Long journey seeking respect for Kominsky-Crumb
Aline Kominsky-Crumb, wife of Robert Crumb, talks about her life with the comics
It’s long way, literally and figuratively, from growing up Jewish in a lower-middle-class tract suburb in Long Island to a village in Provence where the locals know you as the septuagenarian yet youthful yoga-teaching grandmother and “the lady with the nicest balconies.”
For Aline Kominsky-Crumb, née Goldsmith, those wildly distinct start- and end-points are just a hint of a unique generational odyssey.
Having fled at the earliest opportunity what she calls her “f—ed up upbringing,” the girl self-nicknamed Bunch (chosen partly because “it sounded kind of disgusting ”) spent her late teenage years in Lower Manhattan, studying fine art at Cooper Union — “I was paying $35 a month rent!,” she marvelled on the phone from France last week — and generally living the turned-on hippie ethos.
For a time, she was a camp follower of East Village beatnik band The Fugs, before making her way to San Francisco, where she found her first artistic niche among a feminist artists’ collective and met her future husband, the underground comics legend Robert Crumb. (“It was an instant soulmate thing,” she recalled.)
The couple lived in a state of rural-bohemia poverty that eased in ensuing years as Crumb’s standing in the fine-art world rose to the point where the sale of some of his sketchbooks was sufficient to finance their move to France, where they have lived since 1993.
Along the way, KominskyCrumb carved her own identity as an unflinchingly autobiographical, no-holds-barred comics artist, one whose work had no real precedent in popular culture. But the ride wasn’t smooth. A parallel could be drawn with Yoko Ono: an artist whose expressionist style can be lazily mistaken for untutored sloppiness becomes associated
with an iconic established artist and the object of an opprobrium that in hindsight clearly came down to sexism (and in Ono’s case, racism, too).
“A lot of people were very contemptuous of me and thought I was pushing my way into Robert’s work,” Kominsky-Crumb recalled. “I got a lot of hate mail, but I used it as fodder for my mill.”
Happily, like Ono, KominskyCrumb has seen her critical standing slowly but surely approach her husband’s, her reputation growing along with that of the form she practises. An unquestioned inspiration to a generation of woman cartoonists, she has found broader popular recognition elusive, but the new Love That Bunch: Food, Sex, Death, Pain, Romance, Joy (Drawn & Quarterly, 212 pages, $32.95) ought to be a corrective to that relative neglect.
A reissue of a Bildungsroman collection first published in 1990 with the addition of a major 40-page update, the book makes good on its subtitle list, offering a rich dose of what introductory essayist Hillary Chute calls the artist’s “unfettered access.” Remarkably, it currently stands as her only solo work in print.
A thread connecting all of Kominsky-Crumb’s work, and a quality especially evident in Love That Bunch, is the dynamic tension between self-deprecation and self-assurance. Yes, she’s hard on herself, but it takes real personal strength to reveal so much.
“That was one of my arguments with the early feminists — that to learn to reveal your weaknesses and ugliness, you have to feel OK about yourself,” she said. “They thought I was being a poor role model. They didn’t understand that it’s a gift to other people, to allow them to get rid of it and live with it better. Even now, some people will say ‘Why do you draw yourself so ugly? Do you really feel that bad about yourself ?’ I say: ‘Not really, but I’ve been there and I’ve lived through those feelings. Everybody does sometimes.’ I feel confident enough to expose that about myself and be willing to live with the results of it.”
More than once KominskyCrumb has remarked that being so closely associated with Robert Crumb has been both a blessing and a curse. These days, surely, it’s more the former than the latter?
“Well, it always has two sides,” she said. “It turned me off to fame and even to success; it made me want to just do my art and be ignored, because I saw that (fame) was really difficult for Robert to deal with.
“On the other hand, I’ve had a lot of perks. In the most banal terms, I’ve profited by having a much more prosperous life, because he makes a lot more money than I do. I’m not complaining about that,” she said with a laugh. “He’s also just a great guy. Not that we haven’t had our own adventures, but we have this spiritual connection that is very deep, that has always been there and always will be there.”
With the distance of 50 years, Kominsky-Crumb often finds herself reflecting on the legacy of the 1960s counterculture that nurtured her and her husband, acknowledging “how lucky we were to be young then” while ruing the “harsh, expensive, competitive world” faced by aspiring artists today.
“Our grandkids and other young people ask us about that era,” she said, “and we tell them ‘It really was as good as you think.’ It was a magical period, a window of opportunity that closed afterward, and it profoundly changed my values. I never went back to being the bourgeois, spoiled Long Island girl that I was before. I’ve lived a bohemian, eccentric, individual life ever since. Robert and I have been able to live a reality that we created ourselves.”
And what of the expat life? As a U.S. citizen in France does she ever find herself in the role of explainer/defender of her old home, especially given the current climate?
“Not really. There are only 1,500 people in our village, after all. My daughter married a French guy, my grandchildren speak French. I’m very integrated into the community. They know I don’t live in America and they know I would never vote for Donald Trump.”