It is unnerving to walk into a gallery and see all your deepest fears and anxieties splayed out across the wall, but that is the power of Robert Crumb. For more than half a century, the wiry, weird, difficult and awkwardly horny artist (now in his 80s) has been churning out underground comics that lay bare his deepest neuroses, and reflect yours back in the process.
Now he is being celebrated in an ultra-high-end London gallery, with pages ripped from his notebooks and framed up like the finest of fine art. Except this isn’t fine, it’s filthy and angry and paranoid. It’s classic Crumb: skinny men quivering with worry and fear and hormones in a cruel, uncaring, senseless world – filled with towering women in thigh-high boots, obviously.
The best works are the simplest, the visual one-liners. Crumb flushes himself down a toilet, with graffiti on the wall saying: “Here I sit and can’t get started, tried to shit and merely farted.” Abject, miserable failure and gross humour, that’s Crumb’s world. In other self-portraits he has a gun pressed to the back of his big goofy head, or he’s whingeing about how no one could possibly understand him. “Self flagellation perhaps,” it says in one drawing, “or maybe it’s true!” He’s a terrible, and hugely relatable, mixture of supercharged self-hatred and extreme arrogance.
How could he not be? The world he sees is nasty and brutal and politically anguished. An alien laments the greed and deception of the human race in one image. A miserable man with a dripping nose weeps: “I’ve blown my life, I’m fucked.” Everywhere you look you see happy, healthy humans ignoring and dismissing the poor, tortured little weirdos in their midst.
The only solace in any of this comes from women: giant, towering, buxom Amazons. Crumb worships them, idolises them, grasps desperately on to their thick legs. He is a broken, terrible dork, but these women are something good in the world, something pure. In one almost sweet drawing, a little bald guy in a hospital gown tells a huge glamazon that he is so happy and filled with love. “Every moment is significant!” it says in big bold letters in the sky. Where’s the paranoia and resentment and self-flagellation? All gone, apparently, the instant a babe comes into view.
Downstairs, the works are all prints from a 1980s notebook, but upstairs it’s mainly original drawings. Direct, hilarious, experimental: he’s got a great compositional eye, a brilliant way with line, and an unbelievably unique style. Up here, there’s even more paranoia, even more horniness – guys either throttling their own genitals or pulling their own hair out. There’s no in between: it’s total sexual deviancy or total anguish. What a life.
One portrait of his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb (who was also a noted comic artist), swimming in the Med, feels different. It’s not horny or paranoid or gross or intense, it’s just loving, pure and simple. A little moment of unblemished joy in an otherwise pretty vile world.
I don’t know what is gained from seeing most of Crumb’s work in a gallery context, framed and whacked on a wall instead of in a printed publication. At best it gives you the time and space to consider each image, to take every one as a single, important, elevated thing instead of just another anxious page in a long stream of anxious pages. At worst it destroys the experience of reading through the work, undermining the original intention and format. The narrative, more comic-booky images don’t work as well when framed on a wall. Crumb is obviously worthy of being shown in a swanky Mayfair gallery, but equally, there is nothing wrong with comic books. They’re cheap, easy, dirty and real, just like Crumb.
Either way, Crumb remains singular and hilarious. “There’s no end to the nonsense,” it says in big letters on one wall downstairs, and let’s hope not. Because when the nonsense is by Crumb, it’s pretty damn brilliant.
• R Crumb: There’s No End to the Nonsense is at David Zwirner, London, until 14 March
