Dan Nadel – författare

The first biography of Robert Crumb—one of the most profound and influential artists of the 20th century—whose iconic, radically frank and meticulously rendered cartoons and comics inspired generations of readers and cartoonists, from Art Spiegelman to Alison Bechdel.Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic, as iconic as Walt Disney or Charles Schulz. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, a curator and writer specializing in comics and art, shares how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact. More than just a biography of an iconic cartoonist, Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America. Including forty-five stunning black-and-white images throughout and a sixteen-page color insert featuring images both iconic and obscure, Crumb spans the pressures of 1950s suburban America and Crumb’s highly dysfunctional early family life; the history of comics and graphic satire; 20th century popular music; the world of the counterculture; the birth of underground comic books in 1960s San Francisco with Crumb’s Zap Comix; the economic challenges and dissolution of the hippie dream; and the path Robert Crumb blazed through it all. Written with Crumb’s cooperation, this fascinating, rollicking book takes in seven decades of Crumb’s iconic works, including Fritz the Cat, Weirdo, and his final book-length comic of The Book of Genesis; capturing, in the process, the essence of an extraordinary artist and his times.

Frank Frazetta has reigned as the undisputed king of fantasy art for 50 years, his fame only growing in the years since his death. With his paintings now breaking auction records (Egyptian Queen sold for $ 5.4 million in 2019) he’s long overdue for this ultimate monograph.Born to a Sicilian immigrant family in Brooklyn, 1928, Frazetta was a minor league athlete, petty criminal and serial seducer with movie star looks and phenomenal talent. He claimed to only make art when there was nothing better to do – he preferred playing baseball - yet began his professional career in comics at age 16. Strip work led him to the infamous EC Comics, then to oils for Tarzan and Conan pulp covers. Both characters were interpreted by many before him, but as he explained in the 1970s, “I’m very physical minded. In Brooklyn, I knew Conan, I knew guys just like him,” and he used this first-hand knowledge of muscle and macho to redefine fantasy heroes as more massive, more menacing, more testosterone-fueled than anything seen before. As counterbalance he created a new breed of women, nude as censorship allowed, with pixie faces and multiparous bodies: thick thighed, heavy buttocked, breasts cantilevered out to there, yet still, with their soft bellies and hints of cellulite, believably real. Add in the action, the creatures, the twilit worlds of haunting shadow and Frazetta’s art is addictive as potato chips.

Frank Frazetta has reigned as the undisputed king of fantasy art for well over 50 years, the value of his paintings now climbing as high as his fans’ admiration. Each year his works break the previous year’s auction records, with the cover for Lancer books 1967 Conan bringing $13.5 million in September 2025.Born to a Sicilian immigrant family in Brooklyn, 1928, Frazetta was a minor league athlete, petty criminal and serial seducer with movie star looks and phenomenal talent. Self-described as lazy and difficult, he often started a painting the night before it was due, completing it in mere hours, yet delivering a masterpiece—often still wet, but a masterpiece, nonetheless. He started in comics  at age 16, including the infamous EC Comics, moved on to film posters, then to Tarzan and Conan pulp covers. Along the way he produced magazine covers for National Lampoon, though at odds with the editors’ “hippy politics,” made the animated film Fire & Ice with director Ralph Bakshi, and learned to paint left-handed at age 68 after the first of many strokes paralyzed his right hand. As he explained in the 1970s, “I’m very physical minded. In Brooklyn, I knew Conan, I knew guys just like him.” Using this first-hand knowledge of muscle and macho he redefined fantasy heroes as more massive, more menacing, more testosterone-fueled than anything seen before, and their female counterparts as thick-thighed, heavy-buttocked, and pixie-faced, yet still, with their soft bellies and hints of cellulite, believably real. All in all, Frazetta’s art is addictive as potato chips, and now available in a compact, attractive and affordable package.

A reevaluation of American art of the 1960s that foregrounds the role of surrealism during a period of social and political upheavalChallenging what we think we know about art of the 1960s, this volume moves beyond the established movements of pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism to shine a light on how American artists created a unique type of surrealism, making works suffused with eroticism, dread, wonder, violence, and liberation. A series of essays reveals how this new surrealism enabled artists to reconnect art to an increasingly untethered reality following the period of rapid postwar transformation and to imagine new worlds and models for art rooted in political and social change.Presenting a new framework to understand the work of artists such as Lee Bontecou, Franklin Williams, Nancy Grossman, Mel Casas, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Nutt, John Outterbridge, Ralph Arnold, H. C. Westermann, Romare Bearden, Louise Bourgeois, Christina Ramberg, and Robert Arneson, this study features an expansive chronology that highlights how a broad group of artists across the United States connected to each other through exhibitions, galleries, and collectives, offering a fresh perspective on how artists in the 1960s harnessed psychoanalysis, wordplay, and assemblage, among other strategies, to create new horizons for subject matter and form that continue to reverberate in American art today.Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art, New York(September 24, 2025–January 29, 2026)

