Robert Crumb's London Exhibition: Sexual Deviancy Elevated to Art Form
Walking into a gallery to find your deepest fears and anxieties splayed across pristine white walls can be an unnerving experience, but this is precisely the power wielded by legendary underground comic artist Robert Crumb. Now in his eighties, Crumb is being celebrated in an ultra-high-end London gallery setting at David Zwirner, with pages torn from his personal notebooks and framed as fine art masterpieces.
From Comic Books to Gallery Walls
For more than half a century, the wiry, difficult, and awkwardly horny artist has been churning out underground comics that lay bare his deepest neuroses while reflecting our own insecurities back at us. What makes this exhibition particularly compelling is the transformation of his work from cheap, printed publications to expensive gallery installations. The pages ripped from his sketchbooks now hang like the finest of fine art, though the content remains anything but refined.
This is classic Crumb territory: filthy, angry, and paranoid. His world is populated by skinny men quivering with worry, fear, and hormones in what he portrays as a cruel, uncaring, and senseless universe. Towering women in thigh-high boots dominate many compositions, representing both objects of desire and sources of terror in Crumb's complex psychological landscape.
The Visual Language of Neurosis
The most powerful works in the exhibition are often the simplest - visual one-liners that pack a psychological punch. In one particularly memorable drawing, Crumb depicts himself being flushed down a toilet, with graffiti on the wall declaring: "Here I sit and can't get started, tried to shit and merely farted." This combination of abject misery and gross humour defines Crumb's artistic universe.
Other self-portraits show the artist with a gun pressed to the back of his big, goofy head, or whingeing about how nobody could possibly understand him. "Self flagellation perhaps," reads one drawing, "or maybe it's true!" Crumb presents himself as a terrible yet hugely relatable mixture of supercharged self-hatred and extreme arrogance, a contradiction that resonates with many viewers.
A World of Anguish and Amazons
The world Crumb depicts is consistently nasty, brutal, and politically anguished. One image features an alien lamenting the greed and deception of the human race, while another shows a miserable man with a dripping nose weeping: "I've blown my life, I'm fucked." Throughout the exhibition, happy, healthy humans are shown ignoring and dismissing the poor, tortured little weirdos in their midst.
The only solace in this bleak universe comes from women - giant, towering, buxom Amazons who Crumb worships, idolises, and grasps desperately onto. While he portrays himself as a broken, terrible dork, these women represent something good and pure in his world. One almost sweet drawing shows a little bald man in a hospital gown telling a huge glamazon that he is so happy and filled with love, with the words "Every moment is significant!" appearing in big bold letters in the sky.
Gallery Context and Artistic Merit
The exhibition is thoughtfully arranged across two floors, with downstairs featuring prints from a 1980s notebook and upstairs displaying mainly original drawings. These original works reveal Crumb's direct, hilarious, and experimental approach, showcasing his great compositional eye, brilliant way with line, and unbelievably unique style. The upper floor contains even more paranoia and horniness, with figures either throttling their own genitals or pulling their own hair out in anguish.
One notable exception to the prevailing themes of sexual deviancy and anguish is a portrait of Crumb's wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb (herself a noted comic artist), swimming in the Mediterranean. This work feels different - not horny, paranoid, gross, or intense, but simply loving, pure, and straightforward. It represents a little moment of unblemished joy in what Crumb typically portrays as a pretty vile world.
The Gallery Versus Comic Book Debate
An important question raised by this exhibition is what is actually gained from seeing Crumb's work in a gallery context. At best, the framing and presentation give viewers the time and space to consider each image as a single, important, elevated entity rather than just another anxious page in a long stream of anxious pages. At worst, some might argue that this presentation destroys the experience of reading through the work sequentially, undermining the original intention and format of comic book storytelling.
The more narrative, comic-book style images don't always work as effectively when framed individually on a wall. While Crumb is undoubtedly worthy of being shown in a swanky Mayfair gallery, there's equally nothing wrong with comic books themselves - they're cheap, easy, dirty, and real, qualities that perfectly match Crumb's artistic sensibility.
Regardless of the presentation format, Crumb remains singular and hilarious. "There's no end to the nonsense," declares one work in big letters downstairs, and let's hope this proves true. Because when the nonsense comes from Robert Crumb, it's pretty damn brilliant. The exhibition continues to challenge, provoke, and entertain, proving that sexual deviancy and personal neurosis can indeed be elevated to an art form worthy of gallery walls.
