Birth of A Movement: The Art of Robert Williams

Pardoning the Hawaiian archipelago, California is as far west as you can travel before hitting Asia. The coastline and crevices demark, for many, the furthest edge of Western expression—surfing, skateboarding, outlaw motorcycle clubs, underground comix, the porn industry, psychedelic churches, hot rods, Hollywood, poster art, and the World Wide Web. Perhaps, there is something in the water or in the unique quality of light that drives men to pursue ignoble enterprises. Or, perhaps, only the slightly deranged are drawn, here, to the Golden State.

“As much as the west coast tries to affect an air of elegance and sophistication it is corrupted by its position as the frontier,” agrees Robert Williams, a man who surely epitomizes the California maelstrom.

In 1979, with the publication of The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams, Williams unintentionally coined a term that would come to define an art movement. But he began intentionally carving out its place in the world long before

“I’m a symptom not an instigator,” says Williams. “I just lent a definition to the condition.”

illiams’ modesty belies the riotous young man who arrived in California in 1963, when Hollywood was still a small town, “ready to set the art world on fire” with his draftsman’s hand and a fevered mind fueled by sex, drugs, and fast cars.

“I wanted to immerse myself in art theory,” says Williams while still conveying the bearing of a street tough. Williams enrolled in Los Angeles City College, a well-respected junior college that didn’t require a high school diploma or more than $6.50 per unit.

“But I arrived right in the middle of abstract expressionism,” says Williams. “It lends itself well to bank lobbies and hospital waiting rooms—it’s unobtrusive.”

Williams was anything but. He liked comic books, girly magazines, B-movie posters, pulp magazines, science fiction covers, and hot rod art. His growing artistic vision encompassed drag races, border battles, UFOs, gangsters, demons, mad scientists, psychotic clowns, pin-up girls, puppet shows, sea monsters, and doomsday scenarios. But he wanted to paint them with the precision of an old master.

“In art school, the premise was that only people of limited imagination would create a 3-D representation because, obviously, they didn’t have the mental strength or intelligence to appreciate two dimensional art… I had a fucking problem really early on.”

Williams’ conversations are agreeably punctuated by profanity, like grease spots on mechanic’s shop floor, but there is a reedy refinement beneath the grit that hints at his origin story.

Born in 1943, Williams is the product of a Southern military man and a liberal Yankee mother with some serious misgivings about traditional family values. It was a contentious union which resulted in four divorces.

“My father was very intelligent, very well-educated,” says Williams. “But he was very conservative. And he would not hesitate to whip my ass…”

Williams was sent to military school for first and second grade and spent most of the rest of his childhood split between his folks’ separate homes in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Montgomery, Alabama where his father owned a drive-in diner. It was the largest in the world, according to Williams, and could serve one hundred cars at a time, with two movie screens, a radio station, and live acts to entertain them. Greasers came to show off their rides and crack wise. Waitresses in hot pants and roller skates served food and eye-candy, the smell of fry grease mingling with car exhaust. Eventually, Williams’ father moved on and bought a fleet of stock cars. But that had also had its perks. Williams received his first set of wheels—a 1934 Ford Coupe—when he was twelve.

These formative impressions, a collision of hot girls and fast cars, could easily have been relegated to a young man’s masturbatory fantasies. Instead, they would one day erupt on canvas in a cacophony of color and compositional narrative that fried the brain pan of almost anyone who saw it.

“I’ve always been an artist, see,” says Williams. “I had a lot of trouble in school—my grades failed because I’m kind of dyslexic—but I could really draw.”

Sadly, drawing wasn’t helpful in the world young Williams yet inhabited.

“All my younger life, I did horrible jobs,” says Williams, “I was a truck driver, a forklift operator, a short order cook, a soda jerk, a ditch digger. I worked for a carnival. I built houses.”

By the time Williams was seventeen, he was living with his mother fulltime, building cars and hanging out with a rough and ready hot rod club in New Mexico. Every cent he earned (by any means necessary) went into his Model T. Over time, his increasingly rebellious lifestyle—drugs, alcohol, fights—led to a number of arrests.