The first major exhibition and catalog dedicated to the work of groundbreaking painter and filmmaker Mike Henderson.  Mike Henderson (b. 1944) is a painter, filmmaker, and professor emeritus at University of California, Davis. Published to accompany his first museum retrospective, this catalog surveys Henderson’s paintings and films from 1965 to 1985, which are rooted as much in Francisco Goya’s horror of humanity as in Sun Ra’s hope for a new Black future. In the work of that time, Henderson depicted scenes of racial violence, heteromasculinity, and abject social conditions with force and unflinching directness.  In 1985, a studio fire damaged much of Henderson’s output from the previous two decades, obscuring vital ideas about a time of tumult and change, often referred to as a world on fire. Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965–1985 addresses Henderson’s multifaceted art of that period, which examined and offered new ideas about Black life in the visual languages of protest, Afrofuturism, and surrealism.  Published in association with the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis  Exhibition dates:  Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of ArtJanuary 29–June 25, 2023

Takeshi Murata (born 1975) first became known as an early innovator of "datamoshing," a form of "glitch art" that requires compressing two videos together until their respective pixels merge into one mashed-up picture. Since then, inspired by Giorgio de Chirico and traditional 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, Murata's work has ventured into the realm of hyper-realism in a series of uncanny prints and videos that explore our inner and exterior lives via everything from B-grade horror film imagery to relics of a 1980s childhood. Part monograph and part artist's book, Takeshi Murata includes an essay by New Museum curator Lauren Cornell, an interview with the artist conducted by Alex Gartenfeld, Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and an essay by Dan Nadel.

Ben Jones, one third of the artist collective Paper Rad and progeny of Providence's Fort Thunder warehouse-based art scene, makes work that harks back to the Saturday morning cartoons and video games of the 1980s. Exploring the theme of masculinity, Jones' signature neon-infused images, paintings, digital pictures and built environments, Men's Group Black Math includes a 24-page comic strip about contemporary male life, plus a series of texts about manhood commissioned from men the artist admires, including artists Peter Saul and Gary Panter.

A collection of 30 years of drawings by Chris Martin, selected in conjunction with the artist, showing how he has pushed the boundaries between the most sophisticated formalism and outsider art's instinctive logic. Martin chronologically presents drawings from all phases of his career as he discovers new forms, from undulating sound waves to mushrooms to tantric arches to the iconic visages of James Brown and Sigmar Polke. On the New York painting scene he has influenced a wave of painters for whom his catholic tastes and loose sensibility are inspirational.

Hybrid portraiture of humanoid monsters and existential figuresThis book presents new paintings by acclaimed New York–based artist Jason Fox (born 1964), along with sketches, source material and works on paper made between 2006 and 2016. Fox paints hybrid portraits—humanoid monsters and existential figures—often posed behind a canvas, as though in the act of their own creation. In an interview with the artist Joe Bradley included in this volume, Fox describes his influences and subject matter, which range from comic books, rock icons and minimalism, to his dog, Duncan, and former president Barack Obama. Published on the occasion of Square Cave, the artist’s solo exhibition at Canada gallery in New York, this book provides insight into Fox’s multivalent and psychedelic studio practice.

This surreally lyrical, sexually charged book collects Jimmy DeSana’s earlier work, made from 1980 to 1983. For his series Suburban, DeSana staged photos of nude subjects in various evocative poses, entwined with everyday objects and lit with gel-covered tungsten lights. Rather than constructing a space, the “suburban” was a place of examining stereotypes and norms. Of this series, DeSana told Laurie Simmons, his contemporary and longtime roommate, “I don’t really think of that work as erotic. I think of the body almost as an object. I attempted to use the body but without the eroticism that some photographers use frequently. I think I de-eroticized a lot of it. Particularly in that period, but that is the way the suburbs are in a sense.” Interest in DeSana is at a renewed high: Salon 94 represents his estate and mounted a well-received exhibition in 2012, and art and photography from the early 1980s is enjoying a renaissance across all media. There is a special interest now in queer artists and the legacy of a generation destroyed by AIDS, with regard to contemporary photography and queer culture and Jimmy DeSana: Suburban is an essential contribution to this evolving canon.

