Robert Colescott - the Seattle years

He combined expressionist brush strokes with a narrative content (and love of comics) that pushed people out of comfort zones. With fluid but dizzying shift scales, he packed his picture plane and turned a search beam on the unmentionable.

In 1970, when he opened his first show in New York in a now-defunct space on West Broadway called the Razor Gallery, he drew crowds. The minimalist aesthetic held sway, but people were looking for something else.

Philip Guston provided it in 1968, moving from Abstract Expressionism to drawings of fat guys smoking cigars with KKK hoods over their heads. Hilton Kramer called him a "mandarin imitating a stumblebum." Instead, Guston was changing history, providing a path for a generation of painters, and Colescott was with him.

But Colescott was more of a satirist than Guston. Even people who loved Guston's second wind had a hard time with Colescott's first.

He made his mark by reveling in stereotypes. His canvases are full of dizzy blondes and the black males who salivate over them: frenzies of jungle fever. Kara Walker wouldn't be possible without him, nor would generations of artists who are not afraid to be both funny and offensive.

Colescott painted sore spots with humor, rancor and compassion. In The Sword Swallower, a white man holds a slippery center stage. He's a tornado in human shape tearing holes in his throat. Behind him a black couple half his size appraise him sympathetically. ``I think he's hurting himself," the woman says, her words rendered in stringy letters encased in a comics-style bubble. ``It's  true," her man replies. A fast, fleet-footed painting, it's full of hot lights and sheltering shades.

Colescott:

Ridicule is a way to break things up. Think Dada. It's a tool, a weapon and a basis for structure.

His central interest was the shifting relationship between abstract and narrative elements, which he said he picked up from Leger.

Like any good communist, Leger wanted to share what he knew. He thought abstract art didn't communicate with the people. He had a beautifully monumental simplicity about his figures, and he plugged the necessity of a narrative.

Colescott began as an abstract artist, and his later work was increasing abstract.

Art is a spiral. If you keep painting long enough you come back to where you started, but not quite. You bring the baggage of all you've learned. As long as I'm willing to let something new happen, the work continues to develop. If not, it's a disaster.

About representing the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997, one of contemporary art's genuine pinnacles:

I'm working my way through it. Like the bumper sticker says, `I'd rather be surfing.' It's an honor, a privilege and a pain in the ass.

(Quotes from a 1997 interview in the now demised Seattle PI)

Cue the chorus - obits:
Richard Lacayo (Looking Around) here.
Roberta Smith (NYT) here.
Suzanne Muchnic (LA Times) here.
Richard Nielsen (Arizona Republic) here.
Charlie Finch (Artnet) here.
Emily Langer (Washington Post) here.
DK Row (Oregonian) here. (Too brief, but promising more.)