Robert Williams (artist) - Definition and Overview

Robert Williams is a famed, controversial painter and editor of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.

Williams began as part of the trail-blazing Zap Collective, along with other underground cartoonist visionaries like Robert Crumb. His mix of California car culture, cinematic apocalypticism and film noir helped to create a new genre of psychedelic imagery — along with artists like "Big Daddy" Ed Roth.

Perhaps his most famous work Appetite for Destruction — depicting interlocking levels of human-to-robot rape and brutality — was featured as the cover for the Guns n' Roses album of the same name, before unhappy parents made a fuss, and it was moved to the inside cover by record company Geffen Records.

Williams began the magazine Juxtapoz in 1994. It has propelled many artists with his taste for Americanized figurative nightmares and the blending of pin-up/religious/kitsch culture to fame, among them Mark Ryden.

There is a mid-career collection of his work, The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams (1982), published by RipOff Press (ISBN 0867194189).