He has long been championing women who are solid and strong, women with thick limbs, bulging thigh muscles, and big bottoms pictured lifting weights or eating fast food, they are still feminine and hypersexual. Beyond analyzing Crumb’s unmistakable sexual fetishes, his drawings do pose a challenge to the canon of “hot” or “sexy” women in contemporary culture: His women aren’t super-skinny waifs but rather powerful, imposing figures. It’s important to remember when considering how Crumb represents these women that he is a cartoonist, and his comics are looking to amuse as much as arouse. They do not conform to a prescribed body type, but rather via his pencil, these women are transformed into Crumb’s ideal. He intentionally sexualizes his muses-from his wife Aline, to famous athletes like Serena Williams and Tonja Buford-Bailey. Looking at the works of “Art & Beauty,” there’s no doubt that, for Crumb, drawing women is still a turn-on. They are still very beautiful, voluptuous women, but the cast has grown immensely through technology.” These works are complicated by the fact that Crumb is now drawing from women’s own portrayals of themselves. “There are certainly images like that of Coco (a reality TV star) that come from the media, but now he is working from images shot on the street. “The biggest difference for me is that Robert is now working from pictures sent to him from cell phones,” says art dealer Paul Morris, who first met Crumb in 1999. The women Crumb has chosen as subjects for Art & Beauty Magazine over the years-including famous sports stars, his wife, and TV stars-largely haven’t changed, but an interesting addition to his references in the new volume include selfies sent to him by women. In this context, Crumb’s obsessive drawings of women hardly seem perverse. Every image we encounter of a woman’s body, it seems, has a currency in the current cultural condition. The consumer-based economy we live in, which depends so heavily on the pressure to conform to beauty standards (no matter what they are), has hardly improved since 1990-the year author Naomi Wolf pointed out this correlation in her seminal work The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. This month alone, debates have raged over portrayals of female celebrities in the media-from Amy Schumer’s rebuttal to Glamour’s “plus size” issue to Kerry Washington’s distaste for her airbrushed AdWeek cover and Jennifer Lawrence’s Harper’s interview in which she called out the film industry for its view on body types. In the two decades that have passed since Crumb started Art & Beauty, the canons of female beauty have diversified, but now perhaps more than ever, our society is obsessed with policing, controlling, defining, and subduing women’s bodies. In addition to the exhibition and the release of the new Art & Beauty Magazine, Number 3 (2016), David Zwirner Books is also publishing all three volumes as a single book, Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. The show, “Art & Beauty,” presents selected drawings from the three volumes of Art & Beauty Magazine, which was inspired by his personal collection of a 1920s top-shelf magazine of the same name. Crumb’s portrayals of women in 2016 are still deeply divisive, but they also interact in an intriguing new way with the current discourse on beauty.Īt David Zwirner in Mayfair, London, Crumb’s catalogue of drawings of women from 1990 to 2016, from his “Art & Beauty” magazine series, are presented together in an exhibition, including the project’s third volume, which is now being shown to the public for the first time. Crumb), continues to draw them prolifically and passionately, and with the same provocative appeal as at the start of his career as a cartoonist in the 1960s. At the age of 72, the artist (who goes by the pen name R.
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