ROBERT CRUMB AND REMBRANDT

Robert Crumb is known as an uncompromising, honest writer and artist. He is also of course known as one of the most unique cartoonists of the last century. He is also a fantastic technician in realistic, representational drawing.

Crumb’s characters fall on a wide spectrum of styles, from very cartoony (Mr. Natural, Keep On Truckin’) to richly human and realistic (Blues musicians, Genesis). The drawings on the realistic end of the spectrum are the ones that I am focusing on here. These drawings employ that unique “Crumb” style of comic book ink hatching—a method that yields forms that are warm and round and soft at a distance, but up close are scratchy, anxious, and unordered.

The technical aspect of Rembrandt’s drawings and etchings are similar, though they are often even more unordered and dense. Rembrandt’s scratchiness was often due to pieces being rendered in drypoint, a method that naturally produces this feel. I suspect that Crumb was directly influenced at some stage in his development and his aesthetic might be, at least partly, the result of his closely studying images rendered by Rembrandt and others in drypoint.

Obviously, this comparison is a technical one, but there is a clear similarity in content here too. Both artists created characters that are emotionally complex; at the risk of reducing them I would call them strong and sad and often with a comical quality. They feel to me like the characters in the background of a George Grosz piece or a Dostoyevsky novel.