Sophie Crumb, 'crazy artist' and daughter of R., has new book and exhibit
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/20101121_Sophie_Crumb___crazy_artist__and_daughter_of_R___has_new_book_and_exhibit.html
Nov. 21, 2010
By Dan DeLuca
NEW YORK - Sophie Crumb and her father, R., sit side-by-side in a
Lower East Side art gallery, paging through self- and family
portraits that Sophie began drawing when she was 2 years old.
R. is short for Robert, the given name of the thick-spectacled
Philadelphia-born artist known more for giving birth to underground
comics than for being the father of Sophie.
The elder Crumb, 67, with a scraggly beard, is admiring a tender
rendering his 29-year-old daughter did last year of her husband,
Simon, asleep with their son, Elie, in his arms, drawn the day she gave birth.
Sophie flips the page. She points to a sketch she did in 1992, two
years after she moved to France with her father and mother, Aline
Kominsky-Crumb, who is also a comics artist. It shows a blond
11-year-old munching a burrito while a Gallic friend wonders, "Vat is
sis weird American thingue??"
Her father, the creator of such sprung-from-the-subconscious
counterculture icons as Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat, points with
pride to a pencil drawing his daughter did when she was barely 3:
"Here's the first one with genitalia."
The pictures are included in Sophie's first book, Sophie Crumb:
Evolution of a Crazy Artist, published in hardback by W.W. Norton this month.
The Crumbs live half an hour apart in the south of France. They moved
to the Languedoc-Roussillon region, which is "like the Northern
California of France," Sophie says, "because my mother was afraid I
was going to turn into a Valley Girl."
Father and daughter have crossed the Atlantic to talk up Evolution,
which contains 271 pages of drawings and comics. The sketchbook diary
traces the life of the precocious offspring of encouraging, eccentric
artist parents through her troubled adolescence and young adulthood.
Its release coincides with Sophie's Manhattan gallery show at the
DCKT Contemporary, where her expressionistic self-portraits, lifelike
ballpoint-pen drawings, and cartoons inspired by French celebrity
tabloids will be hung through Dec. 30.
The book, Sophie says, "was me and my parents' idea." The cover shows
four faces of Sophie, from ages 2½ to 27, and gives editing credit to
S., A., & R. Crumb.
"Sophie was a prolific artist starting at a very early age," Aline
writes in her foreword. "How much of this is genetic and how much is
behavioral I have no idea. Robert and I were drawing comics more or
less daily, so for Sophie drawing must have seemed the natural thing to do."
"We always wanted to do something with all this work," Sophie says.
She quickly corrects herself: "It's not even work. It was done for
pleasure. It's free and spontaneous and wacky and crazy. That's why
the word crazy is in the title."
Robert says, "I had never seen a book that follows an artist from
their earliest drawings through every stage in prime adulthood. And
she did so much drawing that it was really easy to pick interesting stuff."
In his foreword, Robert - whose reputation is again ascendant since
Norton's 2009 publication of his dazzlingly illustrated The Book of
Genesis - writes that Evolution's idea is not so much to show the
talents of "an exceptionally gifted artist." It's "a highly revealing
visual record. One can look at this book as a sort of clinical study,
a psychological textbook."
As a toddler, Sophie took to drawing "like a duck takes to water,"
her father says. Sophie adds, "He was into it, that's what made it so
much fun. And because he's such a compulsive archivist, there was all
this work. Just a huge pile of it."
At home, the daughter says, her famous father was "the mommy." That's
partly because Crumb (who accidentally spills coffee on his
daughter's book during the interview - "Sorry," he says,
self-mockingly, "it goes with the genius.") is not well-equipped for
the modern world.
"He doesn't drive, he can't swim, he doesn't know how to go on the
computer," Sophie says, affectionately mocking. Her mother - with
whom R. is collaborating on a new book of comics - handled practical
matters. Her father was free to read his daughter Popeye and Little
Lulu comics, and play Barbies with her, that is, when he wasn't
obsessively cataloging his collection of 78 r.p.m. blues, jazz, and
country records from the 1920s and '30s.
Sophie, who's dressed all in black and has a fresh tattoo of her
son's name on her left forearm, next to one of Dorothy Parker's poem
"Résumé," calls her parents "so neurotic and self-analytical." The
Crumb family has always been a "little isolated unit of weirdness,"
Robert admits.
That was clear from Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary Crumb, which
focused on a disturbed family history that began in South
Philadelphia. There, Crumb and his brother Charles (who committed
suicide in 1992) and their youngest brother Maxon created an
alt-comics universe in response to life with a violently abusive father.
The Crumbs moved when Robert was 7, but he retained connections while
living in San Francisco in the 1960s. "Brian Zahn at Yarrowstalks," a
Philadelphia alternative paper, "was the first guy to actually offer
me a total venue of my own stuff," Robert says.
When Crumb talks about the city of his birth, it is with nostalgia
for what's been lost, even if it's a garbage dump near his house.
"When I go back it's not the same city," he says. "It's not the
Philadelphia I remember."
Sophie is seen sketching away in Crumb, and director Zwigoff employed
her in his 2001 movie Ghost World, based on Daniel Clowes' comic. She
did the drawings for Enid, the alienated teen played by Thora Birch.
The young artist's family name has opened doors. But following in the
footsteps of "The Legend," as she refers to her father in Evolution,
has also been a burden. As a teenager she sometimes signed her work
Sophie "Miette," which means crumb in French.
Evolution makes obvious how well she can draw, but also shows her
thrashing about for a style of her own.
She lived in Brooklyn in the mid-2000s, apprenticing in a tattoo shop
and selling her Belly Button Comics on the street. These days,
though, she concentrates on portraits and sketchbook renderings.
"Whenever I tried to do anything for anyone else," she says, "there
was too much conflicting pressure. It was too hard. But when I drew
for myself, it was always a pleasure."
"Dealing with being the daughter of 'The Genius,' " she says, "messed
with me when I was a teenager, of course, when I was trying to create
my identity."
"But I realize I don't want to be this so-called professional artist.
. . . I don't want to become like him. I don't want to sacrifice my
whole life to become a cartoonist genius. I just want to keep living
my life and drawing."
Her father approves. "I like your attitude," he says. "I wouldn't
want you to be like me, either."
Sophie gets up to help with the hanging of her show. Her father looks
around the gallery. "I'm proud," he says. "I'm deeply impressed with
her artwork. But I'm also uneasy.
"She says she feels most comfortable sitting in her room drawing in
her sketchbook. But you can't make a living doing that. I was
actually more entrepreneurial than she is. I had a little of that in
me. I was lucky, too. It was the hippie times, the time was right.
"It's hard for artists. Real artists, not hustling artists. And she's
not a hustling artist. She's the real thing. And you've got to use
that talent and apply it somehow. The world is a rough place."
He pauses, and stops fretting. "But she's smart. She'll figure it out."
--
Contact staff writer and music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or
[email protected]
.
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