He’s obsessed with ‘spectacular rear ends’ and he calls his fans scum. Yet comic artist Robert Crumb is at risk of becoming respectable. As his new show opens, he talks about filth, fetishes and his idea of fun.
Robert Crumb is caught in traffic, allowing us time to snoop out the best place for a photoshoot in the upmarket London gallery where more than 50 of his pictures are on display. It all looks so well mannered, this orderly line of black-and-white illustrations, and then you peer into the pictures and the familiar rude energy comes roistering out.
We decide that we will place him between an erotic rear view of the tennis player Serena Williams and a homely portrait of his wife of almost 40 years, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, in bed with her laptop. Aline is the chunky brunette who features in so much of Robert’s work - not least in the three issues of Art & Beauty magazine that are the subject of this exhibition...