Robert Colescott
Robert Colescott
American, 1925– 2009
ROBERT COLESCOTT (1925–2009)
American figurative painter Robert Colescott passed away on Thursday at his home in Tucson, writes Roberta Smith in the New York Times.
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, without regard to race, creed, gender, or political leaning.
After serving in the army during World War II, Colescott majored in art at the University of California, Berkeley. During a year in Paris, he studied with the painter Fernand Léger and spent a lot of time in museums, looking at nineteenth-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 for him Léger’s ideas about narrative, but from outside the Western canon. After another stint in Paris he returned in 1967 to the Bay Area in California.
Steeped in history and art history, 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. 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 surfaces to “squirm.”
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