In a talk that evening she will be hailed as a feminist pioneer. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the GuardianĪ few miles away from Crumb’s pumped-up fantasy women, Aline’s work is on display at the House of Illustration, as part of an exhibition of work by female comic artists. Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb at home in France. They have a daughter Sophie, now a comics artist herself. When he became successful in the 1960s with creations such as Fritz the Cat or Mr Natural, the mystic druid, “certain eccentric kinds of women got interested in me.” One of them was his first wife, Dana Morgan, and together, they hawked “cheap, stapled comics” on the streets: “My wife was pregnant and we sold them out of a baby pram.” In 1978, he was married a second time, to Aline, making it a condition of their relationship that he could not be monogamous. I was very much in pain about being this outcast, but it freed me to drop that Hollywood ideal and pursue the people that I thought attractive.” But it fired me to develop my own aesthetic. “During adolescence I couldn’t fit in, and it was very, very painful. The men who are the most charming are often the most contemptuous If everybody’s walking forward, I want to walk backwards. I always felt there’s something odd and off about my nervous system. My wife says sometimes I’m too much so – born weird. He traces this fetish back to his childhood, explaining morosely: “I was always a contrarian. Part of the paradox of Crumb’s art is that the objects of his erotic fixation are often dynamic, powerful women, depicted in gymnastics or yoga or sport. Photograph: Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner, New York/London His insistence that “I don’t care what colour they are” is complicated by another caption beneath a blonde gymnast astride a Swiss exercise ball: “The lovely Coco is renowned the world over as a white girl who is the proud possessor of a striking physical attribute most often claimed by women of African descent.”Īnother illustration by Crumb from Art & Beauty magazine. The fetish is not with Serena Williams as tennis champion so much as with her “spectacular back end”. It’s an extreme image, arresting and disturbing, and when I say as much he responds a little defensively: “It was traced from a photograph.” The inscription below the picture reads: “A HIGHLY SATISFYING CHALLENGE FOR THE ARTIST’S SKILLS ARE THE GLEAMING HIGHLIGHTS ON THE RESPLENDENT CONTOURS OF TENNIS CHAMPION SERENA WILLIAM AS SHE APPEARED ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF THE US OPEN …” Which brings us to that picture of Serena Williams, caught mid-smash at Flushing Meadow in 2002, with her breasts and backside jutting from a black Lycra catsuit. These decorously posed tableaux speak to Crumb’s less decorous fascination with the bodies of black women. Some of its pictures are copied directly from vintage magazines – not least two ethnographic images, Handsome Women of the Formidable Zulu Race, in the second volume, and Three African Women from Brazzaville, Congo, in the third. Robert Crumb’s 2002 drawing of Serena Williams. Published in 19, with the third volume yet to hit the streets, the project was inspired by a soft porn magazine of the 1920s that smuggled risque photographs past the censor under the titular fig leaf Art & Beauty Magazine for Art Lovers and Art Students. Or, as Crumb says when he finally shuffles in, clad in funereal black and wearing his trademark wire glasses: “The dirt’s on the wall.” At 72, he is a paler, frailer version of the priapic nerd of more than half a century of self-portraits.Īrt & Beauty showcases a less well-known side of him: the lifelong junk shop rummager and connoisseur of vintage media, which he values for the craftsmanship of “the golden age of graphic art”. You are drawn into the work and you are judging yourself as you look at it.” “There’s something irreconcilable at the heart of the work that doesn’t resolve towards a single vision of beauty, and which is at odds with much contemporary art. “What’s exciting about the work is his openness to his own desire and erotics,” he enthuses. At 72, he is a paler, frailer version of the priapric nerd of the self-portraitsĪs we wait for the great man to arrive, Lucas Zwirner, the 25-year-old editor of the gallery’s publishing outlet, gives a learned explanation of the appeal of Crumb’s work to a new generation. One collaboration, unprecedented in the history of comics or indeed any art, had husband and wife each drawing themselves in the throes of sex with each other. It is Robert, not Aline, who I have come to interview, and whose pictures are on sale at a starting price of $30,000 (£20,800), but their art is so intertwined that it’s hard to understand either in isolation.
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