“I realized I had to straighten myself up,” said Williams. “I had to get away from hotrods and motorcycles.”

Williams’ most complex oil paintings can feel like super-sized comic book pages where the frames have dissolved, allowing the narrative to spill over itself, melt, and blend. The imagery might hit you like a slap in the face but the action, the energy, is so visceral, it leaves you paralyzed, perhaps just long enough for the astonishing detail to rise out of the stratums of glaze, moving through your brain like slow-working venom, or poetry.

Williams learned to grind his own pigments, and stretch his own canvas, like a Flemish master. He used a magnifying glass and a one-hair brush to reach for the infinitesimal, and the infinite, in the reflection on a chrome bumper, the depths of a woman’s ass, or in the gaping maw of an enormous beast. He was driven.

Through most of his forties, Williams rose at 4:20 every morning, had two cups of coffee and an English muffin, and started to paint with the first morning light. He wouldn’t stop until it was too dark to see. By 10 a.m., he had headaches so he took aspirin. By 1 p.m., the pain was so intense, he moved on to a narcotic painkiller that would do the job.

“I was putting in well over one hundred hours a week,” recalls Williams. “I was a painting machine, turning out maybe three paintings a month.”

But, in 1992, he had a physical breakdown.

“My kidneys weren’t working,” says Williams. “My wife finally said I’m not putting up with the bullshit anymore.”

Williams met Suzanne at LACC.

“I saw her walking around the campus with a T-square,” says Williams. “So I knew she could draw. And she had to be intelligent—she had to have a sense of geometry and responsibility—because she was carrying a T-square!”

Suzanne was not only an artist—“In many ways she is still much better than I am,” says Williams. “She’s just slick as snot.”—she was also very into hotrods.

The couple married within months.

Meanwhile, Williams, who still felt at odds with students and faculty in the art department, got his first paid gig working as a cartoonist for the school newspaper.

“I couldn’t figure out why no one else jumped that chance to get their work published,” says Williams. “But, the truth was, no one else in the art department could draw.”

He won an award at the National College Journalism Convention, and earned a title among his art school peers that would follow the Williamses from LACC to Chouinard Art Institute—now known as CalArts.

“They called me ‘The Illustrator,’” says Williams. “It was derogatory.”

As much as the west coast tries to affect an air of elegance and sophistication it is corrupted by its position as the frontier.”

Robert Williams work has been called sexist, racist, and homophobic… just to start. In a New York Times review that still stings, Williams’ paintings were described as the “nadir” of 1992’s pivotal exhibit Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s. An estimated 117,000 people attended—the most in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s

history. But some of the hype came by way of riot police. Leading up to the exhibit, feminist and gay advocacies groups claimed general outrage with the exhibit’s lack of diversity, but Williams was singled out for attack. In particular, his oil painting “Oscar Wilde in Leadville, April 13th 1882.”

“Leadville” is a massive canvas depicting the Irish playwright on stage, holding Botticelli’s Venus in his outstretched hand to a group of drunken reprobates—presumably the silver miners, prostitutes, and gunslingers that inhabit the outpost town hovering over their shoulders. Venus wears work boots in her half shell and sucks on a cigar, emblematic of Wilde’s noble attempt to make high art accessible to everyone during his lecture tour of America. A full third of the canvas is given over to a portrait of Wilde being covered in kisses by a fairy, who clearly commends his philosophical effort.

To anyone who sees it, “Leadville” lies somewhere between a comic book, a dream scape, and vivid history lesson, a precursor to even more erudite lessons to come—like Williams’ 2014 work “The Everywhere-at-Once Cabriolet,” which explores the increasingly respectable multiverse theory of physics through the lens of a futuristic crazy car.

