Even 10 years ago, long after it had been turning up in galleries in major American cities and in Europe, comic art as "art" was still a hard sell. If it was art, purists reasoned, then all commercial art should be reconsidered for loftier status.
Nothing that drastic has happened yet. But comic artists - the darker the better - are increasingly visible in gallery and museum exhibitions. Case in point: the current Robert Crumb show at the University of the Arts' Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery.
It's about time the notorious native Philadelphian had a show here, and smart of Rosenwald-Wolf director Sid Sachs, who organized "Robert Crumb: My True Inner Self," to correct that oversight.
Crumb, who lives in France, has had regular one-person shows of his ink drawings as "art" at New York's Paul Morris Gallery for the last seven years; recently, he has exhibited at Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Cologne's Ludwig Museum, and London's Whitechapel Gallery, among other places. Just last month, he and his wife, Aline, an illustrator, were profiled in the New York Times.
If you know Crumb from the comic books he contributed to, such as Zap and ID, several issues of which are on view in a glass vitrine, or from the documentary film R. Crumb, a poster for which is also on display, you have an idea of what to expect, although Crumb the fine artist is far less obscene than his comic-artist self.
Crumb's drawings of the last 20 years - many of them executed on grease-stained restaurant placemats - are tame compared to some of his drawings and comics from the '60s, which are also on view here. They depict men and women, mostly at restaurants, and occasionally himself, with everyone's worst features exaggerated.
On the other hand, his drawings from the '60s, including a cover for a 1967 issue of Philadelphia's underground newspaper Yarrowstalks and an original ink drawing for Head Comix, whose lead characters are often sweet in appearance, can shock. (I'd recommend vetting this exhibition before taking children.) A large notebook from the early 1970s, which is not available for viewing except for a few pages that were scanned (I was able to look through the entire volume before the exhibition opened) contains some of the most X-rated drawn imagery and notations I've ever seen or read.
