Three Issues, One Book: R. Crumb’s Art and Beauty Out Now

Robert Crumb is an American artist and cartoonist, a central figure in the underground comix movement who has worked across comics, drawing, and print since the 1960s.

• The Fantagraphics edition gathers all three issues chronologically, from the 1990s to 2016

Released April 21, 2026 by Fantagraphics, Art and Beauty: Drawings by R. Crumb brings together all three issues of the series in a single volume, arranged chronologically from the earliest drawings made in the 1990s through work completed in 2016.

Women appear throughout in varied states: posed, clothed, nude, active. Quotations from Leonardo da Vinci, William de Kooning, George Grosz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harvey Kurtzman run alongside the drawings, creating a tension the book does not resolve. Philosophy and eroticism occupy the same page without reconciling; neither cancels the other out.

The series positions itself as a form of satirical art criticism, with Crumb treating the history of aesthetics and the female form as related subjects, both available for examination on his own terms. The book functions simultaneously as an anthology of personal obsession and a mock survey of received ideas about beauty and propriety.

An introduction by Paul Morris, a gallerist with a longstanding connection to Crumb‘s work, frames the collected material within the broader context of the artist’s career.

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