Robert Crumb

arm these vast tracts of land, huge ploughing machines, and I had a hippie guy with a beard standing in front of one with a sword, and a thing coming out of this giant farm machine, and I did this for one of the issues for the cover and the people that ran the paper said, “No, this is not good because it will alienate the farmers.” There was always something, you could never win with them.

You’d have to ask Aline why we moved to France. It was her decision. I’m passive, and just went along with the whole thing. I’m in two minds about it. For one thing, I miss all those large-butted American women. French women are just too small and skinny. I know they are feminine and people think they are sexy but they don’t do anything for me. Too elegant. In England, you just look at the women, and wow! England and Scotland, great-looking women. They stride down the street unself-consciously. You’d never catch a French woman doing that.

So…he’s not political; he just wants a quiet life, to be left in peace to ogle; his wife is more the one with the agenda.

As with a great deal of anti-Americanism, Crumb’s target is surely not so much America, as people in general. America, being the richest and biggest and brassiest, is where you see humanity most clearly in all its glory and all its squalor. Well okay, yes, it is all about America, because he’s American, and anyway what would Robert Crumb be without America? But just as, say, Hogarth is inseparable from London but really is satirising humanity in general, so Crumb’s America is just humanity writ large.

Robert Hughes provides an appreciation of Crumb, and wonders why he alone of the Sixties underground generation continues to flourish and develop. I’m not so sure that’s true though. It’s more a case of his best early work gradually coming out into the open. Much is made of his recent collaborations with wife Aline, but if you’ve seen these it’s clear that it’s pretty poor stuff. Juxtaposition with the master sadly only serves to emphasise that Aline really isn’t very good, and the storylines are plodding.

Times cartoonist Peter Brookes gives the best appreciation:

Ironic, isn’t it? This paper of record wouldn’t in a million years print what Robert Crumb is really all about: outrageous, sexually explicit and politically incorrect cartoon strips that have pervaded alternative America’s consciousness since the late 1960s and made him into a counter-culture hero.

Yet here we are celebrating his genius in these pages to mark a major Crumb-fest of exhibitions (one even at Bonham’s, for God’s sake). There’s also a new compilation, The R. Crumb Handbook, but all we can show here is Crumb-lite, not Crumb hardcore.

But pornography it isn’t. The cartoonist has always held that there is a difference between what he does and straight porn, which is interested only in titillation. One difference is humour. Crumb is very funny, with a ribald drawing style to match, and the sexually explicit is hardly dangerous when you can laugh at it.

Robert Hughes, Time’s distinguished art critic, has compared him with Breughel. Well, anyone with half an art school education (and most of us got only that in the 1960s) knows this is nonsense.

No, he’s much, much better than that.