Studio International

Published 18/04/2005



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.