This volume brings together twenty-five of R. Crumb’s most ambitious, acclaimed, and profound comics. One of the most influential and iconic cartoonists of our time, R. Crumb is celebrated for pushing the boundaries of representation, mass consumerism, and polite society. The comics in this volume exemplify Crumb’s creative output over twenty-five years following his early experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s. The comics collected here depict characters searching for an understanding of the world around and within themselves. Through adaptation, autobiography, biography, and short fiction, Crumb—much like his subjects—demands we pay attention to our darkest desires, compulsions, fears, and obsessions. Existential Comics will also feature a new, introductory comic strip by Crumb, reflecting on his practice in the context of this volume. Editor Dan Nadel’s essay further weaves together Crumb’s life, career, and influences, delving into the creative environment that informed some of the artist’s most outstanding comics.

The first comprehensive monograph on one of today’s most innovative and successful painters - made in close collaboration with the artistDefined by bold brushstrokes, a dynamic use of color and imaginative compositions, the paintings of Dana Schutz are panoramic expanses that offer visions of humanity in all its complex facets. Her deeply subjective approach, untethered from realism, translates into images that seem to exist in a place that transcends time while celebrating the intrinsic qualities of her medium of choice with freedom and intelligence. As the artist herself stated, ‘I’m interested in painting as an affective place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.'This first comprehensive monograph on her work was created in close collaboration with the artist and features a number of never-before-seen paintings and drawings.

The definitive study of the work of KAWS, one of the most influential and much-loved forces in contemporary art and culture KAWS is one of the most popular and recognizable contemporary artists, whose reach extends far beyond the art world into the realms of fashion, music, and popular culture at large. Beginning his career as a graffiti artist in the 1990s, KAWS has expanded his repertoire into painting, sculpture, drawing, product design, and augmented reality, together forming an artistic vision that unites all of these practices. KAWS has collaborated with some of the most prominent international brands, including Uniqlo, Comme des Garçons, Supreme, Nike, Dior, sacai, General Mills, and many more, and the book includes images of the artist’s studio by Jason Schmidt and a selection of KAWS’s previously unpublished preparatory drawings as well as work spanning his entire career, from his early graffiti days to his highly collectible vinyl toys, complex abstract paintings, and monumental public sculptures. Richly illustrated and featuring the most significant scholarship on his work to date, this book is a definitive study on the life and career of this extraordinary artist.

An epistolary history of postwar American art through the weird and wonderful mind of Peter Saul A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2020Painter Peter Saul (born 1934), considered one of the founding fathers of pop art but certainly not reducible to that movement, is best known for his cartoonish paintings in Day-Glo hues satirizing American culture. Saul was born and raised in Northern California, attended Washington University, lived in Europe from 1956 to 1964, and then settled in Marin County from 1964 to 1976, where he found a community and began to make his reputation. The story of Saul’s development in these crucial years is narrated by the artist himself in Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence, 1945–1976. The letters in this volume, first to Saul’s parents and then to his dealer, Allan Frumkin, are intimate and wide-ranging, full of the same kind of observations that make Saul’s work so compelling. Throughout this period Saul was concerned not only with making his work but also making his life as an artist. The book is therefore very much the story of an artist finding his voice and then attempting to understand and participate in “the art world,” as Saul worked first through pop, then “funk,” and then essentially created his own category. Taken together, the letters in this book form not just an autobiography of the artist, but a memoir of American art history at a critical moment.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post “A definitive and ideal biography—pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I’ve ever read.” —The New York Times A critical darling, Crumb is the first biography of Robert Crumb—one of the most profound and influential artists of the 20th century—whose frank and meticulously rendered cartoons and comics inspired generations of readers and cartoonists, from Art Spiegelman to Alison Bechdel.Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel delivers a “gripping and essential account” (The Boston Globe) of how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact. Braiding biography with “cultural history and criticism...that honors the complexity of [its] subject, even, perhaps particularly, when it gets ugly” (Los Angeles Times), Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America. Including forty-five stunning black-and-white images throughout and a sixteen-page color insert featuring images both iconic and obscure, Crumb spans the pressures of 1950s suburban America and Crumb’s highly dysfunctional early family life; the history of comics and graphic satire; 20th-century popular music; the world of the counterculture; the birth of underground comic books in 1960s San Francisco with Crumb’s Zap Comix; the economic challenges and dissolution of the hippie dream; and the path Robert Crumb blazed through it all. Written with Crumb’s cooperation, this fascinating, rollicking book takes in seven decades of Crumb’s iconic works, including Fritz the Cat, Weirdo, and his adaptation of The Book of Genesis and “floats Crumb on the rapids of his times” (Harper’s Magazine), capturing, in the process, the essence of an extraordinary artist.