Crumb Plumbs Bum and Hums to the Strum, or, HeteroRetroSpectacle

ART REVIEW | R. CRUMB

Mr. Natural Goes to the Museum

By KEN JOHNSON

“R. Crumb’s Underground” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia offers an excellent opportunity to explore the artist’s five decades in comic strips.

Courtesy of Denis Kitchen Art Agency

R. Crumb’s Underground One of the more than 100 works in this exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

…Mr. Crumb is not the only artist to cross over from the comic-book ghetto to the fine-art museum…But Mr. Crumb — a draftsman of transcendent skill, inventiveness and versatility, a fearlessly irreverent, excruciatingly funny satirist of all things modern and progressively high-minded, and an intrepid explorer of his own twisted psyche — remains the genre’s gold standard…

The exhibition is full of wild sex. Mr. Crumb makes no bones about his lust for big, muscular women, and his uncensored erotic fantasy life is not only entertaining but also liberating. See “How to Have Fun With a Strong Girl” (2002), a suite of 12 drawings in which the scrawny Mr. Crumb climbs like a monkey all over a powerfully built young woman. We should all be so open to, and forgiving of, our libidinous fantasies.

But sex is not Mr. Crumb’s only preoccupation. He is also a great lover of early-20th-century popular music and a fanatical collector of old 78-r.p.m. records. A section of the exhibition devoted to his musical interests includes extended narratives about the sadly foreshortened lives of the blues musicians Charlie Patton and Tommy Grady. There is a humane, deeply moving tenderness to these works…

“R. Crumb’s Underground” continues through Dec. 7 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia; (215) 898-7108, icaphila.org