But, many demonstrators misconstrued “Leadville”’s ancillary titles—“Culture, Unlike War, Moves in a Breeze and Not a Gale, This with its Slight Persistent Force Has Made a 19th Century Playwright & Sodomite the Messenger of Art to Cretins and Is Destined to Be the Doomed Nut in a Three Dollar Fruit Cake”—as mockery of Wilde, rather than academic convention.

“To me,” Williams wrote in Malicious Resplendence (one of his ten published books), “this was the most incredible thing, to visualize [Wilde] on a stage dressed in these Edwardian tights lecturing about beauty to these hard-assed frontiersmen.”

The outcry led chief curator Paul Schimmel to say that he would never show Williams at the MOCA again. Despite this fact, Tony Shafrazi, known for his handling of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf, not to mention Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, chose to represent Williams not long after.

This was not the first, or even the second time, Williams had surfed a wave of outrage into greater recognition.

… Once snobs own it and it’s being handled by big auction houses, it’s going to sour.”

In 1986, another in a long string little bands from the strip asked Williams for cover art. They wanted to use his 1979 painting “Appetite for Destruction.”

“I told them what would happen,” says Williams.

There were protests. A media frenzy. Chain stores refused to carry Guns N’ Roses. And, after the artwork was moved inside the sleeve, the album went on to sell twenty-eight million copies.

Unsurprisingly, it is this image—a slavering outer-world beast swooping down on a mechanical rapist as he torments a semi-naked woman—that is most often cited by Williams’ progeny in the realm of lowbrow art.

Everyone saw it. And a lot of women hated it—probably the same women who hated Guns N’ Roses.

But, Williams, who seems to weave criticism like an indispensable but painful hairshirt, says he has no regrets on this point.

“Look, I was very supportive of the women’s movement,” says Williams, “but the feminist movement went nuts, it just fucking went nuts… You remember, in the teens and ‘20s, it was the feminist movement that outlawed alcohol! And they were doing the same thing in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, just latching on to everything. It almost completely got rid of nudes in the art world—which is 90 percent feminist to begin with. It was like a frenzy, a fucking frenzy. I was getting death threats.”

This is a wonderful time to be in the arts. But I am not going to be the Pied Piper, leading kids down a dark, brutal road.”

On the other side of the spectrum, Williams had gained some pretty formidable female allies. No Wave performance artist Lydia Lunch became a stalwart, outspoken defender. Blondie, who posed for “Debbie Harry’s Fears” based her harrowing encounter with Ted Bundy, would go on to champion Williams.

And then there were the punks.

“Well, I don’t know about art, but I know what I like”—The Cramps (1983)

“I’m a generation older but these people prided themselves on gratuitous sex and violence, and free speech,” says Williams, who credits Suzanne for introducing him to the scene. “They were just wide open.”

It was actually Southern California punk rock that first provided a venue for Williams’ paintings, in afterhours pop-up “galleries” where kids could drink when the clubs shut down. The work was fast and loose and came to be known as Williams’ Zombie Mystery Paintings.

“They sold like crazy!” says Williams. They also got Williams’ work noticed by magazines.

“Mostly rock ‘n roll magazines, tattoo magazines, some car magazines,” says Williams, “But I was some body… for the first time in the painting world, I had a foothold name.”

Of course, Williams wanted more. Not just for himself, but for every good artist that had been dismissed by teachers and theorists. He wanted real estate for the “feral art”—to

use Williams’ own term—which was growing in the wilds, sharpening its claws on the white walls of hallowed institutions.

In certain circles, Williams was already famous.

In 1965, not long after leaving Chouinard—and getting fired from a straight job—Williams found himself at the unemployment office.

“As an artist, you might get placed at a production house, making painting for motels and hotels,” says Williams. “That was where a lot of people who studied abstract expressionism wound up.”

A social worker cautiously offered Williams an interview for art director at Roth Studios, but with a warning.

“She said, ‘Everyone we’ve sent out there has turned it down,’” chuckles Williams.

Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was a famed hot-rod builder, a key figure in Southern California’s Kustom Kulture scene, and the creator the psychotic Rat Fink icon which already adorned t-shirts across the country. Williams and Roth had met at a car show in Albuquerque five years earlier.

