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F asked Mark Pascale to comment on a work in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. Prepare to be surprised.
Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
By its very nature, satire is inexorably linked to the issues, tastes, and cultural forms of the society for which it is produced. Robert Crumb (American, born 1943), is a writer and artist whose work did much to define his age by challenging America’s politics and mores, beginning in the late ’60s. Two examples of Crumb’s graphic output are part of the Art Institute’s permanent collection. These works exemplify the range of his art and ideas, and expose his Swiftian disgust with other people’s complacency and gullibility.
Although Crumb is best known for his overtly sexual work, he also dealt with more serious social and philosophical material. For example, in 1978, when Crumb drew “Nukuler Holocaust Kicks,” there was still a constant threat of nuclear annihilation. The drawing’s composition echoes that of a comic strip; there are circular and square windows into which Crumb has inserted a variety of tableaux. Seemingly, no one has been spared from the artist’s satire. In one frame, the doomsayer’s ubiquitous pronouncement: “The End Is Near” is realized, as he laughs at a group of charred nuclear protesters. Another frame depicts a blast-savaged man carrying a television through a bombed landscape, tagged with the pithy inscription “AFTER THE BOMB AND NO PLACE TO PLUG IN.” In spite of the drawing’s serious overtone, Crumb couldn’t help himself from inserting a healthy dose of sexual fantasy in the circle at the lower left of he composition. Here he has drawn (with the tag line “Last Cheap Thrill”), a man ogling a woman to the point of eyes-popping-out intensity, while their clothes disintegrate in a toxic firestorm. The barbarity of a nuclear blast is underscored here by Crumb’s subtle comic details in the writing and drawing, bringing to mind the scatological humor of James Gillray’s late-eighteenth-century etchings.
Mark Pascale is an Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, at the Art Institute of Chicago and Adjunct Professor at SAIC.
To see the drawing, or any other work on paper of Western origin, you must make an appointment in the Jean and Steven Goldman Study Center in the Department of Prints and Drawings. Study room hours are Tuesday through Friday, 1:30 - 4:15 p.m., and can be made by calling 312-443-3660, by email at [email protected], or by stopping by in person.
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