Robert Colescott

1925—

Painter, educator

Robert Colescott is a prominent American painter known for his ironic but unflinching depictions of American life. Trained in Paris and at the University of California, Berkeley, Colescott uses a variety of techniques and motifs, often setting human figures and images from popular culture against an abstract backdrop of vivid colors and energetic movement. While racism is clearly a central concern, Colescott's works resist easy interpretation. As the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in a 1998 piece for the Village Voice, "The most interesting thing about Robert Colescott is that he paints beautifully. Everything else that is interesting about him is interesting in relation to that beautifulness."

Robert Hutton Colescott was born on August 26, 1925, in Oakland, California. Music and art filled his childhood. His mother was a pianist, and his father (a railroad porter) was a skilled violinist and jazz musician. Both were friends of Sargent Johnson, a well-known African-American sculptor who played a significant role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Johnson, a frequent visitor to the Colescott home, was instrumental in nurturing Robert's artistic inclinations. A formative experience occurred about 1937, when Colescott saw the acclaimed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera painting in San Francisco. "I could sense the strength in it," he later recalled to Kim Bennett in Magical-Secrets: A Printmaking Community, "even as an eleven-year-old kid."

Still a teenager, Colescott entered the U.S. Army in 1942 and served in Europe until the end of the war. This, too, proved a formative experience, because it exposed him to Paris, the capital of the international art world and a well-known refuge for African-American artists tired of the racism they faced at home. After leaving the army, Colescott returned to the United States to attend Berkeley, which granted him a bachelor's degree in drawing and painting in 1949. He then went back to Paris to study for a year with the painter Fernand Léger, who convinced him to question and modify the abstract expressionism then dominating the art world. The most lasting sign of Léger's influence is Colescott's characteristic use of human figures against colorful, abstract backgrounds.

In 1950 Colescott returned once again to Berkeley, earning a master's degree in painting and drawing two years later. Many artists around Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay area, including the well-known painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, shared Léger's determination to resist abstract expressionism's de-emphasis of the human body. As a result, Colescott's return to Berkeley served in part to reinforce Léger's teachings. But Colescott also found something new in California: the incorporation (by artists such as Wayne Thiebaud) of advertising images and other elements of popular culture, often with ironic or satirical purposes. This, too, would become a characteristic feature of Colescott's style.

After receiving his master's degree, Colescott moved to the Pacific Northwest, first to Seattle and then to Portland, Oregon, where in 1957 he accepted his first major teaching appointment as an associate professor of art at Portland State University. Seven years later, his career received a major boost when he won a study grant from the American Research Center (ARC) in Cairo, Egypt. In an interview with Ann Shengold for Robert Colescott: Another Judgment, the artist described the trip's significance: "I spent a couple of years in Egypt and was influenced by the narrative form of Egyptian art, by 3,000 years of a ‘non-white’ art tradition, and by living in a culture that is strictly ‘non-white.’ I think that excited me about some other things, some of the ideas about race and culture in our own country; I wanted to say something about it."

After two years at the ARC, another two years as a visiting professor at the American University of Cairo, and several more years in Paris, Colescott returned to the United States, where he took a position at California State College in 1970 and began preparations for an ambitious new project: to refashion some of the most familiar paintings in Western art by replacing white figures with black ones. The best-known painting to emerge from this project is George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975). In a vivid reworking of Emmanuel Leutze's famous 1851 canvas, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Colescott replaced George Washington with the African-American educator and agronomist George Washington Carver. Colescott painted a recognizable likeness of Carver, but he transformed the troops surrounding Washington into nameless stock figures or stereotypes, including a so-called Aunt Jemima figure and a banjo player. While critics continue to ponder the painting's dense symbolism, most agree that it is meant to serve as a reminder that representations of the historical past, including textbooks and iconic paintings such as Leutze's, unjustly exclude the contributions of nonwhite people. Colescott has noted several times that the only African Americans mentioned by name in his childhood textbooks were the educator Booker T. Washington and Carver.

