What Becomes a Legend Most?
Robert Colescott Takes on Columbus  
in a "Bad" History Painting   


Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Spring 2022, Volume 21, Issue 1
https://americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2022/cutler_bittner.htm

 

Jody B. Cutler-Bittner 
St. John's University


The painting is somewhat cartoonish – with European sailing ships bobbing on a feigned distant horizon. In the foreground, a pasty, gouty-faced explorer steps off the canvas with his map. Rising behind him, Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born, Pan-Africanist leader, instantly identifiable by the depicted regal costume with which he curated his public image. Thus, Robert Colescott creates a synapsed, geographically situated narrative of the Christopher Columbus legend in this large-scale, rough-hewn work titled Knowledge of the Past Is the Key to the Future: Some Afterthoughts on Discovery (1986, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first clause is a series title and will be referred to as the Knowledge series). These characters, along with additional, more ambiguous ones distributed across the flattened picture plane suggest signposts illuminating a section of the map in Columbus's hand. The abutting of mismatched vignettes, awkward figuration, and implied political content is typical in Colescott's sixty-some-year oeuvre, which, as a whole, has hovered between a naïve kind of Pop Art, child-like drawing, and Expressionism "light." Atypical is the lack of a winking art historical and/or explicit pop cultural reference employed for absurdist comic relief amidst ultimately somber content.

The 1980s was a transitional period for the artist, in which he worked on varied themes simultaneously that split off into overlapping series; and, in the case of the Knowledge series, a loose subgroup, including Some Afterthoughts, that explicitly turned to revisionist history paintings. Some Afterthoughts has been featured relatively recently in a travelling retrospective for Colescott and a three-person museum exhibition with two much younger, high-profile artists: Kerry James Marshall and Mickelene Thomas.1 Spurred by this exposure and the onslaught of public monument wars in which Columbus has been front and center, the following is a close look at the visual delivery and follow-up messaging of Some Afterthoughts, in the light of subsequent directions in American art and Colescott's truly unique spot – or hotspot – on the national scene in the 1980s.

Some Afterthoughts harkens back to Colescott's most renowned painting created a decade earlier, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art), in its turn to mythic American paterfamilias.2 His appropriation of Emmanuel Leutze's iconic painting, Washington on the Delaware (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art) for George Washington Carver, as a reification of received, diluted patriotism, was shared by a number of artists through the early postwar decades; likewise, patriotic symbols like the American flag proliferated in contemporary art across the country in a late counter-cultural questioning of American national identity on the eve of the Bicentennial. For the mainstream contemporary art audience to whom George Washington Carver was addressed (first exhibited at the toney Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco) as Colescott pursued an art career, his version was unique in bringing race, through the retrieval and outing of troubling historical stereotypes of black people, into the realm of artsy in-jokes. In its cartoonish style, as well as punning title, Colescott was banking partly on the wide appeal of mainstream Pop Art and its embrace of Mad Man-era ad sloganeering to cloak the troubling content. In short, Colescott was pushing the boundaries of both "high" and "popular" art by outing the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in direct context of the proverbial "white cube" gallery – right up there in crude art debunking with Marcel Duchamp's infamous urinal sculpture aka Fountain (1917, Tate).

By the end of the decade, Colescott was known on both coasts for paintings that targeted the Euro-American obsession with racial distinctions part and parcel to individualized and institutional racism, while taunting cognoscenti with art historical know-how in absurdist renditions of imagery lifted from his own canonical art heroes, like Vermeer, Picasso, and Willem DeKooning. At over fifty years old, Colescott took off on the budding East Village scene with several solo shows at then trendy Semaphore Gallery. He was also included in the 1983 Whitney Biennial alongside mainly much younger artists that were turning to topical subject matter, including race issues.

In what follows, I will track the jump in artistic sensibility from George Washington Carver to Some Afterthoughts, from ugly humor to ugly seriousness, as well as the artist's transformation from satiric visual entertainer to straightforward revisionist. If the earlier work embodies a sensationalist exposé on lingering racist stereotypes in the United States, Some Afterthoughts juggles a wider range of anatomical typologies to the brink of global postcolonial discourses on shared human culpability for repetitive violence towards others. Both paintings circulate within a stylistic constellation of purposefully "bad painting," an epithet coined by Marsha Tucker in the late 1970s, while curator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, to describe a wave of seemingly casual, adolescent-tinged figuration.3 In the case and spirit of Colescott, "bad" is also highly apropos as a slang term encapsulating a semantics of reversal popularized by African Americans that culminated in the 1980s.  

