Watch out. A raw, captivating exhibition by the great American painter Robert Colescott (1925-2009), has arrived at the New Museum, for you to enjoy and dissect. “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” is the first museum exhibition of this artist’s relentlessly provocative work to be seen in Manhattan since a 1989 exhibition (also at the New Museum) and the most complete to date. It reveals a man who was eventually able to fuse his own private demons about race with the public demons of his country, creating one of the most compelling, simultaneously personal and socially relevant oeuvres in 20th-century American painting.
Tight and carefully crafted, the show follows Colescott’s heroic trajectory from start to finish, a nervous mixture of abstraction and trompe l’oeil during his college days to a sardonic humanism that is both indictment and optimistic.
As a light-skinned black American who was raised to pass as white—because, as he would later say, he wanted to “belong to the wrong club”—Colescott didn’t embrace his Blackness until the mid-1960s, on age 40.
After 1968, he made very few paintings that did not startle, seduce, enlighten, amuse and horrify, and did not refer to race and racism. With a burlesque expressionism, he dealt with stereotypes and caricatures of both blacks and whites, often reformulating Western masterpieces with non-white subjects. They were ancient and wildly satirical. In them, race was first among equal subjects, including gender, American history, sex, religion, consumerism, and jazz, as well as large doses of popular culture—that is, advertising, literature, movies, edibles, and their mascots, such as Colonel Sanders.
His points were pushed forward by his searing palette (bright pink, magenta and a vibrant cerulean blue) and vigorous brushwork, masterful and sloppy at the same time. In 1990 he wrote about making ‘great sensual paintings. It is the first impact people get. They walk in and say, ‘Oh wow!’ And then, ‘Oh [expletive]’ when they see what they are dealing with in the matter. It’s an integrated ‘one-two’ punch; it gets them every time.”
Perhaps most importantly, Colescott contributed to the revival of figurative painting that began in the 1970s and continues to this day, especially among black artists. He first gained fame as a series appropriator in the mid-1970s – for the Pictures Generation artists and the neo-expressionists.
He was born in Oakland, where his parents (identifying as Creole) moved from New Orleans in 1919, early in the Great Migration. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949, and after living briefly in Paris and studying with Fernand Léger, he returned for his graduate degree. In 1955, he took a job as a high school art teacher in Seattle, before transferring to Portland State College in 1957. (He would teach at colleges and universities for most of his life, retiring in 1995). During these years he sorted around the influences of the figurative painters of Northern California – Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff and most importantly Joan Brown.
Colescott’s racial awakening began with two stints in Cairo, a residency in 1964 and a teaching job in 1966-67. You can see the effect of ancient Egyptian art in the first major painting in this show, “We Await Thee” (1964), in which female nudes appear to emerge from a stone bench. Their varying skin tones, as well as bodies and faces that are literally split, half black and half white, are common in Colescott’s work, perhaps reflecting his tensions around racial identity and that of the nation as a whole.
Subsequently, Colescott laid claim to the saturated colors of the black figurative painter Bob Thompson in his “Nubian Queen” (1966) and “Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet” (1968), which appear to be populated by fiery red spirits. Colescott has a niche for himself created in pop art with paintings like “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie” (1971), featuring a nude blonde over a black GI with a smoking M16 rifle.
His two most famous paintings, both from 1975, are his simplest appropriations: “Eat Dem Taters,” a blackface broadcast of Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters,” and “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook, transforming Emanuel Leutze’s portrayal of George Washington on his way to victory into a black achievement, a tribute to one of America’s great educators. (In 2021, Carver’s painting was sold at auction for $15.3 million to George Lucas for his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.)
Of Carver, Colescott noted in 1990, “Undermining this icon, a quasi-religious image that everyone bows and believes in – but no one thinks about – seemed like a good idea, a new life for an old shoe.”
Both works hang in the central gallery of this exhibition, crucial hinges between the artist’s searching early efforts and his magnificent late works. These paintings throw a gauntlet on both the art world and academia, but are only the beginning. If there’s one thing Colescott didn’t do, it was stand still.
In 1979 Colescott began to move towards more nuanced forms of appropriation in “Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder”, in which the artist paints a copy of Matisse’s “Dance” in his studio, but distracted, as if by reality, in the shape of a live model shedding her clothes.
One of the show’s least known and greatest early paintings is the 1978 “Wreck of the Medusa”, which takes us past Géricault’s masterpiece, “The Raft of the Medusa”, to the disintegration of the raft at sea – a beautiful blue expanse under a narrow band of pink and blue sky. Bobbing in the waves are a black man swimming to a blond Avon lady, a life preserver, a swaddled baby (Moses?) adrift in a basket, and below that the artist himself at a booze bottle.
A more comprehensive humanistic, albeit lucid, look at life takes place in the exhibition’s last two galleries, featuring works from the late 1980s and 1990s. Overflowing with figures from different eras, cultures and stories, these paintings become almost operatic. The people move forward and overlap as if Colescott is thinking of Cubism.
These phantasmagoric assemblages are exciting, tragic and both readable and mysterious. In “School Days” a black athlete points a gun at us, and on the other side a black man is wounded in the chest. An enraged, purple-haired black woman (white from the midriff down) towers over the action.
Colescott wants us to understand some of what has brought us to this point, as suggested by his series “Knowing the Past Is the Key to the Future.” One is “Matthew Henson and the Quest for the North Pole” (1986) featuring a black American explorer, a naked white woman with the severed head of a black man on a platter – Salome and the martyr John the Baptist; a shackled Black Venus and her lurking white male keeper; and a woman whose face is half black and half white. In the lower left corner of this work – in one of the best painting moments in the show – is a portrait of a Native American chief, signifying the immensity of the sins of white America.
Colescott, who died in 2009 at age 83, has never stopped developing. In some of his last paintings he added different display modes, the most effective figures outlined in combinations of black and magenta. In “Beauty Is Only Skin Deep,” what appears to be an embracing black couple offers one of the show’s most peaceful, romantic moments. But look closely. The man covers the woman’s eyes; a cartoonish white face, possibly that of Betty Boop, is confronted with a map of Africa that is also a woman’s head, and a black man appears to hold his head in white hands. Colescott’s paintings continue to make people nervous, especially in the coastal enclaves of the art world. In 1997, when he became the first black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition, his roots were in Site Santa Fe and the University of Arizona Museum of Art, some distance from those enclaves.
Likewise, the current exhibition was hosted by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, and independent curator Matthew Weseley, author of a forthcoming monograph on Colescott, and historian and curator Lowery Stokes Sims, who has spent decades studying the artist’s work. writes. Together with Raphaela Platow, director and chief curator of the Cincinnati Arts Center, the couple has put together a lavish catalog in which we hear from Colescott (an outstanding, erudite writer), his family and friends, as well as some exceptionally astute professionals.
After traveling to Portland, Oregon, Chicago and Sarasota, Florida, the show has come to its final stop at the New Museum, which was not on its original route. It’s embarrassing that one of New York’s major museums wasn’t involved in this endeavor from the start, especially given their confession to diversifying on all fronts after George Floyd’s murder. But luckily for the city, for the ongoing reformation of American art history and for young artists in the five boroughs, the Colescott Show is here, and the New Museum is deeply indebted.
Art and Race Matter: The Career of Robert Colescott
Through October 9, New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan, 212-219-1222; newmuseum.org.