. He fact-checked the final manuscript, though he had no control over the final text. He imposed one condition, Nadel writes: 'that I be honest about his faults, look closely at his compulsions and examine the racially and sexually charged aspects of his work. He would rather risk honesty and see if anyone could understand than cooperate with a hagiography.' Robert Crumb's childhood was nomadic. He was born in 1943 in Philadelphia, but his father was in the Marines and the family (Crumb had four siblings) followed him from base to base. Crumb and his older brother, Charles, took to cartooning early, on the bedroom floor, their materials stuffed into coffee cans and cigar boxes. They deplored superhero comics, which were filled with intimidators solving problems with their fists. They were into oddball strips, like Walt Kelly's 'Pogo' and the early work out of Disney. When he was in high school in the 1950s, where he was painfully self-conscious, an absolute outsider, Crumb began to tune into discontented voices such as those of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. Mad magazine was another revelation. He and Charles began sending their homemade comic books out into the world. He skipped college but lit out for Cleveland, where he got a job drawing for a major greeting card company. He married his first wife, Dana Morgan, when he was 21 and she was 18. They took LSD together and it permanently shifted the contents of his mind, in a manner he liked — it gave him a direct passage to his subconscious. He began to draw for alternative newspapers. He and Dana drifted out to San Francisco, where he embraced the counterculture, and it embraced him. 'Keep On Truckin'' appeared in Zap Comix No. 1, which hit the streets in 1968. The image was a widely bootlegged phenomenon, to the extent that Crumb would see it on the mudflaps of passing trucks. He was a sort of knowingly inverted dandy, to borrow Walker Evans's description of James Agee. He wore corduroy trousers, baggy pants, thick spectacles and fedoras. Joplin advised him to stop dressing like a dude out of 'The Grapes of Wrath.' He was 'beak nosed,' Nadel writes, 'Adam's apple ready to bob in distress.' He was not quite made for this world. Crumb's underground comics were transgressive comics — they were dirty. Zap No. 4, which came out in 1969, contained a strip called 'Joe Blow' about a family that cheerfully and explicitly commits nearly every variety of incest imaginable and sent a signal, Nadel writes, 'that the American nuclear family was not well.' Zap No. 4 was the first comic to be declared obscene. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested in his City Lights bookstore for selling it. Crumb's sudden fame drove him and his wife out of San Francisco. They settled up north in California's rural Potter Valley, where they slowly developed a commune of sorts. They had an open marriage, of which Crumb took more advantage than Dana did. Both had affairs, but Crumb had more of them, with some later ones lasting decades. He had a physical type: big haunches, bold posterior. His sexual obsessions don't swamp this biography, but they linger near the surface. Crumb carried a lot of baggage. He let his warty, untutored id loose in his work. He had a sense of himself as, Nadel writes, 'a grotesque ectomorph.' He sometimes drew comics about domination, about rape, about women without heads who seemed to be little more than pieces of meat. 'He was stuck between shame and desire; the spiritual and material; worship and hatred,' Nadel writes about some of these cartoons. 'They are also curiously devotional, drawn with great care and attention, as though Robert was mesmerized by his own fantasy.' Nadel presents the voices of women who were appalled; he cites just as many who ardently defended him, who felt that women have masochistic fantasies too, and that no one should be in the business of regulating fantasies. Crumb certainly did not run a P.R. campaign on behalf of his own psyche. He tinkered in his work with ugly racial stereotypes. These drawings deeply troubled many of his liberal cartoonist friends. His work was purging satire, he insisted, and others, including the poet Ishmael Reed, agreed with him. He became his own best character in his work; he was both ventriloquist and dummy. The second half of this biography shows us Crumb mostly running away from things, first in Potter Valley and later in rural France, where he moved with his second wife, Aline Kominsky, with whom he frequently collaborated. Too much socializing made him squirm. He'd often start drawing in the middle of a busy party. He ran from fame. He was determined not to be perceived as a joke that 1968 left behind. He avoided Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim when they wanted to make a movie with him. He turned down an opportunity to play banjo on 'Saturday Night Live' with his band, which sometimes went by R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders. He declined a $10,000 offer to draw a Rolling Stones album cover. He blocked most attempts to commercialize his work and characters. Over the decades he slowly began to feel that he'd run out of original ideas, though the sketchbooks he filled over the decades prove otherwise. Still, he more often illustrated the work of other writers — notably Harvey Pekar in the autobiographical and blue-collar 'American Splendor' series, but also James Boswell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Charles Bukowski and the Book of Genesis. He drew dozens of photorealistic and often solemn portraits of the long-forgotten musicians he so loved. There are a lot of road trips in this biography. Crumb was too dyslexic to learn to drive. He enjoyed the existential state, Nadel writes, of being the 'eternal passenger.' He took two stabs at being a father, a role for which he felt ill equipped, and did a bit better the second time around. His second marriage was an open one, too. Aline died in 2022, at the age of 74. Nadel is a canny visual reader of comics, and he traces Crumb's influence on a long line of cartoonists, from Art Spiegelman and Matt Groening to Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry and Seth. 'Every cartoonist has to pass through Crumb,' Spiegelman tells him. 'What happens when you encounter Crumb is like the accelerated evolution scene in '2001.' You had to pass through him to find out what your voice might be.'
Forbes
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Looking At The Paintings Of Lisa Yuskavage, And Seeing
Lisa Yuskavage, The Artist's Studio, 2022 © Lisa Yuskavage, Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Lisa Yuskavage's exhibition at David Zwirner LA, her first in Los Angeles in 29 years (which just closed on April 12), was a revelation. The exhibition consisted of some twenty new works that are original, clever, funny, and, in many cases, in conversation with her earlier works and influences. 'The more you know my work,' Yuskavage said, the more you can spot the references and easter eggs she's placed there. The majority of these works take place in an imagined art studio (inspired by a photo of Braque's studio, Bruce Nauman, and other studios in which she has been, either as a student, a painter, or an artist. Some of the figures in the paintings are models, some from previous Yuskavage paintings, or even herself. The paintings displayed in the studio can be her own, or references to painterly problems she is grappling with. They are all painted in a spectrum of colors that seem to have a special glow, perhaps because the base is cadmium yellow. Yuskavage was in LA for the press preview and spoke at the opening in conversation with David Zwirner. Lisa Yuskavage, In the Company of Models, 2024 © Lisa Yuskavage, Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner I can still recall the sensation Yuskavage's early canvases caused in New York, with her depiction of females who might appear more at home in a Russ Meyer film or a Zap Comix than a canvas in an art gallery or museum. At the time, although I appreciated her artistry and the sense of humor in her work, her subject matter didn't engage me. But, the truth is, I didn't know what I was looking at. Yuskavage spoke at the LA press preview, in conversation with David Zwirner himself. It was a conversation of familiars, and Yuskavage was candid about her work, herself, and the drive that fills her canvases. Yuskavage recounted that she was raised in a blue collar community in Pennsylvania, where there was little to no art on display, no contact with galleries and museums, and even less appreciation of art, or the possibility of being an artist. Nonetheless, because of her intelligence, her artistic talent, and her drive, Yuskavage won scholarships to the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia and then to Yale University's School of Art. Lisa Yuskavage, Painter Painting, 2024 © Lisa Yuskavage, Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner When Yuskavage began to paint her own canvases, she had all these art-historical references at her command. They were part of her, but not fully her. Yuskavage wanted her work to also reflect the images or standards of beauty which predominated her blue collar background such as the photos of Playboy playmates. Yuskavage also sees her work as following those of the Pictures generation. As Yuskavage recounted, they were among the first group of artists to really use pictures and media as the subject matter and visual reference for their work. Similarly, Yuskavage sees her own work as about images and depictions of women and artists in art history and popular culture. The paintings on exhibit at Zwirner were filled with references to her earlier works and to herself. The studio in which the paintings take place are often filled with canvases stacked against each other as well as sculptures. This too, has art historical precedent, be it the 19th Century French salon painters, or Picasso's own paintings of his studios. Zwirner also teased out the adversarial fires that inflame Yuskavage and how she thrives on conflict. She is always seeking, in her own words, 'to turn up the volume' on her work. Receiving bad or negative reviews to Yuskavage only affirmed that she was doing something right. She preferred, she said, a full-throated negative review to a simplistic positive one. Moreover, she said that at times she has thought of her work, 'I'm just going to offend everyone.' And been very pleased about it. One of her north stars is clearly the drive to be oppositional. 'I'm not going to give them what they want,' she said at Zwirner. There is something quite admirable about her contrariness. Lisa Yuskavage, Painter (Kelly Marie), 2024 © Lisa Yuskavage, Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Yuskavage also explained that she is mad for color theory, any and all of them, from Josef Albers to Laura Ashley. Color appears in her paintings almost as a subjective guide to the emotional content of the work. How she arrives at the colors is as complex as how she uses them to define her compositions. Finally, on a technical level, Yuskavage's work begins with problems that she creates and then needs to solve. Her use of negative space is one of the challenges she sets for herself in her work. For example, Yuskavage pointed to a yellow square in one of her new works, and explained that many painters have as their base a neutral color so that the colors layered upon them stand out. Instead, Yuskavage used cadmium yellow that is somewhat shocking and not necessarily attractive, as her base. That created a problem in that she had 'fight my way out of,' she said. In the painting, the remaining yellow square was one of the few places not painted over. Perhaps it's not surprising that when I first arrived at the Zwirner gallery and gave the works a once over, I saw it as a mid-career or late period celebration of her past work. However, a mere 45 minutes later, after hearing Yuskavage discuss her work, seeing it was a totally different experience which I enjoyed at such a deeper level, and appreciated all that much more. The challenge posed by any artwork is to really see it. To engage with it. Yuskavage's works want to pick a fight with the viewer, to force them to look away or even feel guilty about looking. But, once you know what to look for, what you are seeing, it completely changes how you see her work. And that is very much an art experience worth having.