 

Race and American History (Painting) 

Born in 1925, Colescott's cartooning started as a child in Oakland, California, alongside his brother, Warrington, an accomplished printmaker. (He was also exposed to music and became a jazz drummer, which some have linked to the staccato rhythms of his art, including the "bumpy" juxtapositions seen in Some Afterthoughts). Robert served in WWII and attended the Paris atelier of Fernand Leger, a reformed canonical modernist with populist visual aims, before following Warrington to art studies at the University of California at Berkeley. 

The brothers were raised in a willfully race-blind household perhaps because of the family's Creole-Louisiana heritage.4 In the segregated South, however, they were presumably considered black due to the "one-drop" rule as well as their father's job as a Pullman porter, administered by a black union shop. In hindsight, it is not surprising that Colescott's art centralized race with particular focus on the haunting history, language, and legislation of so-called miscegenation. Robert's self-consciousness with regard to his African roots emerged gradually, spurred by a sojourn in Egypt in the late 1960s on an art research grant and follow-up teaching assignment, which may have been the cause of the emergent pedagogical intentions in his art, climactic in the Knowledge series. His experience on the African continent, the news from home during those turbulent years, and the current state of national and international political affairs upon his return in late 1969 impacted his art persona as well as personal identity.5

In postwar United States, modernist abstraction became ground zero for expanded art programming at colleges and universities (as opposed to historical art institutes with more traditional artistic rudiments). However, naturalistic and representational elements could be assimilated into the gestural gestalt of non-objective Abstract Expressionism – latent in the work of DeKooning, one its heroes, whose flesh-oriented paint modeling was an influence on Colescott. Especially in the Bay Area, figurative threads were prevalent. Colescott's work of the mid-1950s to mid-1960s fit well into this West Coast milieu as part of an approaching second-generation – including Bay Area art peers Joan Brown and Peter Saul. Colescott then pursued teaching and exhibition opportunities in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest.

While travelling, Colescott switched from oil to acrylic paint due to faster drying time, and its matte finish lent to the slap-dash immediacy that became his stock and trade – beginning with the blackface paintings of the 1970s. At first, his black figures are integrated with other cardboard-cut-out, often sexist and exaggerated ethnic types, such as the blonde bimbo-fatale, submissive Chinese servant, Italian chef, and so on, perhaps trading on the cross-over appeal of satiric "blue" comics like Lenny Bruce, Red Foxx, and Richard Pryor. Yet, when it came to the representation of blacks by whites in American society, deeply entrenched graphic codes tipped the balance. Colescott went with it, shifting his mise-en-scène to art historical backdrops that lured white cognoscenti into his racialized "lessons." It worked, as far as garnering critical attention, but head-on analysis of his extra-art motives with his abrupt strategy came only in the mid-1980s by Lowery Sims, one of a few African-American art scholars at the time with an inside art-world view of and voice on race matters as a curator then affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, formerly, with the Museum of Modern Art.6 By then, Colescott was on to new paths, including the sagacious conceit of the Knowledge series.

An art history buff with a sense of humor like Colescott surely free-associated his turn to the history genre – the antithesis of modernist painting broadly. Yet, its flowering in the Revolutionary era (France, US, Haiti) links to the rhetoric of liberty and social progress, if only for bourgeois philosophes and aristocrats. At a time when national art academies were first being established, "the most dignified function to which painting could aspire was the promotion of the public virtues, the virtues required by the members of a governing class...and most important, 'a passion for the commonweal', a virtue close to, but not identical with, simple patriotism"; extraordinary events in the past (ancient and recent) starring stoic, model heroes were inflected with the contemporary politics (Barrell 37). The concurrent emergence of aesthetics as a discrete branch of philosophy, especially as per Immanuel Kant, its most renowned early theorist, also emphasized deliberation over sensation as a defining conferment of beauty (nature; the arts) and appended moral dimensions and the notion of "freedom" to (implicitly) "good" art.

