The internationally acclaimed South Korean novelist on confronting the country’s violent history
Friday 5 February 2016
Early in 2015 a buzz began to build around a slim novel called The Vegetarian. It was about a woman who turned her face to the wall, refusing to eat meat and scandalising her friends and family, as a prelude to rejecting life itself. “It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions,” wrote its Guardian reviewer.
Wild about the garden: inside photographer Siân Davey’s sanctuary
The artist transformed a neglected patch beside her cottage, attracting a variety of visitors eager to shed their inhibitions, clothes and anxieties, and whose lives she has caught in striking images that form part of a new exhibition
Claire Armitstead Sunday 30 July 2023
The photographer Siân Davey was “navigating a family deep in crisis” when her son Luke suggested that they transform a neglected garden outside her rented cottage into a wildflower sanctuary that would draw people in. “And, without any ambition, something in me said a resounding yes,” she says. Together, they set about clearing the plot, researching local flowers and sowing them according to the rituals of a Buddhist faith they both share.
‘A lot of biopics depend on likeness – this is braver’: Gabriel Byrne on playing Samuel Beckett
The actor talks about his new movie Dance First, in which he plays the Irish dramatist, the time he shared a drink with Richard Burton and why he had to leave Los Angeles
Claire Armitstead Friday 22 September 2023
In 1969, Samuel Beckett and his wife learned that he had won the Nobel prize in literature in a telegram from his publisher. “Dear Sam and Suzanne,” it read. “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Both were notoriously celebrity averse. Suzanne described it as a “catastrophe”. Beckett declined to give a Nobel lecture, and refused to talk when a Swedish film crew tracked him down to a hotel room in Tunisia, leaving them with a surreal mute interview.
Claire Keegan: ‘I think something needs to be as long as it needs to be’
The acclaimed Irish writer on writing short works, the Magdalene Laundries and her new hobby, horse training
Claire Armitstead
Wednesday 20 October 2021
For those who know and follow her work, a new Claire Keegan book is as rare and precious as a diamond in a coalmine. There have been just four of them over 22 years, and all are small, sharp and brilliant. Fortunately for an author so sparing with her output, those who know and follow her include an international array of literary connoisseurs, and many of the children passing through the Irish school system.
The acclaimed young author of The Water Cure talks about her latest dystopian novel, Blue Ticket, and how listening to music and speaking Welsh helps her writing
Claire Armitstead
Saturdad 15 September 2020
“Something has changed, but we don’t know what,” says Sophie Mackintosh. She’s explaining the scenario of her second novel, Blue Ticket, but she could just as easily be describing the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s days before the Covid-19 lockdown, and as we talk in the Guardian office a sense of impending doom swirls around us.
This satire of life in the early years of the Soviet Union cost its author dear at the time and it has not lost its provocative power
Claire Armitstead Wednesday 4 January 2017
Mikhail Bulgakov was 33 years old, a former doctor and an up-and-coming playwright and short-story writer when he invited a group of people to a reading of his new novella, The Heart of a Dog. He had held a similar soiree the previous year to launch another novella, The Fatal Eggs, and though the earlier reading had gone well, it had made him anxious enough to muse in his diary: “Is it a satire? Or a provocative gesture? … I’m afraid that I might be hauled off … for all these heroic feats.”
or years, Hilary Mantel was one of literature’s best-kept secrets, unknown to all but a devoted yet limited following. Then along came Wolf Hall. “Maybe this book will win one of the prizes that have been withheld so far,” ventured its Guardian reviewer when it was published in 2009, in what was to prove one of the understatements of the millennium. It won both the Man Booker prize and the US’s National Book Critics Circle award, selling more than 1m copies on each side of the Atlantic, and going on to colonise theatre and TV.