“I was really the right guy for the job,” says Williams.

Given free-reign to pour his own vision into illustrations, ads, and t-shirt design, Williams’ name quickly became synonymous with Kustom Kulture. And he was making decent money for the first time.

“Here I was, trying to get away from hotrods,” says Williams, “only to get pulled right back in at the highest level.”

Roth Studios in Maywood was a nexus for freaks—bikers, surfers, musicians, artists, gearheads, hippies, dropouts, and the occasional FBI agent.

Suzanne worked on Choppers, the magazine Roth started when mainstream publications refused to run pictures of his bikes, and was never shy about sliding under a car. The couple still lived in Hollywood, the center of the party.

“We were true bohemians, you know,” says Williams. “Psychedelic cavaliers. No affectation. Nothing fake about it.”

Somewhere between unicycling around Hollywood, enjoying the rock ‘n roll scene, dropping LSD, and working at one of the coolest places on the globe, Williams continued to paint.

It was during this heady period that a musician pal gave Williams a copy of Zap Comix No. 2 featuring Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, and R. Crumb.

Williams knew some of the artists from the psychedelic poster movement, which intertwined with the hot rod scene. Like them, he was proud of the deep influence comic books exerted on his art—especially the early gore-soaked days of EC Comics, and Mad Magazine, which was one of their few titles to survive the Senate Subcommittee Hearing on Juvenile Delinquency in ‘54.

But nothing had prepared Williams for Zap.

“It just blew my mind! I mean, my brains were all over the fucking ceiling!” says Williams with palpable excitement that even nearly

half a century cannot dampen. “The work in there—there was just no considering social values in that comic.”

In 1968, Williams joined the mad grandees at Zap, ground zero for the mushrooming underground comix movement, and became an underground legend for a second time.

Zap Comix No. 4, already targeted for obscenity charges, hit the streets. Booksellers were arrested up and down the West Coast. A sting operation was carried out in New York. Vietnam was raging. Williams was listed as a draft dodger. To make things worst, Time Magazine dubbed “Big Daddy” Roth—Williams’ steady, longtime employer—the “supply sergeant for the Hells Angels.” The FBI and the IRS took notice.

By the age of twenty-seven, Williams was a full-fledged art outlaw.

In 1993, the Laguna Art Museum launched Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Robert Williams & Others, a seminal, record-breaking show brought together by surfer and fervent lowbrow patron Greg Escalante.

Something important was percolating, and Williams was eager to revive his idea for an art magazine created, for and by his peers, in the spirit of the Surrealist movement’s Minotaure and La Révolution Surréaliste. His first attempt, the far-sighted but short-lived Art?Alternatives, was published in New York by Harvey Shapiro in 1992. For the first time lowbrow art had a forum—the premier issue explored tattoo art, the history of underground comix, and featured the work of Williams, S. Clay Wilson, and Spain—but, with an editorial staff based on the East Coast, the situation was untenable.

“They were just too far from the real action,” says Williams.

After trying to interest Larry Flynt in the project, and picking the brain of Timothy Leary, Williams went to Escalante for ideas. Escalante’s suggestion: High Speed Productions, the San Francisco-based company which published Thrasher, a popular skateboard magazine that had often featured Williams’ art. Williams and Suzanne flew up and he gave the pitch: A magazine devoid of pretentious theorizing, distracting layouts, and drawn-out critical analysis, it should be driven by the art itself—which would be a mad combination of subversive sensibilities and fine-art craftsmanship.

Williams drew up a list of names and, in 1994, Juxtapoz was born. The premier issue featured “Big Daddy” Roth, Kustom Kulture’s Von Dutch, Garbage Pail Kids’ John Pound, and Zap Comix No. 13. Williams did the cover.

“It was ordained from the beginning to be an underground outlaw publication,” Williams explains.

For the cover of issue two, Williams chose Mark Ryden, a move Ryden readily credits with launching his career.

