NHRA Museum to fete hot rod artist Robert Williams
Ahead of a retrospective show in 2015, Robert Williams told the Los Angeles Times that he’s no fan of “lowbrow” or the stuffier “pop surrealism” terms that have often described his work. Instead, he said, he prefers “feral art” because the art has “had to raise itself out in the wilderness.” Which is not to say that his art hasn’t more recently found its way out of the wilderness, a journey punctuated by the NHRA Motorsports Museum’s upcoming event celebrating the hot-rod artist.
Though born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Williams, now 75, spent plenty of time during his childhood at his father’s drive-in in Montgomery, Alabama, where he studied the hot rods that showed up. His study of art didn’t come until years later — after a period of juvenile delinquency, racing, and brawling in Albuquerque — when he took art classes at Los Angeles City College and the Chouinard Art Institute, and discovered that his illustrator style of artwork clashed with contemporary trends toward expressionism and abstract art.
He quit those classes to pursue work as an illustrator taking pretty much whatever job the employment agency threw at him when, in 1965, the agency offered him a gig as an art director for Ed Roth.
“Could this have been an act of divine providence?” Williams wrote in the foreword to Pat Ganahl’s Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth: His Life, Times, Cars, and Art. “In that instant I grabbed the phone and accepted the job.”
Williams said his primary job at Roth’s studio “was to come up with sheer imagination,” and he participated in the creation of several Roth cars. He also handled the artwork for Roth studios, which not long after became “extremely graphic and sometimes violent,” Ganahl wrote. Regardless, he remained with Roth until the studio folded in 1969.
While constantly referenced the pulpy, violent, and fantastical aesthetic of comic books (that is, “Tales From the Crypt” comics rather than Superman comics) in his illustrations and in his oil paintings, he also frequently incorporated hot rods in his work as well, pulling inspiration both from the Montgomery drive-in and from his days of delinquency. “His canvases are, in effect, like pages from a comic book with all the panels removed,” The Guardian wrote ahead of the same show the Los Angeles Times wrote about.
That comics-influenced approach formed the basis of his next venture, the Zap Comix collective formed with Robert Crumb and a number of other underground and anti-establishment artists. It wasn’t until the 1980s, however, with the ascendancy of punk rock and underground ‘zines, that his artwork began to find a wider audience beyond comics readers. He began to place some of his work in galleries and published his first book, The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams, the title of which gave rise to that catch-all descriptor for subversive and anti-social fringe art. He built on that success in 1994 when he founded Juxtapoz magazine.
Throughout it all, he remained dedicated to hot rods. Not the sanitized fairgrounds cruisers that began to appear in the mid-1970s with the street-rod movement, but the dirty and cheap stripped-down racers that featured prominently in his youth and in his artwork. Greg Sharp, curator of the NHRA Motorsports Museum, has called Williams’ primered 1932 Ford coupe “the first rat rod.”
Most of the hot-rodding world, however, didn’t get its introduction to Williams until Gray Baskerville sat down with the artist for a profile in the December 1998 issue of Hot Rod.
Featuring a talk by Williams, the “Robert Williams Hot Rod Innovator” fundraiser will also feature displays featuring Williams’ and Roth’s cars. The event will take place August 11 at the NHRA Motorsports Museum in Pomona, California. For more information, visit the event page on Eventbrite.com.
SOURCE: HEMMINGS
AUTHOR: Daniel Strohl