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Figurative


Image of The Dutiful Son

The Dutiful Son
Painting

1979
84 x 66 1/4 in. (213.36 x 168.28 cm)

Robert Colescott (Oakland, California, 1925 - 2009, Tucson, Arizona)

Object Type: Painting
Medium and Support: Oil on canvas
Credit Line: Gift of Robert Harshorn Shimshak and Marion Brenner with additional support from the Collection Committee.
Accession Number: 2000.07

Exhibition


Renegade Humor
, February 3, 2012 - July 8, 2012, New Wing, Second Floor, Central Skylight and South Metro A Galleries, San José Museum of Art.

Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection, July 30, 2007 - September 9, 2007, San José Museum of Art.

Inside Out: Selections from the Permanent Collection, November 20, 2004 - July 9, 2006, New Wing, Second Floor, South Metro A and Central Skylight Galleries, San José Museum of Art.

Collecting Our Thoughts: The Community Responds to Art in the Permanent Collection, June 23, 2001 - September 23, 2001, New Wing, Metro A, Skylight and South Galleries, Second Floor, San José Museum of Art.

The Lighter Side of Bay Area Figuration
, co-organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri April 7 - June 18, 2000; and the San Jose Museum of Art, September 3-November 26, 2000, New Wing, Metro A, Skylight and South Galleries, Second Floor.

SJMA Label Text


Renegade Humor (2012)

In The Dutiful Son, Robert Colescott offered a subversive critique of the suburban American family. The painting is set in a garishly colored living room, complete with all the necessary suburban accouterments: a clutter of cigarettes and an ashtray, chocolate, knick-knacks, Hoover vacuum, and a TV. A mother-figure clad in lingerie and high heels and reading a romance novel lounges provocatively on the couch. She gazes suggestively at her clean-cut son, who is dutifully vacuuming an oriental carpet. A dark shadow in the corner of the carpet where he is working provokes us to question “what lies under the carpet” in this family dynamic. While the scathing satire goes so far as to intimate inappropriate familial relations, Colescott’s scene is also imbued with a sense of fun and infectious humor. The artist commented: “I like the idea that paintings can be humorous and serious at the same time.” Colescott used humor as bait to lure viewers into his works, then delivered the powerful punch of his message.


Inside Out: Selections from the Permanent Collection (2004-2006)

The son of Creole parents, Colescott has long been interested in questions of race, class and gender. After visiting Egypt in the 1960s, he began to make race a central topic in his narrative paintings. In The Dutiful Son, Colescott tackles gender stereotypes and ideas of contemporary enslavement. He reverses traditional gender roles by depicting the son in a frilly apron dutifully vacuuming the rug while his mother relaxes on the sofa.

The Dutiful Son was painted when Robert 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. A young boy dressed in a ruffled apron vacuums an outlandish living room rug. Supervising the chore is his buxom mother, who lounges on the sofa in her lingerie and high heels, idly reading a book. Painted in Colescott’s cartoon-like style, the scene is 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 reversed gender roles proposed by the then-burgeoning women’s movement.

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Dimensions
  • Image Dimensions: 84 x 66 1/4 in. (213.36 x 168.28 cm)

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