Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I strongly recommend the documentary. But "a little off" is an understatement. By the time of the documentary, his highly intelligent brother Charles is still living with his amphetamine-addicted mother in his late 40ies and rarely leaves his childhood bedroom. He admits on camera that he has "homosexual pedophiliac tendencies" and fantasized about killing Robert as a teenager, and complains that he cannot have an erection anymore because of his medication. Tragically, Charles killed himself shortly after filming of the documentary wrapped. Crumbs other brother Maxon [0], an accomplished and highly talented painter who earns money as a beggar on the streets, tries to find some peace of mind by living a zen-like life in celibacy, in a decrepit hotel room, full of meditation on a bed of nails, and is struggling with his intense sexual desire, several sexual harassment suits, and the fact that he cannot physically have sex, because the pleasure is so intense for him that it triggers epileptic seizures. All three brothers appear to have problems with extreme sexual desire, and Robert is the only one who seems to be able to function at all, although the documentary shows him several times in a trance-like, babbling state induced by the sight of a woman (in older age, he once said in an interview that he is "no longer a slave to a raging libido" [1]).

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Still-in-the-sh...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/07/robert-crumb-i...

Little mentioned is the fact that the three crumb brothers had two sisters. Neither of them agreed to take part in the movie, and very little is known about them.

One of them reportedly declined to take part because of his "crimes against women".

Wasn't one of the brothers also a (heterosexual) stalker with an Asian fetish and a habit of drawing art about it? Presumably that was Maxon. It's been a long time since I've seen the documentary.

TFA is also frankly pretty underhanded in talking up Crumb's love of inter-war blues recordings while saying very little about his forays into anti-black racism, including one example which is so notorious that the Crumb documentary confronts him directly about it.

Or more directly, his art often portrayed black people in caricature.

>> his art often portrayed black people in caricature

His art often portrayed people in caricature.

If the subjects are rarely white and mostly black, is it not fair to say that he often portrayed black people in caricature?

Similar to saying 'Van Gogh often painted sunflowers' instead of 'Van Gogh often painted flowers'.

A majority of Van Gogh's flower painting are not of sunflowers.

A majority of Robert Crumbs paintings are not caricatures, but he did paint caricatures and the subjects were often black.

There's a fuzzy but very real distinction between caricature in general and frankly racist caricature. Quite a few of Crumb's drawings of black people have been clearly over that line, and (polite warning) it would be pretty rash to try to deny that.

That is putting it mildly. Crumbs art is ridiculously over the top offensive.

Of course taboo-breaking was the point of underground comics.

the art was published underground because plenty of it was plenty offensive to lots of groups of people. .. that was the intention completely. Lots of R Crumb's art was controversial and outrageous by definition. Lots of reasonable and caring people had a lot of concern, volunteer censors appeared from many corners with torches and brimstone, and the art was published anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com