The notion that art (in other words, "the arts") could or should be pedagogical is often attributed to Aristotle, who argued for its productive use by society in its reflective imitation of nature, ugly and beautiful, human and otherwise in the Poetics; whereas, his mentor, Plato, linked imitation to untruthfulness and was skeptical of art's sensorial provocation, which distracted from logical thinking in The Republic – a take easily aligned with modernist disavowals of mimesis and commitments to self-expression. In recent decades, art's historical usage of the term, modernist, which includes but is larger than the avant-garde or "cutting edge," has evolved to encompass more firmly figurative work based on subject matter irrespective of stylistic approach. Thus, some artists associated with realist or illustrative narrative styles like American Regionalism and Social Realism, as well as the Mexican Muralists, have breached its discursive orbit.7 Of the latter group, Colescott was influenced early on by Diego Rivera whom he watched paint at the 1939 Golden Gate International Expo in San Francisco.

On the other hand, modernist dismissals of narrative art can point to its propagandistic adoption by repressive regimes like Soviet Russia and Maoist China, at the expense of "free" abstraction. Colescott realized first-hand through critiques – in his view, misunderstandings – of his 1970s work that artists cannot predetermine their reception once their art is out in the world.8 As novelist and critic Ralph Ellison put in, "Once introduced into society, the work of art begins to pulsate with … ideas brought to it by its audience and over which the artist has but limited control" (Twentieth 38). But they can try, of course, and that was Colescott's game, not least through his explicit painting titles. In this aspect, the Knowledge series specifically adds to a legacy of twentieth-century African-American artists adopting narrative schemes, not surprisingly, while hedging (late) modernist stylistic circles, as extrapolated, for example, in the exhibition Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist curated by Richard J. Powell for the Nasher Museum at Duke University in 2014. 

Possibly the first painting so designated by Colescott as part of the Knowledge series, judging partly from its subtitle, is The Original (1983). The setting depicted segues from a series begun earlier and overlapping, titled At the Bather's Pool (c. 1983-85), wherein "the races" collide in a faux-Edenic tropical watering hole informed by Cezanne and Matisse (specifically, according to the artist; I would add Gauguin), punctuated with elements dropped in from the future, like airplanes and polka dot bikinis. Anatomical forms from African sculpture are introduced there, broaching the Diaspora directly and opening up a Gumby-like elasticity with bodies. Gradually, the Knowledge series drew specific, real history into its thematic orbit.

 

Past Is Prologue

The full title phrase of the Knowledge series echoes aphorisms associated with a number of influential thinkers across time. Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana stated, ”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Although difficult to pinpoint the primary source, Marcus Garvey has been credited as saying, “A people without knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.” The latter suggests reconnections, in the post-colonial era, between ancestral culture and political opportunities in a global present. Colescott's title phrase also echoes the ubiquitous Shakespearean line, "What's past is prologue" from The Tempest. and, in turn, in this context, the "Prologue" of Ralph Ellison's now classic novel, crucial for Colescott's generation, Invisible Man: "the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead." Continuing to navigate and negotiate the discrete images of Some Afterthoughts from the initial diachronic conflation of Columbus and Garvey, this dynamic is insinuated in the painting's claustrophobic space and lack of visible escape route, which evokes racial inequality and, perhaps, ongoing socio-economic problems in the Caribbean going all the way back to first contact.

The largest full figure in the composition, a skeleton in horned helmet, the ghost of Viking Leif Erikson, perhaps, who beat Columbus to the Americas, seems a jaunty specter harkening back to medieval danses macabres. While Linda McGreevy has interpreted this image as a memento mori (as veritably any skeleton may be deemed, inherently), I would say the other skeleton seen in the work, wrapped in a Native American textile in burial at Columbus's feet, provides both a more existentially dead and more multifaceted reference (in its implicated death of a culture) for the whole painting. Partly obscured by Columbus, a lone indio witness to the scene recalls, in symbolic terms, the prominent but passive Native American "thinker," with hand to chin, in the Death of General Wolf (Benjamin West, 1770, National Gallery of Canada). Benjamin West was an ex-pat American working for the British crown, a quintessential example of how history painting often bolstered the imperialist enterprise. On the native grave stands an obvious personification of the "black man's burden," a term first popularized by African-American activist Reverend H.T. Johnson at the turn of the century, playing off Rudyard Kipling's racist tract, "The White Man's Burden," and in continual usage in many contexts ever since. This symbolic slave laborer bridges the upheaval of the Middle Passage with the shadowy nation behind, inhered in the looming bust of a pilgrim, or pioneer, or planter looming that balances the bust of Garvey opposite. McGreevy has noted a resemblance to images of Abraham Lincoln in giving this section of the work another twist, and it may be that it is a blended reference to white settlers and citizens in general, although, knowing Colescott's way with kitschy attributes, as in Garvey's feathered helmet, it would seem an emphatic Lincoln would be wearing his ubiquitous top hat. That nation, as seen in the upper quadrant of the canvas at viewer left, is a steamy "sin city" of sex and violence, including a highly disturbing image of a noose-laden, distraught black man – his ostensible economic success indicated by the cropped business suit. Then, moving clockwise, the viewer sees a hovering face-off between a grisaille-toned, mocked with a crown-of-thorns Jesus and a white Catholic clergyman. Finally, at viewer left foreground, a skimpily dressed black woman with a cigarette, which I read as a femme fatale – that is, a sexist stock character, in a personal, idiosyncratic form. In fact, a parade of women in all shapes, sizes, colors, and his own vulnerabilities in this regard, show up throughout the oeuvre in all sorts of represented situations. Called out over the years on "the woman question," Colescott often discussed his growth over time with regard to Women's Lib and related biases; but, stated repeatedly, in terms of his commitment to artistic honesty: "A lot of things I think about women have to do with the female body" (qtd. in Cotter H35). Here the figure may indicate a state of confusion between exploitation and desire in herself and others in a "new world" tainted by colonial conquest. 

Some Afterthoughts was created shortly after public commemorations for indigenous peoples became widespread internationally, and before the first official so-designated annual day in the United States took place (1989 in South Dakota). Today, despite challenges from reactionary sectors and a push for expansion from others (notably, The 1619 Project, spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones), most mainstream American textbooks at all levels address to some degree the paradoxical realities and harrowing results of the European conquest and the institution of slavery in the Americas. For the first half of Colescott's life, Columbus's metaphoric stature as "first American" was overwhelmingly intact. Woven into the very fabric of the territory that became the US from early European settlement were statues and portraits of Columbus. Colescott may not have appropriated a specific artistic image here, but the puffy costume and tights recalls James Vanderlyn's widely reproduced Landing of Columbus (1847, US Capital).

A crucial subtext of the Columbus legend is the glorified imperative toward world domination by European monarchs under the auspices of Christian "civilizing" missions, later elided with the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny to justify western expansion and take control of Native Americana territory. Even as the brutal legacies of other Spanish-crown-commissioned explorers in Central and South Americas began to be widely deconstructed, those of Columbus and crew that have surfaced increasingly, were staved off partly by shifting connotations of "the discovery" from territorial inhabitation to the ideological founding of a new society. Promoting Columbus as national ancestor early on, when he was assumed to be Spanish, deflected America's contentious British patrimony. Later, when evidence surfaced to seemingly prove his Italian and possibly Jewish roots (both unsettled), there was some backlash to his status, rekindled through the successful lobbying of Italian Americans to establish Columbus Day (1937), in light of American "melting pot" ideals, to cement their own full citizenship. Since 1992, the quincentennial year of the first Columbus voyage, calls to eliminate public commemorations of Columbus in all forms have been gradually coming to fruition. Within this global post-colonial movement to remove white supremacy (in a phrase) from its pedestals are debates in the United States on the fate of Confederate monuments, accelerated by public violence against African Americans that triggered the Black Lives Matter movement. In this prescient context, the noosed head image in Some Afterthoughts can be read as an offshoot of the central burdened figure, in terms of striving and struggling in a racist society. 

Among the most closely related of Colescott's works within the Knowledge series in their similar respective conceit as condensed, cross-chronological narratives, is Matthew Henson and the Quest for the North Pole (1986, Albritton Collection) and General Gordon Romancing the Nile (1986, Artist Estate). The first has the Henson figure, who claimed to set foot on the North Pole before his boss, Robert Peary, but, in any case, played a huge role in his most famous Artic expedition (as well as others), carrying a large boulder – here, suggesting both the struggle for recognition as well as attendant servant duties that made his professional quest more trying. A severed black head served up on a plate by (white) Salome, a bifurcated black-and-white Jesus peeking out from behind another femme fatale image, and an enslaved black female pending abuse from the white pioneer/citizen of Some Afterthoughts are among the semiotic staffing. 

