![]() ![]() A sketch of a woman in a bikini and sunglasses, wearing a smile and with her hands in the air, looks like a GTA 5 loading screen from a parallel, purely hand-drawn universe. ![]() An image of a gymnast, bum raised high in a handstand, makes my buttocks clench in empathy. A tracing of Serena Williams, a moment before she strikes down a serve, with her sportswear bunching up, is perfect in its portrayal of athleticism as the ultimate in eroticism. I love Crumb’s shapes I love the women he renders bulbous, fleshy and muscular. ![]() The exhibition features pieces from across the decades, mostly without the commentary that accompanies each vignette in the printed volume. Volume two was published in 2003, and now volume three rounds off a luxe coffee-table style compliation of the works, published by David Zwirner Books. Named after a real-life publication he remembered from his youth, Crumb’s version of Art & Beauty featured drawings of women engaging in a range of catalog-style activities, all of them rendered in his trademark exaggerated shapeliness. In 1996 Kitchen Sink Press published Art & Beauty magazine by R Crumb, the underground comix legend famed for his psychosexual comic strips that satirised American life. It’s taken hours of research, a viewing of Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb, and two, already-binned thousand-word essays for me to get to this: I like the images that R Crumb has created of women in Art & Beauty, but they have an edge of awfulness. I’ve actually, god forbid, had to do a bit of thinking. But the David Zwirner gallery’s exhibition of R Crumb’s Art & Beauty has given me a bit of a psychic battering. Crumb is tall, thin, bespectacled and self-effacing, preferring to let his work speak for itself but eventually warming to your own enthusiasm and rapping with great articulateness.I’m the sort of gal that can normally spin an opinion of an event, gig or exhibition before the white wine at the press view has come up to room temperature. But the main ingredient of both magazines is Crumb, whose cartoon style is a fantastic synthesis of all that was best in the history of American cartooning-Popeye, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Little Orphan Annie-with the conviction and integrity of a comic artist of the Thirties or Forties only now coming to the surface.Ĭrumb’s studio-the back room of a second-story Victorian flat a block away from the ruins of Haight Street-is a cluttered compendium of pop relics: Old and new posters, food containers, toys, tops, bubble-gum cards which he drew during an earlier career as a free-lance commercial artist. Clay Wilson), who are as attuned to one another’s work and receptive to mutual influence as a tightly integrated band. Zap is the most effective publication of the underground comic renaissance thus far, with the possible exception of Snatch Zap has been removed from sale in at least three cities (Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Boston) since the first issue came out last March, but a Berkeley book dealer was recently busted for selling Snatch almost as soon as it hit the stands.Ī strong ingredient in Zap’s success is the uncanny cohesiveness of its four major artists (Crumb, Moscoso, Griffin and S. ![]() Natural, and also originator of a more recent comic book called “Snatch.”Ĭrumb (it’s his real name), 25 years old and entirely self-taught, a former designer of comic greetings and bubble-gum cards, is a pioneer and near legendary figure of the underground comic renaissance which is spawning new publications all over the country, the biggest revolution in pop art since the rock dance poster. Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, two of Zap’s four regular contributors, were gathered in the studio of Robert Crumb, designer of the cover cartoon, Zap’s founder and presiding genius, creator of Angelfood McSpade and Mr. It’s more like the acid vision I had.” The scene was an editorial conference for Zap Comix, the proof a cover for Zap Zero, which is being published simultaneously with Zap No. “It works better than the dick plugged into his ass. He was surrounded by a burst of yellow that paled out over a blue ground into a billious green. The three artists were examining a cover proof sheet, a cartoon drawing of a bristly male nude suspended in foetal position, his genitals a long electric cord plugged into a wall socket. ![]()
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