Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist

Hardcover | 21.34 x 3.05 x 26.16 cm | 272 pp

W. W. Norton | 2011 | 9780393079968 

Sophie Crumb's startlingly expressive drawings track her development as an artist from the age of two to twenty-eight. Sifting through dozens of their daughter's remarkable sketchbooks, A. and R. Crumb 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 Crumb'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 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.