Around the time Colescott was completing George Washington Carver, he accepted two concurrent teaching positions in the San Francisco area, one at Berkeley and another at the San Francisco Art Institute. He remained at the institute until 1985, when he accepted a position at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he taught until his retirement in 1990. In 1997, at the age of seventy-one, Colescott was selected to represent the United States with a solo show at the Venice Bienniale, arguably the most important international art exhibition in the world. As the first African American to receive this honor, Colescott's nineteen paintings were enthusiastically received by international critics, such as by John Bentley Mays of the Globe and Mail, who called Colescott's works "crazy quilts stitched together from the scraps of the artist's black American experience: cartoon-like stereotypes of both blacks and whites, dashes of Rastafarian colours, anecdotes about sex, violence, black exploitation and black survival."

At a Glance …

Born Robert Hutton Colescott on August 26, 1925, in Oakland, CA; son of a railroad porter/jazz musician and a pianist. Military service: U.S. Army, 1942-46. Education: Studied painting with Fernand Léger, Paris, France, 1949-50; University of California, Berkeley, BA, painting and drawing, 1949, MA, painting and drawing, 1952.

Career: Portland State University, associate professor of art, 1957-66; American University of Cairo, Egypt, visiting professor, 1966-67; American College, Paris, professor of art history, 1967-68; College Art Study Abroad, Paris, professor of art, 1967-69; California State College, professor of art, 1970-74; University of California, Berkeley, visiting lecturer of painting and drawing, 1974-79; San Francisco Art Institute, instructor of painting and drawing, 1976-85; University of Arizona, Tucson, visiting professor of art, 1983-84; University of Arizona, Tucson, professor of art, 1985-90, regents' professor of art, 1990—.

Awards: American Research Center Grant, 1964-65; National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1976, 1980, and 1983; Guggenheim Foundation Grant, 1985; Artist's Residency Grant, Roswell Foundation, 1987; "Robert Colescott Day" declaration, City of Houston, Texas, December 2, 1988; Resident Artist Grant, Tamarind Institute, 1989; Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Award, 1991.

Addresses: Agent—Phyllis Kind Gallery, 236 W. Twenty-sixth St., Ste. 503, New York, NY 10001-6736.

As of June of 2008, Colescott retained the rank of Regents' Professor of Art at the University of Arizona, Tucson. While he no longer taught on a regular basis, he continued to give occasional lectures and to paint. In 2006 he had a major solo exhibition at the Kravets/Wehby gallery in New York. Sarah Valdez in Art in America said of the show, "Each piece evidences the artist having a grand time practicing his craft and letting his consciousness stream forth, all the while dexterously poking fun at a domain notoriously dominated by white people: high culture."

Selected works

Paintings

Little Bed, 1961.

White Blossoms, 1961.

Jemima's Pancakes, 1968.

Egg Foo Yung to Go, 1971.

Eat Dem Taters, 1975.

George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, 1975.

Jus' Folks by Vermeer, 1976.

The Lone Wolf in Paris, 1977.

Auvers-sur-Oise (Crow in the Wheat Field), 1981.

Les Demoiselles d'Alabama: Vestidas, 1985.

Tobacco: The Holdouts, 1987.

Feeling His Oats, 1988.

Emergency Room, 1989.

Second Thoughts on Eternity, 1991.

Black as Satan, 1993.

The Sphinx Speaks, 1993.

Exotique, 1994.

Ode to Joy (European Anthem), 1997.

Tastess Lik Chicken, 2001.

McWillie's Farm, 2002.

Ascension, 2003.

Sources

Books

Shengold, Ann, Robert Colescott: Another Judgment (exhibition catalog), Knight Gallery/Spirit Square Arts Center, 1985.

Periodicals

Art in America, March 2007.

Globe and Mail, June 19, 1997, p. D3.

New York Times, March 3, 1989; October 27, 2006; March 30, 2008.

Village Voice, June 2, 1998, p. 173.

Online

Bayles, Jennifer, "Acquisitions: Robert Colescott," Albright-Knox Art Gallery, http://www.albrightknox.org/acquisitions/acq_2000/Colescott.html (accessed June 17, 2008).

Bennett, Kim, "Robert Colescott," Magical-Secrets: A Printmaking Community,http://www.magical-secrets.com/artists/colescott (accessed June 17, 2008).

Karstrom, Paul, "Interview with Robert Colescott," Smithsonian Archives of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/colesc99.htm (accessed June 17, 2008).

—R. Anthony Kugler