Biography

Robert Colescott’s humorously confrontational narrative paintings colorfully examine themes of race relations, sexual politics, and cultural stereotypes. The artist describes his approach using terminology borrowed from the world of professional fighting: he draws people into his paintings using a “one-two punch,” luring them into the scene with clever and accessible pop-culture inspired imagery, and later zapping them with difficult messages. Colescott’s pugilistic spirit is democratic—he does not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, gender, class, or age, but rather dispenses his social critique broadly through his powerful and contentious art.

Originally from New Orleans, Colescott’s parents moved to Oakland, California, in 1919. As a young man Colescott served in the army for four years, returned to the Bay Area, and attended college under the GI Bill. He studied at San Francisco State University before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, studying with Margaret Peterson, Worth Ryder, and James McCray. After earning his B.A., he moved to Paris to study with Fernand Léger. Colescott explains the impact the artist’s teaching had on his work, “The big lesson I got from Léger was monumentality … he didn’t think that abstract work had enough meaning and enough significance for his people. And so he encouraged me to go back to the figure and give up abstraction as such.”1 Returning to UC Berkeley a year later, he continued his studies and earned his M.A. in 1952. He spent three years in the mid-1960s in Cairo, Egypt, as artist in residence at the American Research Center and later teaching at the American University. Living on the African continent and immersed in Egyptian culture, he realized that his art did not have to be European in orientation, but could assimilate African aesthetic influences such as color combinations that might appear dissonant to the Western eye.2 It was not until the 1970s that Colescott began painting the works for which he became known, many of them lampoons of well-known art historical conventions.

The Dutiful Son (1979) was painted when Colescott was living in the Bay Area and teaching at UC Berkeley, and it bears the biting social commentary associated with his work beginning in the 1970s. It portrays a young boy dressed in a ruffled apron and vacuuming while his buxom mother, scantily attired in lingerie and high heels, lounges on a sofa in the same room, idly reading a book while keeping an eye on her son. On the coffee table in front of her lie an ashtray and cigarettes, chocolate, and assorted tchotchkes, lending the room a trashy ambience. Also on the table is a strategically placed copy of a book entitled Modern Art, which evokes a sense of frustrated upward mobility: the mother aspires to be a cultured and sensuous lady of leisure, but rather is an indolent suburbanite with her son standing in as her valet. Appropriately, the scene is painted in a highly animated style underscored by the artist’s characteristically vivid, garish palette. With The Dutiful Son, Colescott pokes fun at the pretensions of middle-class Americans while challenging the wholesale acceptance of reversed gender roles proposed by the then-burgeoning women’s movement.

Colescott was chosen as the sole representative of the United States in the 1997 Venice Biennale, cementing his reputation as a leading figure in American art. The fact that he was also the first African-American artist chosen for this honor is a poignant reminder that race still matters in the art world as in the whole of society. Colescott’s career of more than fifty years has been based on his unshakeable belief that exposing society’s prejudices through art is a worthy goal, yet the manner in which he has approached this intention is surefooted and deft. Perhaps best articulated by critic Kenneth Baker, Colescott’s work is “topical without being didactic, freewheeling without being flashy, serious without being humorless and highly personal without being self-involved.”3 —J.N.

1. Robert Colescott, oral history interview by Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (14 April 1999), 12.
2. Lowery S. Sims, “Robert Colescott, 1975–1986,” Robert Colescott: A Retrospective (San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art, 1987), 2.
3. Kenneth Baker, “Colescott Takes Raw Yet Forgiving Look at Race, Sex in America,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 May 1999.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

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