Robert Colescott throws down the gauntlet

His paintings reference race and racism, pride and prejudice, in ways that surprise, seduce, elucidate and horrify. They are now at the New Museum.

Warning. A thundering and fascinating exhibition by the great American painter Robert Colescott (1925-2009) is coming to the New Museum, to be enjoyed and dissected. "Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott" is the first museum exhibition of this artist's relentlessly provocative work to be seen in Manhattan since a 1989 exhibition (also at the New Museum) and the most comprehensive to date. It reveals a man who ultimately succeeded in merging his own private demons about race with the public demons of his country, creating one of the most compelling, both personal and socially relevant bodies of work in American painting. of the 20th century.

Taut and carefully crafted, the show traces Colescott's heroic trajectory from start to finish, an edgy mix of abstraction and trompe-l' eye during his undergraduate years to a sardonic humanism that was both accusatory and optimistic. As a light-skinned black American who was raised to pass himself off for a white man - wanting, he would later say, "to belong to the wrong club" - Colescott did not artistically embrace his Darkness until the mid-1960s, when he was 40.

After 1968 he made very few paintings that did not refer to race and gender. racism in a way that frightened, seduced, elucidated, amused and horrified. Embracing burlesque expressionism, he doctored stereotypes and caricature of blacks and whites, often reframing Western masterpieces with non-white subject matter. They were ancient and wildly satirical. In them, race was first among equal subjects which included gender, American history, sex, religion, consumerism and jazz, as well as large doses of popular culture - i.e. advertising, literature, movies, edibles and their mascots, like Colonel Sanders. .

His dots were highlighted by his fiery palette (hot pink, magenta and a vibrant cerulean blue) and his vigorous brushwork, both masterful and sloppy . In 1990, he wrote that he made “large sensual paintings. This is the first impact people have. They walk in and say, "Oh wow!" And then, "Oh [expletive]" when they see what they have to deal with in terms of subject matter. It's a built-in "one-two" punch; he gets them every time. an American History Textbook,” 1975. Colescott often reformulated masterpieces, seeking new interpretations. at9mc1 evys1bk0">Perhaps most importantly, Colescott contributed to the resurgence of figurative painting that began in the 1970s and continues to this day, particularly among black artists. He was first made known as a serial appropriator in the mid-1970s, before the artists of the Pictures Generation and the Neo-Expressionists.

He was born in Oakland, where his parents (identified as Creole) moved from New Orleans in 1919, at the start of the Great Migration.He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1949, and after living briefly in Paris and studied with Fernand Léger, he returned for his graduate degree.In 1955, he accepted a job teaching art at the college in Seattle, then at Portland State College in 1957. (He taught at colleges and universities for most of his life, retired...