Artist 101

1.

Early Years

Colescott was born in Oakland, California in 1925 and spent a childhood surrounded by artistic role models. His parents were both musicians – his mother a pianist and his father a classical and jazz violinist. Creative influences were also to be found beyond the family home; Colescott was encouraged by Sargent Johnson (a friend of his parents) and saw Mexican artist Diego Rivera painting a mural at the San Francisco World’s Fair as a youth. He toyed with the idea of pursuing music but was swayed to follow a career in visual art, partly as a result of this early exposure.

Colescott’s passion for art was already firmly engrained when he was drafted into the US Army to serve out the end of World War II in Europe as a teenager. The war took him to Paris – then the beating heart of the art world – a city that was relatively accepting of African American artists.

2.

A Classical Training

When he returned to America, Colescott took up studies in drawing and painting at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1949, and returning in 1952 to complete a master’s. In the 1950s and 60s, Colescott became particularly influenced by his Northern Californian contemporaries in the Bay Area Figurative Movement who were shunning the then-dominant Abstract Expressionism in favour of a more representative approach.

During his time in Paris, Colescott studied under French Modern Art master Fernand Léger, who inspired Colescott’s distinctive approach to the human figure. His painting technique drew on the legacy of Old Master and Renaissance painters, but when it came to subject matter, Colescott forged a new path.

In parallel to his artistic career, Colescott was a devoted educator. During his time teaching at Portland State University from 1957 to 1966, he took a sabbatical at the American Research Center in Cairo, and later became a visiting professor at the American University in the Egyptian capital. He spent much of the 1960s exploring Egypt, an experience that would profoundly influence his later work. When war broke out in 1967, he and his family fled to Paris for three years, then settled back in the United States where Colescott taught art at Cal State, Stanislaus, UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute and later the University of Arizona.

It was in Portland that Colescott’s career gained widespread recognition, supported by gallerist and philanthropist Arlene Schnitzer, who offered the artist his first solo show in 1963.

3.

Challenging Assumptions and Stereotypes

Even in his early work, Colescott provocatively reinterpreted well-known art historical masterpieces by placing Black protagonists centre stage. This was an evocative and controversial device to address racial stereotyping, in which roles were reversed; Black characters were placed in conventionally ‘white’ positions. A well-known example is his reimagining of Édouard Manet's Olympia in which the Black servant is portrayed as an equal. Colescott's version, created in 1959, is spare and subdued, yet mighty in its cultural gravity.

The gravity of Colescott’s oeuvre extends far beyond first impressions; it’s a riddle of contradictions and conflicts. His painted scenes are bright and charming, while simultaneous carrying blunt, acerbic and sometimes crude imagery. This tension implicates the viewer, urging them to engage with their own perspectives and assumptions on politics, identity, capitalism, colonialism, gender and sexuality. His figures, distorted, discordant gesturally executed and exaggerated almost to the point of caricature, carry both individual and collective narratives.

For Colescott, comedy was not deployed as whimsy, but as a tool to draw viewers in to confront more urgent, sobering themes. As the artist himself said, ‘If you decide to laugh, don’t forget the humour is the bait, and once you’ve bitten, you may have to do some serious chewing.’

4.

An American Icon

In the 1960s and 70s, Colescott began creating the exaggerated, colour-laden works for which he is best known. He continued to modify iconic masterworks, putting his unique twist on pieces including Vincent van Gogh's Potato Eaters (reinterpreted by Colescott in 1975), Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, 1976, and another Manet, Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, 1980.

By the 1980s, Colescott had become an icon of American art and a trailblazer in the reemergence of figuration. This status was cemented in 1987 when the San Jose Museum of Art gave the artist his first retrospective, which later travelled across America.

In 1997, he was catapulted onto the global art stage as the first African American artist to represent the United States in the 1997 Venice Biennale. One key painting in Colescott’s Venice presentation was White Boy, 1989. The piece is a quintessential example of the artist’s groundbreaking figurative approach in which he mines from, critiques, and then revises the tropes of European painting. Within the composition, a bikini-clad Black woman cradles a much smaller white male figure. Another figure, evocative of the women in Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, holds up a fist in empowered defiance. The work is a potent commentary on the challenges faced by women of colour, power dynamics, and the complex public perception of interracial relationships.

In his 1980 painting, 1919, Colescott explores themes of race and identity in America. The painting represents his parents relocation from New Orleans to Oakland in order to offer their sons a better life. He depicts his mother's skin as lighter than in reality to represent the suppression of her identity as a survival mechanism.

5.

On the Market

Over the last few years, demand for Colescott’s paintings has soared, with a high proportion of his market growth in the US. His work continues to strike a chord with a society increasingly conscious of the racial bias embedded in American history, which looms large in contemporary culture.

Colescott’s work is held in prestigious collections including those at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His paintings continue to be exhibited widely in the US and internationally, most recently in the travelling exhibition 'Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott.'

In May 2021, The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art acquired Colescott’s 1975 painting, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware River: Page from an American History Textbook – a reimagining of Emanuel Leutze’s famed 1852 painting of the first President of the United States crossing the Delaware River by boat – for a record-shattering $15.3 million. The work’s modest estimate of $9 million was already ten times the artist’s auction record at the time.

In February 2023, Colescott’s Miss Liberty sold at Bonhams for $4.5 million, the second-highest price ever achieved by the artist, and in November 2021, Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hommage to Victor Hugo) achieved the artist's third-highest price. These extraordinary results – and the growing interest in Colescott’s work in the broader art landscape – are proof of his rapidly surging market status and immense legacy in 20th-century painting, and well beyond.

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