In Germany, Crumb’s stories appeared in translation as early as 1969 through the left-wing alternative press U-Comix (since 1978, the popular publishing house Zweitausendeins has regularly released his comics and carefully crafted sketchbooks). It is this Crumb-a representative of the “other” America, who became popular amid student protests and the Vietnam War-who was probably most familiar to German audiences visiting the Ludwig. Perhaps the most macabre of such lacerating allegories in the current exhibition was a 1993 sequence of drawings in which African-Americans and Jews take over the United States. With these figures and their stories, laced with bizarre situations and phantasmagoria, Crumb composes raucous satires underscoring the irrational fears, anxieties, and hypocrisies underlying cultural experience. Natural, a white-bearded, barefoot eco-guru in loose-fitting getups, is forever making incoherent boasts Angelfood McSpade, a sensual, black, earth-mother stereotype, is revealed over time to be a white man’s erotic projection. Then and now, one could understand Crumb’s comics as opposing the culture of Walt Disney, since his well-known characters have traits that render them unsympathetic, even grotesque, rather than endearing and together offer pointed social allegories: Fritz the Cat, a hippie tom, is self-satisfied, smugly bourgeois, and idealistic but unmotivated Mr. His comics were sold for the first time on the streets of Haight-Ashbury in 1968, when he also gained widespread notoriety for making the album cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills and with his growing popularity and influence, independent art publishers began releasing books violating the official comics code born of the McCarthy era, which censored excessive violence, sexual depictions, and profanity. In fact, the sixty-one-year-old could be considered the founding father of underground comics. If such a tension between contexts was still in play at the Ludwig, perhaps that was because Crumb is not merely the virtuosic illustrator one found in the comic books and original sketchbooks, record covers, posters, and postcards organized by curator Alfred Fischer. And while Crumb’s drawings have often been shown as art-and even prominently, as in the 2004 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh-he claimed that he sees publications, not gallery exhibitions, as his ultimate vehicle. At a press conference for the exhibition, he pointed out that it was only fifteen years ago that the Museum of Modern Art’s “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” show held up his work as exemplary of a medium belonging to the masses. Nevertheless, the museum’s serious treatment of the comic-book artist had a sense of novelty, at least in Crumb’s own estimation. Indeed, the decision to mount a Crumb exhibition seemed a fitting one for the Ludwig, whose collection of Pop (the largest outside the United States) includes work by artists like Öyvind Fahlström, who makes explicit reference to Crumb, as well as by such Pop descendants as Raymond Pettibon, who appeared in Crumb’s magazine Weirdo in 1985. Even within the world of fine art, they have seeped in from the margins at least as far back as Joan Miró and Kurt Schwitters, and since Pop art this entertaining medium has widely been considered a worthy source by artists. After all, comics have historically been an integral part of cultural heritage in countries like France and Belgium (consider Moebius’s Blueberry or Hergé’s Tintin). For many audiences, the question might have seemed beside the point. Crumb’s comic-strip alter ego asked on the poster for this eponymous retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
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