R. Crumb: Art & Beauty, David Zwirner

From an illustrated Kafka biography to a comic-strip retelling of the book of Genesis, Robert Crumb's cartoons have seen him take on the past fifty years through a haze of sex, satire and the occasional acid trip. He illustrated his way the '60s and '70s subcultures, with strips like Fritz the Cat and Keep on Truckin', and remains one of the most important cartoonists working today.

Art & Beauty is his magazine project, originally published in the '90s, styled after a risqué 1920s publication notorious for its nude photographs of life models. As you might expect, however, Crumb's take is a little more subversive and misanthropic than that.

Tabloid stars, sports personalities (most notably Serena Williams, above) and friends of the artist are drawn by him alongside captions taken from the historical canon – Da Vinci, Cezanne, Andy Warhol – the idea being to critique both groups by pairing the 'high' with the 'low'. Although clothed, many of Crumb's female subjects are portrayed in ways that might seem objectifying, the fetishistic proportions of their bodies reminiscent more of porn than popular social commentary.

'To render and glorify the life today', reads a slogan on the magazine's front cover by Crumb's friend and collaborator, the writer Charles Bukowski. Whether Art & Beauty does that is unclear, and some may take issue with the rendering and, particularly, the glorification of hyper-sexualised, 'modern' views of women.