Bob Crewe: Discovery, Invention, Form

Curated by Jessica May and Erin Hutton

Solar Eclipse (1999), mixed media on wood panel, 78 ¼” x 126”

May 20 - July 10, 2021

About The Show

Can the visual art of a genius pop musician survive the kind of biographical and quasi-forensic analysis that, years and years later, objets-d’art get? With Bob Crewe, the answer is yes. - Peter Plagens, artist, art critic & novelist

Cove Street Arts is delighted to participate in the reintroduction of the visual artwork of Robert Stanley Crewe (1930-2014, known as Bob), a polymath and world citizen who spent the last years of his extraordinary, eventful, and extraordinarily eventful life in Maine. Co-curated by Jessica May and Erin Hutton, our exhibition includes 18 works in a variety of media made in the period that critics consider the artist’s strongest, the 1990’s through the early 2000’s.

A large segment of the public is aware of Bob Crewe’s status as a legendary songwriter, manager, producer, and recording star. Though he enjoyed success in the 1950’s, writing hits for doo-wop bands (e.g., The Rays’ Silhouettes), Crewe is perhaps best known (due in part to the massive success of the Tony Award winning musical Jersey Boys) as the co-writer of a string of 1960’s hits for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons - major hits, including Sherry, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like a Man, and dozens more. And for co-writing, in the 1970’s, Frankie Valli’s iconic and oft-covered Can't Take My Eyes Off of You. Fewer people realize that Crewe was a co-writer of LaBelle’s 1974 disco funk classic Lady Marmalade. And fewer still are aware that, after losing his inspiration for the music scene of the 1980’s, Bob Crewe, then a man in his 60’s, turned the full force and vitality of his boundless creative energy toward another innate talent and lifelong love: visual art.

As evidenced by his extraordinary success in the music industry - as a performer and songwriter, certainly, but even more surprisingly, given his lack of formal training and inability to read music, as a producer -- Crewe was a bona fide creative genius. True genius is a rare commodity in and of itself, and Crewe’s particular brand was fueled by an even more elusive and remarkable sensory phenomenon known as synesthesia which is, simply put, an unusual type of neurological wiring resulting in a blending or cross-connection of one’s senses. It is an effect many writers, and notably the major Romantic poets, strove through the use of literary devices to simulate in the minds of their readers. Keats combining the senses of vision, taste, and hearing in Ode to A Nightingale is a good example: Tasting of Flora and the country green/Dance, and Provencal song, and sun burnt mirth!

In Crewe’s particular case, true (not simulated) synesthesia manifested as a merging of his visual and auditory faculties. He “saw” sound, quite literally, and in color. So his musical compositions truly are, in a certain sense, sound paintings. Bob Gaudio, the Four Seasons band member with whom Crewe co-wrote the aforementioned string of hit songs, described Crewe’s process as follows: He had a way of communicating with people – and they got it. He’d say “I want to hear some blue streaks here……I want to hear sky blue; you’re giving me brown.”

Given Crewe’s unusual neural wiring and his extraordinary success as a musical autodidact, his success as a visual artist, again with no formal training, is perhaps less than surprising. Art historian and exhibition co-curator Jessica May describes the pop legend’s foray into visual art as [finding] a new creative language, one worthy of his time and attention over decades, one in which – far from merely grasping and mimicking the prevailing trends of the day – he would eventually make his own unique contribution. Crewe himself described his approach as always instinctual, further elaborating: I believe in chance, thrift shops, found objects. In crafting records, for instance, I might hear an old Harry James riff and weave it into a Freddy Cannon song. The sound of someone slamming the studio door might become the hook. I view art the same.

Art critic Peter Plagens describes Crewe’s aesthetic as more European than American (due to trips to Europe with older rich gay man, Austin Avery Mitchell, while in his 20s). In Europe, Crewe was particularly impacted by French artist Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut (“raw art”), from which the term “texturologies” was borrowed. Plagens compares and contrasts as follows: Dubuffet wanted to give only an impression of “teeming matter.” Crewe was more forthrightly literal about his materials. Crewe said at one point, “I started to experiment with building up and tearing down.” Plagens, one of the critics who considers Crewe’s Texturologies (including the work featured in our exhibition) his strongest, notes: Crewe made some arresting pieces, and even within them, there is a tremendous variation.

From the 1990’s to early 2000’s, the quality of Crewe’s artwork earned him solo exhibitions in New York City and California, where he enjoyed a string of five in important galleries. Catalog essayists for these shows included major LA critics, Peter Frank and Peter Clothier, and also Alisa Tager, who astutely noted Crewe’s talent for maximaliz[ing] the minimal [and] substantiat[ing] the ephemeral in his quietly energized paintings. She further characterized the work as resolutely grounded in material fleshiness. . .mysterious forays into memory and illusion.

Bob Crewe did not die young, but the evidence – artistic as well as musical – suggests that the gods indeed did love him. - Peter Plagens

* Artwork photographed by Luc Demers, courtesy of The Bob Crewe Foundation.