There’s a much larger and more complicated story behind the art of American painter Robert Colescott (1925-2009) than most realise. And an important part of it is told by the painting called 1919 that he created in 1980 – which will be offered by Bonhams as a single-lot sale in New York this September. Colescott was the second of two sons born to Warrington Wickham Colescott Sr and Lydia Kenner Hutton, who emigrated from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Oakland, California, in 1919. Colescott described this relocation as part of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the segregated South into less racially restrictive parts of the country. There’s considerable evidence that his parents – whose appearance made it possible for them to pass for white – intended to take advantage of the more relaxed atmosphere in California in order to assimilate into the mainstream. They settled in a white neighbourhood and their two sons attended schools where the overwhelming majority of students were white.

There were setbacks. Although Colescott’s father had hoped to work as a professional musician, he remained an employee of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Because his older brother Warrington appeared to be white, Robert Colescott’s mother perhaps preferred his older sibling to her younger son, whose skin colour and facial features alluded to their African ancestry.

Stay updated with our auctions. Sign up to receive your weekly newsletter of global auctions, stories and more from Bonhams and our sister companies. Subscribe now

Nonetheless, Colescott succeeded in passing in the white world. He volunteered in the US Army during World War II, serving in a regular unit – rather than one consisting of Black or ‘colored’ troops – at a time when the Army was still segregated. After the war, Colescott attended college to study art. Having graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, he travelled to Paris, where he attended the atelier of Fernand Léger. Between 1952 and ’64, Colescott worked as an art teacher in the Pacific Northwest. He lived in predominantly white neighbourhoods, employed by institutions where the overwhelming majority were white.

While living and working there, Colescott’s racial identity was interpreted differently by different people. It never occurred to a white, female student who worked with him for an entire year that he was Black. A Black student in one of Colescott’s classes was excited to have as a teacher someone with whom he could identify racially, but he was disappointed when Colescott seemed to give him the cold shoulder. Arlene Schnitzer – whose gallery Colescott joined in 1961 – asked him directly about his background, and he did not identify himself as Black. This must have been an uncomfortable situation for Colescott – to say the least.

It is unclear why Colescott decided to apply for a grant to spend a sabbatical year in Egypt. In interviews later in life, he gave the impression that he went on a whim. It is possible that Colescott’s acrimonious divorce in 1961 from his first wife – a Czechoslovakian woman whom he had met in Paris – followed not long after by his marriage to his second wife, created a scandal in Portland which he wished to escape. The fact that his application was accepted reflected the support that he had earned from the powers-that-be in the Portland art world at the time.

In later years, Colescott recalled his sojourn in Egypt as the first time he felt truly at home. “Walking down the street in Cairo was to be walking among people like myself,” he recalled. “Everybody – the president of the country and on down – was a person of color.” Until this point, he had followed the guidance of his parents – particularly his mother – in choosing to identify publicly as white. In Egypt, he began to have second thoughts. His mother’s death in 1966 might have also provoked soul-searching. His experience in Egypt was emotional and cathartic. He was also impressed with ancient Egyptian art. As well as the grandeur of the ruins, the narrative element of Ancient Egyptian art captured his attention. His second year in Cairo was cut short by the outbreak of the Six Day War, so he, his wife, and their son spent the remaining years of the decade in Paris. Although they did not divorce until 1971, Colescott and his second wife went their separate ways, and he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1970. The country he found on his return was not the same as the one that he had left.

Between 1970 and ’74, Colescott taught at Stanislaus State College in Turlock – a small, somewhat remote town. In the studio, his thoughts turned to his formative years. The effects of the social and political turmoil of the 1960s were still being felt, and the assertiveness of those challenging established hierarchies inspired him. “My experience had been that you came back from Europe and the only Black people you would see in airports were people pushing a broom,” he recalled. “Now they were demanding more, and that affected my painting. I felt like I had a lot of things to say.”

Colescott’s paintings of the 1970s were a delayed response to his socialisation, including the derogatory images of black people that used to flood the mass media prior to World War II, as well as the lack of meaningful acknowledgment in his school textbooks of the contributions that had been made by people of African descent to American history.

The series of paintings that Colescott began in 1970 established his reputation. They are very personal. Their purpose was to exorcise the racism that he internalised from his mother and the world in which he grew up. In these paintings, he employed minstrel images – racist stereotypes that date to the 19th century – in order to demonstrate the preposterousness of generalisations concerning people of African descent. A minstrel image is a white person in blackface, his or her face darkened in order to ridicule and degrade Black people. In 1975, Colescott created his most widely reproduced work, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook. It’s a version of Emanuel Leutze’s famous painting of 1851, except Colescott has replaced George Washington and his retinue with the prominent agricultural scientist George Washington Carver and a coterie of stereotypical images of Black people. The painting points to the exclusion of people of African descent from dominant historical narratives and mainstream American society.

While the paintings of the 1970s constituted a public acknowledgment of the artist’s Black identity, they also call into question the system of racial classification that bedevilled his life. In an application for a Guggenheim Foundation grant in 1972, he described the “absurdity of racial definitions” as a theme of his recent works. In an interview in 1988, he elaborated this further. “When we try to lump people into one category, whether it is the way they look or whatever it happens to be, this is a silly thing,” he explained. “When you inject silliness into the context of a work of fine art, especially a monumental work, people fall back on their heels.” Colescott’s paintings of the 1970s are as complex and double-edged as the man himself.

In 1980, Colescott cast a final backward glance before moving on to less personal subject matter. In 1919, he commemorated his parents’ migration from Louisiana to California six years before his birth. Bust-length portrayals of his parents – imbued with the impassiveness of statuary – face each other from either side of the canvas. They float among pink clouds that symbolise their existence within the ephemeral realm of art. They are posed before a graphic map of a type popular before World War II, in which local cultures are represented by cartoon vignettes. At the centre of the canvas, Colescott’s family is represented by a bird’s nest with two chicks tended to by their parents. Among the clouds are attributes pertaining to both parents. His mother’s light skin symbolises her effort to impose whiteness on him, while his father’s dark skin symbolises his love for and acceptance of his darker-skinned son. In reality, Colescott inherited from his mother the physical attributes that so displeased her. Apparently, she persecuted him for qualities that she might have disliked in herself.

1919 is unique in Colescott’s oeuvre. His paintings of the 1970s visualise satirically the social forces that shaped him, and in 1919 he included likenesses of the two individuals who most influenced him. In travelling from New Orleans to Oakland in 1919 – in the hope of reinventing themselves and improving their situation – Colescott’s parents set in motion a chain of events that led their son to the turning point in Egypt and the outrageous and provocative paintings that are masterpieces.

Matthew Weseley is the co-author of Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott