The American cartoonist Robert Crumb's first U.K. solo exhibition in over a decade opens to the public in London on Friday—and features pictures from the latest volume of his "Art and Beauty" magazine series, which has previously seen Crumb faithfully reproduce imagery of women taken from mass media or life studies. Now, he adds cellphone street photos and his fans' selfies to his wellsprings of inspiration.
"The source material is evolving," says the art dealer Paul Morris, the founding director of New York's Armory Show and a longtime friend of Crumb's, who wrote the introduction to "Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. Crumb," a collected volume published to coincide with David Zwirner's show here. "Now, Robert is receiving images from friends and family from their phones. So you're getting a much larger cast of characters to work from, and it's also more street photography—a little bit of Weegee infused into it."
The exhibition, spread across two floors, mostly sees 72-year-old Crumb pay homage to a variety of women, including the muscular, statuesque ones with whose figures he has long been obsessed. Subjects include musician Eden Brower, a member of the country-blues group Eden and John's East River String Band, with whom Crumb sometimes plays mandolin, and the tennis player Serena Williams, pictured on a public beach in a bikini with her hands held aloft. A pair of pen-and-ink studies of a semi-naked model taking selfies were received via a message on the artist's website. "The girl depicted took these 'selfies' in a mirror, having seen the many published works of the artist," writes Crumb in blocky caps on the page next to her. "She ended with, 'It would be a big pleasure to be a part of your art.' In reply we can only say, the pleasure is ours."
"It might be fascinating for him to have someone contemplating themselves and taking those pictures," Morris adds. "There is something of an eroticized moment when you're watching somebody else getting turned on by themselves, so to speak."
Crumb's talent for crosshatching complements his thick ink outlines, which round away the photorealism of his sources, lending them a simplified, exaggerated form. According to the gallery, "Art & Beauty" is named after "a catalog published during the 1920s and 1930s featuring semi-erotic images of life models for art lovers." Next to his pictures, Crumb has copied quotations from other artists, including Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol, and composed overwrought descriptions of his own draftsmanship, mocking the intellectualization of erotica and pop culture. "Behold this disgusting display, vividly captured by some alert photographer, of unruly mob celebrity worship," he writes of Lady Gaga, apparently crowd-surfing at the music festival Lollapalooza in Chicago in 2010.
Morris has worked with Crumb since 1999 and says the artist, who built his reputation on irreverence and countercultural comics, remains pertinent, highlighting the potential influence of his output on American painters including Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin. "The content and context of his work has been influential for many years," he says. "He stays relevant because he doesn't hide anything. As he evolves through time, so do his images."