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 controversy forced record company Geffen Records to move it to the inside cover.

Williams began the magazine Juxtapoz in 1994. It has propelled to fame many artists with Willam's same taste for Americanized figurative nightmares and the blending of pin-up, religious and kitsch culture. Among such artists is Mark Ryden.

There is a mid-career collection of his work, The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams (1982), published by RipOff Press (ISBN 0867194189), but a more comprehensive look at his work arrived the following decade with Malicious Resplendence: The Paintings of Robt. Williams, published by Fantagraphics Books.

See also

• lowbrow (art movement)

American painters | Underground_cartoonists | Comics artists