Lewd, Problematic, and Profoundly Influential
Jeremy Lybarger | The New Republic | 20th May 2025
Robert Hughes called R Crumb, the cartoonist, “the Brueghel of the last half of the twentieth century”. Once a sub-culture illustrator, he is now seen as a widely influential artist. “Technical virtuosity and imaginative range” explain this change as well as the “ruthless introspection” of his personal oddities. It’s a mindset well suited to illustrating “modern American psychoses”. His candid graphics, once seen as over-the-top, now appear, according to his biographer, “profoundly articulate, thoughtful comics”.