Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393079961 ISBN 13: 9780393079968

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

A groundbreaking work of striking originality that charts a young artist's life through her own drawings-from toddlerhood to motherhood.

Sophie Crumb's startlingly expressive drawings track her development as an artist from age two to twenty-eight. Sifting through dozens of their daughter's remarkable sketchbooks, our generation's most celebrated graphic artists have, with their only child, Sophie, now selected more than three hundred paintings and drawings that depict her artistic and psychological maturation. Revealing how an original artistic sensibility is both innate and nurtured, the book features six separate developmental stages, including Sophie's earliest drawings, the elaborate fantasy world of her childhood, her late adolescent rebellion, and her coming of age in the milieu of the Paris circus world and New York's "seventh circle of hell." The drawings from her early twenties―of tattoo artists, dangerous men―reflect a personal anguish that finally ends with her becoming a mother and creating a family of her own. Illuminating and intimate, this book is a dramatic yet subtle statement on the evolution of personality as seen through art. Four-color illustrations throughout

About this title

About the Author:

Sophie Crumb has collaborated with her parents on Dirty Laundry Comics and has produced her own series, Bellybutton Comix. A practicing tattoo artist, she lives in the south of France with her husband and baby boy, Eli.

Aline Crumb is an American underground comics artist and the author of Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir. She lives in southern France.

Born in Philadelphia, R. Crumb is the author of numerous comic works and one of the pioneers of underground comics and arguably one of the most famous cartoonists in history. His books include The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, and many more. He lives in the south of France with his wife, the artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

From Publishers Weekly:

Sophie Crumb's slender body of published comics so far identifies her as an interesting--but still mostly promising--young cartoonist. Questions about this compilation of childhood and sketchbook drawings are both unavoidable and acknowledged. In their twin introductions, Sophie's parents (and co-editors) Robert and Aline Kominsky-Crumb position this book as something other than "Crumbsploitation," praising their daughter's artwork and suggesting that this chronological, lifelong sketchbook anthology constitutes a unique and fascinating document of personal and artistic development. The book satisfies somewhat on these counts. Sophie's earliest work includes very advanced preschool art, and she remains continuously prolific. However, to distance this work from her family background denies part of the reason for her early, sustained development and one of this book's major narrative threads: her relationship to the legacy of her celebrated parents. Their presence as media guides is evident in her early subjects (the Three Stooges, vintage cartoons). Later she leaves home to join a circus, study tattooing, and live with lowlifes in New York City. The true legacy of her parents' influence is her constant outpouring of uncensored, self-critical, and perceptive drawing. (Nov.) (c)
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0393079961
• ISBN 13: 9780393079968
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Crumb A., Crumb R.