Sans espoir

Behind the mastery of a style identifiable at first glance, made of classicism and grotesqueness, Robert Crumb has always nourished a protean inspiration. If we know the animal vein of Fritz the cat or the pornographic crapuleries of Snoid, the psychedelic pranks of Mister Natural or the prophetic pamphlets in which Crumb stages himself, we must not forget that throughout his career he has been the chronicler of the lost and the disinherited.
He has never ceased to look with a sharp eye – sometimes ironic, more often empathetic – at the victims of a system of which he says he himself is the degenerate child. Crumb brings together all the neuroses and alienations of modern America in a gloomy and grating carousel. He paints idealists condemned to defeat, the middle classes forgetting themselves in television mindlessness, whites intoxicated by the belief of their superiority, blacks reduced to caricatures, women subjected to male desire and domestic frustration, males conditioned to crush their fellows or to crawl in self-loathing…
Each of these portraits draws the morbid subconscious of an America of which Crumb knows he is the ordinary product. Not hesitating to take himself as a model for what he denounces, he pokes fun at the impulses and patterns that govern us. And if the attempts to deviate from this path seem doomed to failure, they remain the only way to straighten out our heads.