The cartoonist Robert Crumb is described in a new biography as “misanthropic.” In his own work, he typically characterizes his personality as an unpleasant cocktail of rage, lust, and social ineptitude. But he was perfectly affable the other day, during a visit to the Whitney Museum. The occasion was a private viewing of prints and drawings, including a couple of his own that he hadn’t seen in decades. All were displayed in an austere room designed for examining art works—an oddly formal space for an encounter with one’s past.
The eighty-one-year-old Crumb, dressed in a long dark coat and his trademark fedora and Coke-bottle glasses, looked over his drawings as if trying to place old acquaintances at a party. His works were on hand in preparation for an exhibit that is scheduled to open this fall, “Sixties Surreal,” which will connect the switched-on art of that decade to the dreamier Surrealism of the nineteen-thirties and forties. One drawing, titled “Head #1,” dates from 1967, when Crumb’s underground comics—the era’s term of art—began making their way from Haight-Ashbury to head shops and hippie bookstores across the country.