Collection: Robert Crumb

Robert Crumb (born 1943, Philadelphia) is an American cartoonist and illustrator whose work established the visual and editorial language of the underground comix movement from the late 1960s onwards. Self-publishing from San Francisco through Zap Comix and a network of small-press titles, Crumb developed a densely cross-hatched drawing style and a cast of recurring characters — Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl, the Keep on Truckin’ figure — that became among the most recognisable images in American popular culture while remaining resolutely outside its mainstream.

Crumb’s work is simultaneously confessional, satirical, obscene and formally exacting. His draftsmanship draws on nineteenth-century illustration, early jazz and blues record sleeves, and the vernacular graphics of American commercial culture, recombining them into a mode of cartooning that is both deeply personal and historically literate. His record cover designs, sketchbooks, magazine contributions and artist books have been collected and exhibited internationally, and his work has entered major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Crumb moved to France in 1991, where he continues to live and work. Publications produced in connection with his practice — comix, catalogues, illustrated books, printed ephemera — document one of the most sustained and influential careers in the history of American drawing.