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.”...