In the second painting, Colescott depicts the British military administrator Charles Gordon enmeshed in a mess of colonial machinations in the Nile Valley, exploiting African masses, and getting his just desserts in the form of a bloody beheading by Muslim occupiers in Khartoum. Beyond the violent interludes, the rendition of skin tones in these works is splotched with garish highlights and muddy shading effecting an overall fleshy ugliness (alluded to at the start). In this aspect, Colescott shows affinities with German Expressionists, George Grosz and Max Beckmann, and, as often noted, his close predecessor Philip Guston's late figurative work, for which Guston was much criticized after being acclaimed for earlier abstraction. Colescott's modernist foundation may be gleaned in the cubistic (if not precisely Cubist) partitions that patch the salient elements together in this and much of his work of the period, while using color to clarify disparate forms. But the core aesthetics of the paintings from the Knowledge series, as in the three works discussed, point to Colescott's unrelenting depiction of a muddied, melded past characterized by violence and destitution in terms of bad outcomes for the underclasses in so-called progressive societies. Gradually, elements from much earlier, namely humor and graffiti-like text elements, were reintegrated into new work as the series dissipated. However, skeletons and skulls, severed heads, haunting Christs and clergyman also show up frequently from the 1980s through his final works. 

From his first wide exposure in the early 1970s to the creation of Some Afterthoughts, Colescott trespassed intra and extra disciplinary boundaries, from cartooning to modernist painting to art historical schema to race matters. Using both American and world history, he moved from an effective but formulaic strategy of Manichean race reversal and visual punchlines to sprawling jigsaw puzzle compositions. His expansive thematic repertoire has been periodically energized for better or worse by relevant current events and a focus on revisionist history inspired by like-minded younger artists after the new millenium.

 

Notes 

1. Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott was co-curated by Lowery Sims and Mathew Weseley for the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2019 and travelled through 2021; Figuring History: Robert Colescott featuring Kerry James Marshall and Mickalene Thomas was organized by the Seattle Art Museum in 2018.  

2. An overview of the literature on the work from its first public exhibition through 2009 is given in Cutler. An update appears in the catalogue entry page for Sotheby's 12 May 2021 Contemporary Art Evening Auction where it was purchased by The Lucas.

3. See Tucker, et al. Colescott was not included in Tucker's Bad Painting show although she became an ardent supporter of his work around that time. The connection to Tucker's term and Colescott's work was perhaps first made by Sims in 1984.

4. Historically, a race-blind tactic of child-rearing was not uncommon among Southern families with African heritage, as Black women raised children born of relations (including forced) with white men, who, sometimes literally disowned them. As is well-known, Warrington never identified as an Africa- American artist although his oeuvre includes black figures and contemporary political content.

5. One demarcation is Colescott's inclusion in West Coast 74: Black Image, a 1974 touring exhibition of work by African-American artists organized by the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery (now Crocker Art Museum) in Sacramento, California.

6. Highly influential was Sims who organized Colescott's first retrospective, which travelled nationally.

7. Particularly in the case of a number of African American who have been, until relatively recently, somewhat segregated in American art history into an early and later Harlem Renaissance without consideration of their fundamental engagement with mainstream styles; see Morgan.

8 Two decades later, critiques of Colescott's 1970s work came to a head with at a symposium at Harvard University documented in Cuno and Harvard Art Museums (c. 1998), in the wake of numerous commentaries and discussions in the contemporary art press.

 

Works Cited 

Aristotle. Poetics. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm

Barrell, John. “Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Political Theory of Painting.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, 1986, pp. 36-41. 

Cotter, Holland. "Unrepentant Offender of Almost Everyone." New York Times, 8 June 1997, H35.  

Cuno, James. Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke: A Series of Conversations on the Use of Black Stereotypes in Contemporary Visual Practice. Harvard DVD-video, 1998.

Cutler, Jody B. “Art Revolution: Politics and Pop in the Robert Colescott Painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, vol. 8, no. 2, 2009,  http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2009/cutler.htm 

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. (1952) Vintage International, 1995. https://books.google.com/books?id=iSrI-BQqFf0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

---. "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity." Shadow and Act. (1964) Vintage International, 1995. 

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, Second Edition, Revised. MacMillan, 1914, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48433/48433-h/48433-h.htm

McGreevy, Linda. "Robert Colescott at Phyllis Kind." Arts, November 1987, p. 90. 

Morgan, Stacey I. Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953. U of Georgia P, 2004. 

Plato. The Republic. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm

Santayana, George.The Life of Reason. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15000/15000-h/15000-h.htm

Shakespeare, WIlliam. The Tempest. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23042/23042-h/23042-h.htm  

Sims, Lowery S. "Bob Colescott Ain't Just Misbehavin'." Artforum, March 1984, pp. 56-59. 

Tucker, Marcia, et al. Bad Painting(Exhibition Catalogue). New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1978.

 

 
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