http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/arts/design/sophie-crumb-and-aline-kominsky-crumb.html 2014-09-19 02:02:08 Sophie Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb Ms. Kominsky-Crumb has been an artist since childhood, and her now show is a joint effort with her daughter, Sophie. === At 66, the artist/cartoonist/writer Aline Kominsky-Crumb has emerged from the shadow of her husband, Robert Crumb, the underground comics great. Her first solo in a New York gallery was in 2007. Now she is showing new work in tandem with her daughter, Sophie Crumb. Emphasizing another family tie may not be the best idea right now, especially since she could easily have handled the whole space. Ms. Kominsky-Crumb has been an artist since childhood. In the densely worked multimedia drawings here, she straddles the divide between high and low with an assurance, formal intelligence and lack of pretension that aligns her with David Bates, David Hockney, Marie Laurencin and Raoul Dufy, to name but a few. Inspiration seems to come from comics, caricature, German Expressionism and the “Real Housewives” franchise of cable television infamy. Her garish yet beautifully controlled images depict women who live in South Florida and (like her mother) frequent Hair Magic, a salon in North Miami Beach overseen by a woman named Cookie. The subjects tend to be blond, bejeweled and often injected. In the sun or salon, they look more fierce than happy, their faces, hair and manicures all but filling the frame with fiery colors and ambivalent feelings, especially about aging. Not to stand apart, Ms. Kominsky-Crumb submitted to a makeover herself, as recorded in Ms. Crumb’s work is more generic, getting most of its presence from her technical skill with watercolor and ink. She copies photographs from fashion magazines with results that call to mind the slightly distorted, definitely unsettling realism of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artists of Weimar, Germany. It would be interesting to see either artist tackle painting more aggressively, especially Ms. Kominsky-Crumb, who is already making the most of her mixes of colored pencil, ink, watercolor, glitter and whatnot.