Black to front: Michael Lobel on Robert Colescott

Robert Colescott's Interior I, 1991, is a spot-on pastiche of one of Roy Lichtenstein's "Interiors" paintings: Here are the sterile modern furnishings, the stark outlines, the repeating dot patterns. Yet someone has shuffled in to disturb the otherwise pristine scene--a dark-skinned figure sits on the white couch, his stockinged foot plunked unceremoniously on the gleaming coffee table. Considering the man's relaxed posture and garb, could that open can he grasps be anything but a beer? Colescott disarranges Lichtenstein's distinctive interior through more than just the introduction of that figure, however; the painter has also deliberately sullied the Pop artist's clean-edged forms with his rough facture in order to challenge the cool, distanced approach that is central to Lichtenstein's art, and to Pop in general. Colescott's painting suggests that Pop's customary distance and neutrality may also function as a refusal of difference, racial and otherwise. Through his alterations to the image, Colescott forces us to see the literal but also figurative (read: racialized) whiteness on which the coolness and detachment of Lichtenstein's image--and, by extension, that of Pop in general--depends.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Interior I is a useful image through which to understand Colescott's work, because it points to a simultaneous proximity to and distance from Pop. On the one hand, some of the artist's central strategies--the reuse of preexisting imagery, the reliance on popular and vernacular culture--derive from those developed by the Pop artists in the early '60s. Yet his work also bears profound differences from classic Pop, and not only in its focus on racial themes. For one, as evidenced by Interior I, Colescott rejects the mechanical surfaces of Pop art. His pictures exult in the materiality of paint, a tendency that has become more pronounced over the years: His recent canvases are veritable explosions of bravura handling and riotous color. Further, Colescott is a committed storyteller, and his paintings invariably contain some narrative component. Sometimes it is a tragic narrative of racial discord, at others, a comedic tale of the entanglements of love or sexual desire--and often it is a combination of the two. Moreover, this emphasis on storytelling often opens up into a consideration of history--another thing that separates Colescott from the Pop artists. Pop tends to focus on the qualities of newness so essential to the mechanisms of advertising and mass culture; if any sense of temporality is brought into the picture, it is usually that of consumption, as when James Rosenquist used slightly outdated imagery in his work of the early '60s to call attention to the unending cycles of novelty and obsolescence that register the passage of time in consumer culture. For his part, Colescott has always been concerned with a much broader swath of human history, and he has depicted scenes ranging from ancient times to the present moment.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It is precisely for his focus on historical narratives that Colescott is known to most viewers. Although he has almost five decades of varied work behind him, including a stint representing the United States at the 1997 Venice Biennale, he is indelibly identified with the racially charged transformations of appropriated masterworks he produced in the mid-'70s--paintings that laid the groundwork for such pictures as Interior I. The best known of that group is undoubtedly George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, 1975, in which Colescott transformed the major players in Emmanuel Leutze's kitschy, overblown history painting, replacing the father of our country with the peanut scientist of the title (a persistent though arguably token figure of black history). Carver in turn shares a boat with a checklist of racist caricatures, including a shoeshine boy, a banjo player, and a bare-bottomed mammy. Over several years Colescott produced a number of variations on this theme, including Eat Dem Taters, 1975 (a riff on van Gogh's The Potato Eaters of 1885), and Natural Rhythm: Thank You Jan Van Eyck, 1976, in which the female figure in Van Eyck's 1434 The Arnolfini Portrait is rendered in crude blackface, her swollen belly now alluding to the history of cultural attitudes toward miscegenation. Although Colescott has remarked, "I never wanted to be known as 'the guy who painted the Old Masters in blackface,'" there are many reasons why the artist has become irrevocably identified with this small group of works. (1) For one, the images are unforgettable; their blunt use of caricature and coarse humor sear the brain, so much so that it is now difficult to see Leutze's original without thinking of Colescott's pastiche. In retrospect the '70s pictures can also be seen as pointing the way toward any number of later tendencies, from appropriation in the early '80s to the identity-based art that became prevalent later that decade. By focusing on the racialized codes of popular imagery, Colescott opened up Pop's more limited subject matter to a broader set of artistic concerns. Hence he seems a fitting precursor for numerous younger artists working with stereotype and caricature today, from Gary Simmons and Kara Walker to Michael Ray Charles and Ellen Gallagher. Yet if we are to see him as a sort of bridge figure--bringing Pop irony and appropriationist strategies together with social commentary--it would be useful to ask the question: Where did these paintings come from? After all, Colescott turned fifty in the year he painted George Washington Carver--hardly an age at which most artists "emerge." In fact, he had spent years working up to that point, exploring the possibilities of a narrative approach to figurative painting that employed social satire and often-coarse humor to confront troubling questions of sexual politics, racial identity, and historical representation. A consideration of this earlier body of work helps broaden our understanding of Colescott's project, for it shows us an artist who, influenced both by personal and historical circumstances, incorporated charged social and political themes into his work by drawing on an array of popular sources.