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A wonderful window into Crumb’s world of bodies
and ideas, art and beauty.
Art & Beauty is at once a satirical take on aesthetics and a continued
exploration of Crumb’s subversion of sexuality and mainstream
values. Drawings of women in positions ranging from lascivious to
modest or mid-sport are accompanied by quotations from artists
like Leonardo da Vinci, George Grosz, William de Kooning, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, and Harvey Kurtzman. Mining his own obsessions
and fantasies, Crumb reimagines the history of art, challenging
notions of beauty, along with society’s mores and expectations of
propriety around the female form. The images appeal to a mostly
erotic sensibility, which in turn is undercut by the inclusion of
sometimes ironic and frequently philosophical prose. The images
drag philosophy back down to earth, while the writing challenges
the pure eroticism of Crumb’s drawings.
Presenting all three issues of the series in one book, Art &
Beauty is arranged chronologically, from the earliest images in the
1990s to drawings completed in 2016. Paul Morris, longtime gallerist
and supporter of Crumb’s practice, writes an introduction that contextualizes this body of work and the artist’s career.