A Quiet But Visually Effective Black Pioneer Robert Colescott

Robert Colescott, Painter Who Toyed With Race and Sex, Dies at 83


By ROBERTA SMITH
New York Times
Published: June 9, 2009

Robert Colescott, an American figurative painter whose garishly powerful canvases lampooned racial and sexual stereotypes with rakish imagery, lurid colors and tangible glee, died Thursday at his home in Tucson . He was 83.

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Ode to Joy (European Anthem),1997

His death was confirmed by his wife, Jandava Cattron, who said he had suffered for several years from Parkinsonian syndrome.




Mr. Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997, the first African-American to do so. By then he was well known for pitting the painterly against the political to create giddily joyful, destabilized compositions that satirized — and offended — to get your attention.

People of all colors haunted Mr. Colescott’s paintings, their mottled skin tones often suggested one race seeping through another. Their tumultuous interactions evoked the volatile mixture of suspicion, desire, pain and vitality that the races in America have, that no truths could be held to be self-evident. Life is mired in slippery layers of false piety, self-interest and greed; plus lust, pleasure and irreverence.

Mr. Colescott often found new uses and meanings for the landmarks of Western painting, borrowing compositions and characters from van Eyck, Goya and Manet and peppering his scenes with the Africanized faces from Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

In his 1975 “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook,” he reinterpreted Emmanuel Leutze’s famous painting of George Washington during the American Revolution with Carver at the center, accompanied by black cooks, Jemimas and banjo players. His 1975 “Eat Dem Taters” substituted laughing black people for the pious Dutch peasants of van Gogh’s “Potato Eaters” to attack, in his words, “the myth of the happy darky.” No American painter of the late 20th century made such telling use of painting’s European past to lambaste the painful contradictions of the American present.

Mr. Colescott’s work anticipated the appropriation art and Neo-Expressionist painting of the 1980s. His imagery shared aspects with Pop Art, although he disdained its coolness. His improvisational approach had precedents in jazz and Abstract Expressionism. He said he wanted his surface to “squirm.”

Born in Oakland, CA on Aug. 26, 1925; His mother, a pianist, and his father, a jazz violinist and a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad. The family had moved to California from New Orleans in 1919 to improve their children’s chances for a good education.

He grew up playing the drums, but he drew and painted from childhood. The African-American sculptor Sargent Johnson, who worked with Mr. Colescott’s father on the Southern Pacific, was a family friend.

After serving with the Army in France and Germany during World War II, Mr. Colescott majored in art at the University of California , Berkeley , emerging in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in painting and a geometric abstract style. During a year in Paris he studied with the painter Fernand Léger — whose emphasis on scale, color and narration made a lasting impression — and spent a lot of time in museums, looking at 19th-century painting. He returned to Berkeley for a master’s and spent the next decade teaching in the Northwest.

In 1964 a teaching residency took him to Cairo , where Egyptian art reiterated Léger’s ideas about narrative for him, but from outside the Western canon. After another stint in Paris he returned in 1967 to the United States , which he found changed by the civil rights movement, and to the Bay Area, where artists like Roy De Forest, William T. Wiley, Joan Brown, Robert Arneson and especially Peter Saul had developed extravagant, often caustic figurative styles. By the end of the 1960s he had found his mature style.

Mr. Colescott’s first four marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Ms. Cattron; his brother, Warrington Colescott Jr., of Hollandale, Wis.; five sons from previous marriages — Alexander, of Napa, Calif.; Nicolas, of Portland, Ore.; Dennett, of San Rafael, Calif.; Daniel, of Modesto, Calif.; and Cooper, of Tucson, Az. — and one grandson.

Mr. Colescott helped set the stage for transgressive work by painters like Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Sue Williams and Carroll Dunham and multimedia artists like Kara Walker, William Pope.L and Kalup Linzy.

A commentator who covered his artwork noted, "When asked if he didn’t feel an obligation to serve “the black community,” Mr. Colescott replied, “The way that one serves is to serve art first,” adding that “the way you serve art is by being true to yourself.”