18/4/05

Crumbs from Crumb

Robert Crumb, the American master cartoonist, has been successfully exhibited in Britain, where some critics have compared his work to that of Cruickshank or Hogarth. Certainly there is a Rabelaisian impact to the cartoons. Crumb now lives mainly in France, a refugee from an American culture which he believes is gradually disintegrating. In The R. Crumb Handbook (MQ Publications, March 2005), his new book prepared with Peter Poplaski, Crumb produces a landscape vignette where the pure green land is gradually destroyed by the remorseless process of development. Overhead wires and lines spring up, tramlines and throughways sprout and after 12 episodes, a simple homespun vernacular building finally disappears, together with any remaining greenery. It could be said that this sequence is equally to be found now in southern England.