In 1996, Robert Crumb (popularly known as R. Crumb), one of the most acclaimed comics artists of the 1960s underground comics movement, released a series of full-page black-and-white drawings as a one-volume collection called Art and Beauty Magazine, originally published by Kitchen Sink Press. A second volume of Art and Beauty drawings was published in 2003 by Fantagraphics.
In July, David Zwirner Books, the publishing division of David Zwirner Gallery, a major New York City contemporary art dealer, will publish a complete hardcover edition of Art and Beauty Magazine that will collect the previous two volumes, as well as a third volume of drawings done for the series that have never been published.
Although not comics, the drawings in Art and Beauty Magazine are classic Crumb renditions: full-figured women, clothed and nude, rendered in bold lines and detailed crosshatching that vividly delineate their forms. Needless to say, the women—among them his wife, Aline; friends; athletes; and photos of Crumb-proportioned strangers—are spectacularly voluptuous, drawn doing everything from sitting around the house to contorting themselves into impossible poses.
Read more at Publishers Weekly.