The second volume in the trilogy, 2011’s Bring Up the Bodies, kept the bandwagon rolling so fast and furiously that, eight years later, breathless excitement greeted the appearance of a mysterious billboard in Leicester Square in May, the first hint that the third volume was imminent. (The Mirror and the Light is out in 2020.) Mantel is phlegmatic, saying: “Some readers congratulate me on beginning a career in my 50s. I’m glad, of course, if I can offer anyone midlife encouragement. But I began writing at 22, wrote for 12 years before I published anything, and broke through in my mid-30s. I’ve had plenty of time to brace myself for success.”
Hilary Mantel
She traces the idea of writing about Thomas Cromwell, arch manipulator of the Tudor court, back to history lessons at a Cheshire convent school in which she first learned about Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. “It seemed to me like a very good idea, and I thought I’d like to meet the man behind it.” She had already ventured into historical fiction with A Place of Greater Safety, about the French Revolution. But did she have qualms about taking on the Tudor heritage industry? “Nothing but qualms,” she says. “Think of those miles of shelves stacked with novels about Henry’s wives. But I didn’t suppose I was going to write one of those.”
Until she took him on, Cromwell was best known as the corpulent, grim-faced bureaucrat in a famous Holbein portrait. “His story hadn’t been well served by biographers or fiction writers. He was under-imagined. And when you stand where he stands, what you see defamiliarises itself,” says Mantel. “He was the man who conquers the system from within.”
Portrait of Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). Photograph: Fine Art/Corbis via Getty Images
Her “defamiliarisation” of the period drew criticism from some historians, in particular her refusal to go along with the sanctification of Sir Thomas More. But her response is characteristically brisk: “History is a process, not a locked box with a collection of facts inside,” she says. “The past and present are always in dialogue – there can hardly be history without revisionism. Most historians acknowledge More as a complex and conflicted human being, with debits and credits to his name. My portrait, unlike a historian’s, cannot be balanced or neutral. It comes from the imagined point of view of Cromwell, who is grievously and inextricably involved with him day by day. The same is true for my other characters; they are as I believe Cromwell sees them.”
How does she feel about finishing the trilogy after spending so long in Cromwell’s shadow? “We’ve been on a long walk, but we’re not parting company yet,” she says. A second television series has been announced, and a third stage play is likely. “Each medium offers new opportunities for the story, which is never used up, never completely told. Working on the theatre version was a fresh start in a new field, and maybe helped sharpen up my scene-building skills as a novelist. It persuaded me that however complex your material, you can unfold it with clarity and energy.”
‘I’ve had plenty of time to brace myself for success’ … Hilary Mantel.
Photograph: Richard Ansett/BBC
Part of the fascination of any bestseller is why this particular work should have so captivated the popular imagination. One answer is that Cromwell’s journey from childhood poverty to great power and finally to execution (set to occur in The Mirror and the Light) holds a distressed glass up to our own times. Mantel is wary of direct comparisons: “I wouldn’t be happy to write the kind of moralising, manipulative fiction that forces correspondences between past and present.” But she knows that “the same questions preoccupy us: how to live, how to govern, how to mediate between the world as we find it and the world we would like to see. The resonances change day by day. As events evolve, fiction evolves too, in the minds of readers as well as writers. It doesn’t stay fixed on the page, constant to one meaning.”
So what can Cromwell’s story teach the politicians of today? “Be careful. You are no longer beheaded for your failures, but the Tower of London is still standing.”
He’s obsessed with ‘spectacular rear ends’ and he calls his fans scum. Yet comic artist Robert Crumb is at risk of becoming respectable. As his new show opens, he talks about filth, fetishes and his idea of fun
Claire Armistead
Sunday 24 April 2016
R
obert Crumb is caught in traffic, allowing us time to snoop out the best place for a photoshoot in the upmarket London gallery where more than 50 of his pictures are on display. It all looks so well mannered, this orderly line of black-and-white illustrations, and then you peer into the pictures and the familiar rude energy comes roistering out.