Boston Globe
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
R. Crumb helped invent modern comics, but we haven't known much about his life … until now
Robert found sanctuary from this raging domestic mess in comic books, though he rejected superheroes. Who was Superman, really, if not another brawny bully like Crumb's alcoholic uncles? Instead, he was drawn to the animal adventures of Walt Disney's animation empire, especially Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics penned by a former Disney 'story man' named Carl Banks, whose richly detailed work, '[imbued] with psychological and emotional depth,' suited Crumb's desire for a meticulously rendered private universe. Young Robert began furiously drawing, inking, and writing his own comics with Charles. A few years later, Crumb hightailed it to Cleveland for a key apprenticeship making birthday cards for American Greetings. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Crumb felt the pull of the nascent counterculture well before he became a reluctant counter-cultural figure, taking his first acid trip with his first wife, Dana, in 1965, a mammoth 600-microgram dose that changed his life. 'When I took LSD I realized I was trying to be smart all the time,' he tells Nadel. 'And LSD made me realize that doesn't matter at all. If you trust your instincts … it's all right there.' Acid introduced Crumb's subconscious to the hermetic world of his art, a liminal space, writes Nadel, 'that ushered in ideas whose real meanings were a mystery even to him.' Crumb in 1966 would create his familiar gallery of comic book avatars — Eggs Ackley, Flakey Foont, and Mr. Natural, his first 'Keep on Truckin'' high-stepper. The comics were brazenly perverse and sharply satirical, stories of sexual fetishism and urban depravity next to gently savage attacks on religion and the nuclear family. The die was cast: Crumb was an outsider raging against the mindless conformity of postwar America, Salinger with a Rapidograph pencil. Advertisement Nadel pegs this as the moment when Crumb's id took charge, ushering in a new era of highly idiosyncratic personal and social exploration in comic art. In 1967 Crumb was settled in San Francisco, just in time for the Summer of Love and a psychedelic renaissance. Zap Comix, Crumb's first comic to get wide national distribution, was a watershed moment in adult comics. Grounding his work in what Nadel calls 'surreal happenstance … semipolitical essayistic comics, or visual poetry,' Crumb became the leading voice in an alternative comics movement that also included Gilbert Shelton, Victor Mososco, and S. Clay Wilson. Advertisement With Crumb's success came an ambivalent entry into the mainstream of American consumer culture, the very thing he had savaged in his comics. The perennially poor Crumb took on a few commissions, most notably the album art for Big Brother and the Holding Company's 'Cheap Thrills,' thus finding his work landing in the bedrooms of suburban teenagers everywhere. Mr. Natural became the first meme of its time, appearing without his consent on posters, T-shirts, and lunchboxes. Crumb sued every one of Mr. Natural's bootleggers. The idea of selling out was anathema, especially if it meant compromising a worldview that was taking on a darker, more disturbing cast. 'Snatch,' a 1968 comic book collaboration with Wilson, was an opportunity for Crumb to work through his complicated feelings toward women, a preoccupation which became a leitmotif for Crumb's career. Yet even as he insisted that stories like 'Don't Touch Me!' and 'The Adventures of Dick Nose' were pornographic satires, it's hard to find the humor in them. Understandably, this is the place where many Crumb fans get off the bus, as it becomes difficult to square the lacerating satirist with the coarse misogynist. Nadel, to his credit, doesn't make excuses for Crumb, calling this work 'the ugliest vision of white male heterosexuality' while allowing that Crumb's sexual frankness was a form of self-laceration: 'He was ruining the wet dream with grotesque nightmares.' Crumb is a complex guy, in short, and Nadel understands that genius and virtue are often incompatible, especially with an individual as tortured as his subject. There is a lot of ugliness from Crumb here, including parental neglect and serial philandering, but there is also his abiding love and deep respect for his second wife, comic book artist Aline Kominsky, which held for nearly 50 years until her death in 2022. Nadel tells their story movingly, with empathy and affection. Advertisement Having hounded the reclusive Crumb for years to get his approval and cooperation, Nadel, a curator-at-large for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, was amply rewarded with unlimited access to Crumb's personal archive: thousands of pages of diaries, letters, and sketchbooks, as well as a timeline of Crumb's life from 1943 to 2005. This material, as well as Nadel's interviews with Crumb, gives his biography the kind of granular texture and thematic heft that Crumb's life and work deserves. CRUMB: A CARTOONIST'S LIFE By Dan Nadel Scribner, 480 pages, $35 Marc Weingarten is the author of ' .'
