ROBERT WILLIAMS

2021 SPRING-SUMMER

CULTURED LOS ANGELES

Btchin.......'... ENFANT TERRIBLE TAKES DOWN ART WORLD TO LOWBROW ROBERT WILLIAMS

WILD, SURREAL IMAGES ARE THE VOCABULARY ROBERT WILLIAMS USED TO CREATE AN ART MOVEMENT. WHEN HE ARRIVED AT L.A. CITY COLLEGE, HE PARTIED WITH THE STARS, GOT THE LOWESTPAYING JOB EVER AND MET A BRAINY CHICK IN TIGHT JEANS WITH A T-SQUARE WHO BECAME THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE.

BY REBECCA GRAZIER AND JOHN JOHNS

IMAGES COURTESY OF ROBERT WILLIAMS

It took the lowliest and most underappreciated art form to open and democratize American art: the comic book.

Robert Williams and his love of the comic book have been at the forefront of free expression or letting your imagination run riot since he left Los Angeles City College in the mid-1960s.

Outsiders appreciate his art, but not art school, not his peers, not the art world’s cultural police, certainly not feminist media and definitely not the FBI.

He was just an artist with a dream when he enrolled at Los Angeles City College. Williams left Albuquerque and traveled to Los Angeles with a friend. They found an apartment across the street from the campus in East Hollywood.

“And I came out for an art education, and at that time, the art department was in a bunch of barracks, they hadn’t finished the big art building,” Williams told the Collegian. “So, I took all the art classes I could over there, and I just dedicated myself to doing art studies.”

Williams says the prospects for an aspiring artist were bleak in 1963.

He had experienced an unstable home life in New Mexico, long before he came to Los Angeles. His childhood ranged from being secure and uppermiddle class, to living on the street with his mother after his parents’ final separation when he was 12 years old, according to a 2019 interview in The Comics Journal.

His father sent him to military school when he was quite young, and by the time he arrived at public school he was overwhelmed.

“I was left-handed and dyslexic and had learning problems and bad lungs,” he said. “And, I was always falling behind, I couldn’t understand this or that. The only thing I could do was draw. I was not good at athletics, I was always out of step, always a f---up. Always a f----up.”

But at age 20, the belief he could draw made Williams take a chance. He says earning a living as an artist is not easy, and it was even more difficult in 1963 when he enrolled at LACC. His talent and training informed his decision to throw himself headlong into an art career.

“I just completely dedicated myself to the art department over there to study and do projects and what not, as much as I could take on,” Williams said. “I wasn’t so much interested in the grades, as I was the education. I was already a professional draftsman, and this was during the period of abstract expressionism.”

The term applies to a movement in American art from the 1940s to the 1950s in New York City and is often called the New York School, according to MOMA.

Williams was adept at drawing anatomy, perspective and narrative images. But the style of the New York School popularized by Jackson Pollock and anointed by the New York art establishment, prohibited narrative on canvas.

When Williams arrived at LACC, Southern California was a hotbed of youth culture—cars, hot rods, surfing and surf bands. The Golden State was a promised land for landlocked American youth like Williams. He had already fallen in love with hot rods, as his father had given him a roadster when he was barely in his teens.

But LACC presented something different.

“When we were going there, it was a beatnik school, a hip school,” he said. “It was $6.50 a unit, and I could afford it.”

It was a chance to create a new life.

Williams saw opportunity when a friend told him the campus newspaper, the Collegian was looking for a cartoonist. Comics had influenced him a lot as a kid, especially Entertaining Comics, better known as EC Comics. The publisher specialized in horror, crime fiction, military, science fiction and satire and dark fantasy.

“They were the most bitchin’ comics in the world,” Williams told The Comics Journal during an interview two years ago. “The draftsmanship was remarkable, the stories were written by the best writers, but they were enormously lurid, a lot of gratuitous sex and violence and war comics. Just the stuff a young kid shouldn’t have. I just loved them comics.”

This was part of what informed Williams’ work. He accepted the offer and began creating cartoons for the weekly broadsheet, which would open some interesting doors.

“I thought it was kind of strange that none of the other students jumped at the chance to get stuff in print, but nobody was really interested in drawing,” he said. “They didn’t pay very much; I think two dollars a cartoon.”

He used pen and ink to create the Collegian cartoons. As a novice, Williams’ style was much more direct and simpler in the tradition of newspaper editorial cartoonists.

In the first issue following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Williams paid homage to the spirit of the slain president by drawing a black and white hand clasped in unity in front of an American flag flying at half-mast. 2021 SPRING-SUMMER

5/10/1963

MELLOWSHIP SLINKY IN B MAJOR BY THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS I’M SO IN LOVE YES WITH AN ARTIST IMAGINATION, HE’S THE SMARTEST ROBERT WILLIAMS, STROKE AND SPLATTER I ATTEST TO YOUR GRAY MATTER LIVING KINGS HOW TRUE IT RINGS THESE ARE JUST A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS.