We decide that we will place him between an erotic rear view of the tennis player Serena Williams and a homely portrait of his wife of almost 40 years, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, in bed with her laptop. Aline is the chunky brunette who features in so much of Robert’s work - not least in the three issues of Art & Beauty magazine that are the subject of this exhibition.
It is Robert, not Aline, who I have come to interview, and whose pictures are on sale at a starting price of $30,000 (£20,800), but their art is so intertwined that it’s hard to understand either in isolation. One collaboration, unprecedented in the history of comics or indeed any art, had husband and wife each drawing themselves in the throes of sex with each other.
As we wait for the great man to arrive, Lucas Zwirner, the 25-year-old editor of the gallery’s publishing outlet, gives a learned explanation of the appeal of Crumb’s work to a new generation. “What’s exciting about the work is his openness to his own desire and erotics,” he enthuses. “There’s something irreconcilable at the heart of the work that doesn’t resolve towards a single vision of beauty, and which is at odds with much contemporary art. It’s about seduction and repulsion. You are drawn into the work and you are judging yourself as you look at it.”
Or, as Crumb says when he finally shuffles in, clad in funereal black and wearing his trademark wire glasses: “The dirt’s on the wall.” At 72, he is a paler, frailer version of the priapic nerd of more than half a century of self-portraits.
Art & Beauty showcases a less well-known side of him: the lifelong junk shop rummager and connoisseur of vintage media, which he values for the craftsmanship of “the golden age of graphic art”. Published in 1996 and 2002, with the third volume yet to hit the streets, the project was inspired by a soft porn magazine of the 1920s that smuggled risque photographs past the censor under the titular fig leaf Art & Beauty Magazine for Art Lovers and Art Students.
Robert Crumb’s 2002 drawing of Serena Williams. Photograph: Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner, New York/London
Some of its pictures are copied directly from vintage magazines – not least two ethnographic images, Handsome Women of the Formidable Zulu Race, in the second volume, and Three African Women from Brazzaville, Congo, in the third. These decorously posed tableaux speak to Crumb’s less decorous fascination with the bodies of black women.
Which brings us to that picture of Serena Williams, caught mid-smash at Flushing Meadow in 2002, with her breasts and backside jutting from a black Lycra catsuit. The inscription below the picture reads: “A HIGHLY SATISFYING CHALLENGE FOR THE ARTIST’S SKILLS ARE THE GLEAMING HIGHLIGHTS ON THE RESPLENDENT CONTOURS OF TENNIS CHAMPION SERENA WILLIAM AS SHE APPEARED ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF THE US OPEN …”
It’s an extreme image, arresting and disturbing, and when I say as much he responds a little defensively: “It was traced from a photograph.”
Yes, but why that picture?
“It’s my personal fetish or fixation.”
The fetish is not with Serena Williams as tennis champion so much as with her “spectacular back end”. His insistence that “I don’t care what colour they are” is complicated by another caption beneath a blonde gymnast astride a Swiss exercise ball: “The lovely Coco is renowned the world over as a white girl who is the proud possessor of a striking physical attribute most often claimed by women of African descent.”
Another illustration by Crumb from Art & Beauty magazine. Photograph: Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner, New York/London
Part of the paradox of Crumb’s art is that the objects of his erotic fixation are often dynamic, powerful women, depicted in gymnastics or yoga or sport. He traces this fetish back to his childhood, explaining morosely: “I was always a contrarian. My wife says sometimes I’m too much so – born weird. I always felt there’s something odd and off about my nervous system. If everybody’s walking forward, I want to walk backwards.
“During adolescence I couldn’t fit in, and it was very, very painful. But it fired me to develop my own aesthetic. I was very much in pain about being this outcast, but it freed me to drop that Hollywood ideal and pursue the people that I thought attractive.”
When he became successful in the 1960s with creations such as Fritz the Cat or Mr Natural, the mystic druid, “certain eccentric kinds of women got interested in me.” One of them was his first wife, Dana Morgan, and together, they hawked “cheap, stapled comics” on the streets: “My wife was pregnant and we sold them out of a baby pram.” In 1978, he was married a second time, to Aline, making it a condition of their relationship that he could not be monogamous. They have a daughter Sophie, now a comics artist herself.
Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb at home in France. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian
A few miles away from Crumb’s pumped-up fantasy women, Aline’s work is on display at the House of Illustration, as part of an exhibition of work by female comic artists. In a talk that evening she will be hailed as a feminist pioneer. “It’s nice to be getting a little attention every once in a while,” she says drily.
In the 1970s and 80s, while Aline’s reputation grew as a chronicler of the messiness of family life, Crumb’s portrayal of women, and his sexually rampant self-portraiture, led to vilification by feminist critics. “It had some validity,” he says now. “My work is full of anger towards women. I was sent to Catholic school with scary nuns and I was rejected by girls at high school. I sort of got it out of my system, but anger is normal between the sexes. OK, it can go to the top and men can harm women, but if anyone says they are not angry I don’t believe it, especially while your libido is still going. The men who are most charming are often the most contemptuous.”
Like who? “Like Sam Shepard,” he snaps. “His work is just a seduction of women.” He has said similar things about Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens.
In the 90s, his ascent to the high table of art began. A 1994 documentary by his friend and bandmate Terry Zwigoff won the grand jury prize at the Sundance film festival (the two had formed a retro band, R Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders, in the 70s), and the hefty The R Crumb Coffee Table Art Book was published in 1997. Three years later, he was picked up by the New York art dealer Paul Morris. “It was like being a tramp outside a fancy restaurant watching people eat and someone suddenly says, ‘Come in and eat with us.’ I never aspired to that other world of symphony orchestras and ballet. I was the child of popular culture. I just wanted to get my work published,” he says.
Morris explains how, in early exhibitions, he had to put alarms on Crumb’s work to foil hardcore fans whose sense of entitlement extended to the right to walk off with the pictures. “The scum of the earth. They’re my people,” chortles Crumb, who is tickled by the contradictions of his two worlds. Collectors of cheap comics insist on pristine copies, while fine-art connoisseurs prize the “white-out” of Tipp-Exed corrections that vein his Art & Beauty pictures. He exploited this to the max with four Waiting for Food series – drawings on place mats, which were then sold individually. “Collectors love to get a little marinara sauce with their art.”
A Crumb illustration from Art & Beauty No 2. Photograph: Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner, New York/London
Even before the third edition of Art & Beauty has hit the streets courtesy of his old publisher, Fantagraphics, the images have been collected into an elegant hardback, edited by Zwirner, that doubles as an exhibition catalogue and retails at £24.
Although he mournfully insists that his work isn’t as fashionable today as it once was – to a chorus of dissent from Zwirner and Morris – he cheers up when he contemplates the upsides of the new era. Phone cameras, for instance, which allow him and Aline to “capture the commonplace” of scantily clad women waiting in cinema queues or at ice-cream stands. And selfies, “one of the technological miracles of the age we live in”.
Robert Crumb’s Untitled, 2015, from Art & Beauty magazine. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Paul Morris, and David Zwirner Gallery
It’s a technology that wasn’t around for the first two editions of Art & Beauty and it has given this satirist of desire, whose pneumatic women hold a warped mirror up to commercialised ideals of waiflike fashion models and muscle-bound action heroes, a whole new playpen.
In one picture, sent directly to his website, a young Latina woman photographs herself in various states of undress. The caption reports that, after listing her age, height and vital statistics, she wrote: “It would be a big pleasure to be a part of your art.” It continues: “In reply, we can only say, the pleasure is ours.” That knowing repetition of the word “pleasure” takes you straight to the little speccy guy, just out of frame, squirming with lust behind his drawing pad.
•Art & Beauty is at David Zwirner Gallery, London, until 2 June
• This article was amended on 25 April 2016 to clarify that it was with his first wife that Robert Crumb sold comics out of a baby pram.