Before long, Juxtapoz was outselling Art News, Art in America , and Art Forum.

“This shitty little magazine that wasn’t allowed in art school classrooms,” muses Williams, “became the largest-selling art magazine in America.”

Within a short time Williams was surrounded by a new generation of artists who claimed Robert Williams as influence, along with science fiction, comic books, and poster art. He was, without any doubt, the godfather of a new movement.

Like a real godfather, Williams also has not hesitated over the years to take the magazine and the movement to task.

“They imitate each other like they’re helpless,” he says with solemn exasperation. “You can’t just jump on the coattails of every trend… I tried to fight the tiki trend, I really did, but I just made enemies. Now we’re coming out of this big-eyed children trend.”

Williams stepped back from his guiding role at Juxtapoz some time ago and, to his credit, he has not yet organized a counterculture subcommittee to oversee content.

“Here’s the thing, I know most young artists want to be safely tucked under the wing of some –ism,” says Williams. “They just don’t understand the world that I have always functioned in. But I’m not going to get all dictatorial—that doesn’t help anyone. So, I thought, maybe it’s best for me just to keep my fucking mouth shut.”

But, of course, Williams doesn’t need to open his mouth to express his opinion. His recent painting “Spoiling Pollyannaville” is a clear personal indictment. It depicts the faces of two cute, dewy-eyed animals conjoined at the hips by a plate of cake as they joyful march through a desert; while, in one corner, a prickly green hunchback with a distended eye slides his finger through their pink frosting. There is little doubt as to the identity of the little cactus ogre—a similar character adorns Williams’ own Kool-Aid purple and yellow ’32 Ford Roadster.

As Williams has said, placating people is not his cup of tea.

“Oh, I’m just a footnote in this thing, now,” says Williams dismissively. “I’ve shot my load. But if this [movement] is going to thrive it’s going to be because of rich, daring imaginations… Not because of Hello Kitty conventions.

“Understand, I’m not against Hello Kitty conventions—let there be a whole world of Hello Kitty conventions out there—but I want to create something that other artists can build on in the future… a graphic vocabulary that can grow exponentially, and I hope that whatever comes along next will be even more open-minded and accepting of everything out there.”

At seventy-two, Williams has reached a level of craftsmanship that seems uncanny. He says he has acquired enough skill to achieve on canvas about eighty percent of what is in his head. He still paints six or seven hours a day. Every day. His latest exhibit, Robert Williams: SLANG Aesthetics!, which included large-scale sculptures and an astounding twenty-five new oil paintings, was held at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park where Williams, as a young man, was bowled over by Salvador Dali. SLANG Aesthetics! was staged in conjunction with 20 Years Under the Influence of Juxtapoz, a supporting exhibit with some big names that might never have gotten out of their bedrooms if not for Williams. He considers it a peak in his life.

“I was in high clover,” says Williams. “Just treated like royalty…”

Still, perhaps surprisingly, Williams is plagued by the tensions of a perennial outsider.

On the one hand, he trusts in the inevitable ascendency of “feral art”—“It’s going to happen. The chickens are coming home to roost. Of course, I might be long dead…” On the other hand, he believes the movement can only remain vital as long as it’s struggling.

“Once snobs own it and it’s being handled by big auction houses,” predicts Williams, “it’s going to sour.”

His somber advice: Do not become an artist unless you have absolutely no other alternative. However, if you can’t help it…

“In all of my life as a painter, this is the most optimistic time,” admits Williams, “You can do anything. You can be an abstract expressionist and make a living at it, even yet. You can create old Victorian-style art. Even Thomas Kinkade—I didn’t like him, but that prick made a fortune. This a wonderful time to be in the arts. But I am not going to be the Pied Piper, leading kids down a dark, brutal road.”*

Robert Williams: Fearless Depictions, a retrospective exhibition, is now on view at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

This article was originally published in Hi-Fructose Issue 36, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue and support our independent arts coverage by subscribing here.