SOURCE: MUSICMATCH

2021 SPRING-SUMMER

ART COURTESY OF ROBERT WILLIAMS

WELL, VAN GOGH WAS A CARTOONIST. IF HE HAD BEEN ALIVE IN THE 1960S, IN AMSTERDAM, HE’D HAVE BEEN AN UNDERGROUND CARTOONIST

Whatever the Collegian lacked in pay, it made up for in excitement. Williams was in the fast lane. Dick Baxter was his editor, a scion of an old Hollywood family. His mother was Whitney Blake, an actor with 81 film and TV credits in Hollywood. She was best known for the 1960s TV show “Hazel.” Williams spent time at the family’s Hollywood Hills home. Baxter’s sister, Meredith, went on to become a famous actor and producer who eventually earned five Emmy nominations for her work.

“And I was just, you know connected with Hollywood through those people and met a lot of movie stars and was tightly involved there in the Collegian, and so I did it faithfully every week for a long, long time.”

It was a good partnership and Williams honed his skills. When L.A. City College entered a national scholastic journalism competition, the staff entered his work.

“I came in second place, but the person who beat me was a professional syndicated cartoonist, so I came in second place nationally,” Williams said. “So that added to my portfolio with the cartoons and whatnot and so it really helped me get jobs in the future.”

Williams’ editorial cartoons and illustrations appear in the Collegian archives from 1963 to 1964. Editors contacted him after he left because they could not find another cartoonist. He continued to draw for the newspaper and his archived work continues through 1967.

Life at L.A. City College was not all projects and publication deadlines. He attracted a few lady friends on campus who he says did not seem capable of abstract thought. But then, he met Suzanne Chorna.

“And she was a beautiful girl, and she would walk around the campus with a T-square and a drawing board, so I knew that she had to have some skill and some kind of remarkable intelligence to use a T-square and a drawing board,” Williams told the Collegian. “So, she’d come up to me in class one time and asked me to help her make some plaster for a sculpture, and then from that moment on we were just glued together.”

They married after a two-month romance, and they are still husband and wife after 56 years. After a lifetime of marriage, Williams is still captivated by Suzanne. He marvels at how well read she is in a variety of disciplines including astronomy, history, anthropology and paleontology.

“Suzanne is always leading me,” he said. “I’m fortunate to be in her company.”

A non-conformist in the very conformist early 1960s, now newly married and in need of an income, Williams entered the world of commercial art.

He answered a call for an art director’s job that no one wanted. Williams signed on with Big Daddy Ed King. He was a legend in the world of hot rodding and one of the founders of Kustom Kulture and the creator of Rat Fink, the little green rat that epitomizes the world of hot rodding. Williams had found professional bliss.

By 1970, Williams began to find other artists with similar motivation and interests, which led him to Robert Crumb and ZAP Comix. Time at Zap helped shape Williams’ style. The underground comic publisher encouraged artists there to express themselves as “wildly and as strongly” as they could.

“My subject matter is rude, it’s extremely rude, it’s very much like comic book surrealism,” Williams said.

That style has been a magnet for controversy. His most controversial painting is “Appetite for Destruction,” which he gave Guns N’ Roses permission to use as the cover for their debut album. Axl Rose, the band’s lead singer, found a picture of the painting on a postcard somewhere on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.

That album sold 14 million copies while pissing off conservative church members, parent groups and feminists. Williams gained worldwide notoriety for the album cover, which he painted 10 years earlier.

The painting depicts a woman in a short skirt selling toy robots. Her kiosk is knocked over. So is she. A robot in a trench coat stands over her as a metal avenger flies to the rescue. One feminist organization called it a “glorification of rape.”

Feminist writer Kjerstin Johnson said in Bitch magazine that Williams’ artwork “drives feminists up the wall” the way it objectifies women. The masthead of Bitch states it is a feminist response to pop culture.

“Most of his paintings are about the domination of women’s superior sexuality,” Lydia Lunch said during her podcast, “The Lydian Spin.” “Which has been misinterpreted by feminists for decades as being misogynist. I think he is one of the most profemale artists, but also an incredible craftsman.”

Williams is sometimes called the father of lowbrow art. He has written 12 books, and created Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine in 1994. Newstand calls it exciting and inspirational. It is the UK’s largest online magazine store and says Juxtapoz examines the world of art and culture, and features up and coming artistic and cultural talent across the world. Juxtapoz quickly became the best-selling art publication.

Williams reflects on his time in East Hollywood.

“I had some of the best teachers and ... my debt to Los Angeles City College is enormous,” he said. “It all focuses back to LACC where I learned how to be a gentleman.”

A gentleman?

Disciplined? Yes. Determined? Yes. A suffering artist? Most definitely, yes. A guy who found his right livelihood? Yes. But, a gentleman? No matter. Williams says his life has turned out well, and he maintains a warm spot in his heart for LACC.

“Every 10 years on our anniversary me and Suzanne used to go back to City College and walk around the campus, and here in the last 15 or 20 years it’s had a fence around it so we couldn’t just go walking around anymore,” he said. “My debt is just enormous.”

Now, that is a gentleman. 2021 SPRING-SUMMER

9/23/66

ART COURTESY OF ROBERT WILLIAMS

6/19/64