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. Photograph: Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner, New York/London 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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