Robert Crumb

Boswell’s London and Other Diaries

curated by Martin Schlombs, The Fine Art Group

13th November 2025 - 31st January 2026

at 63 Kinnerton Street, London, SW1X 8ED

CLICK HERE to view the exhibition catalogue

CASSIUS&Co. presents Robert Crumb: Boswell’s London and Other Diaries, curated by Martin Schlombs, opening on Thursday 13th November at 63 Kinnerton Street, London, SW1X 8ED. This is the first exhibition in London dedicated to the artist since Robert Crumb: Art & Beauty at David Zwirner Gallery in 2016.

The discovery of James Boswell’s London Journal (1762), which had been hidden among his private papers and thus spared the censorship of his relatives, was a revelation to Robert Crumb, caustic draughtsman of the counterculture of the 1960s. Here he found not only a bawdy satire of a place and time that reflected his own work, but in the figure of Boswell himself a kindred spirit, spiritually caught between the ‘high’ concerns of his literary and cultural milieu and the ‘low’ of his own guttural, fiendishly hedonistic desire.

The five-part set of drawings Crumb made to illustrate Boswell’s journal, which mark his first mature foray into adapting a literary work, forms the heart and basis of this exhibition. Presented in full alongside a group of more personally diaristic drawings, this exhibition argues for a reassessment of Crumb the artist, one that looks past his notorious salaciousness to see one of the finest draughtsmen and cultural commentators of his century. What emerges is not the work of a devious pornographer but an insightful, anxious and disarmingly self-aware man of his time, one who compulsively confesses himself with abject honesty, and in doing so, can’t help but skewer the society that produced him.

A fully-illustrated catalogue with an introduction by curator Martin Schlombs will be published alongside the exhibition. Robert Crumb: Boswell’s London and Other Diaries will be presented alongside a bookshelf exhibition about James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, and the cultural history of satire. Please email fb@cassiusandco.com if you would like to receive a digital preview and/ or a printed copy of the exhibition’s catalogue.