The painter Robert Colescott (1925-2009) was one of the few black American painters to be widely known in the twentieth century. His most famous works are a series of appropriations, where he takes a famous painting, such as George Washington Crossing the Delaware, and changes it into George Washington Carver, surrounded by stereotypical blacks who take this historic opportunity to fish off the port bow. A show of his most controversial works made a national tour in 1989. Café Américain author Kirby Olson spoke with him in the basement of the Seattle Art Museum in 1987.
KO: Have you been to Seattle before?
RC: I lived in Seattle for five years in the fifties. Back then, there was only one gallery, Zoë-Douzanne. There were clusters of artists. One cluster hung out with Morris Graves, another cluster hung out with Mark Tobey, then there was the European-style modern painters at the University, several renegades, a few watercolorists. Even then, some respect was given to Seattle because of Graves, Tobey, and Callahan, which gave it an identity.
KO: Did you fit into that identity at all?
RC: No, I didn’t. When I lived in Seattle, I was painting something like de Kooning figures.
KO: Had you already studied with Fernand Léger?
RC: Yes, I studied with him in ’49. It was actually Léger who convinced me that figuration could communicate something that abstract painting could not.
KO: Was this a school situation?
RC: It was an open studio, not his own but one he rented for his students. It was large and well-lit, up in Montmartre. Half a dozen people were working there, and once a week Léger would come in for a crit session. The models were set up like a Léger: there were usually four of them holding things like bicycle wheels, ropes, flowers. It was at 104 Boulevard Clichy (Place Blanche), which was so beautiful then—a strip of trees down the center of the road. Now it’s all strip joints. There were some low-level criminals then, but it was authentic; it wasn’t just hype for foreign consumption. I picked up French and later spent four more years in the sixties in Paris.
KO: Did you come out of a background of people interested in art?
RC: No, not really. My mother played the piano well. My father grew up in New Orleans and played violin, which was once a lead jazz instrument. He played with Kid Ory, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong (when he was very young), and later was a porter on a train. I drew all along, and as long as I made things look like what they were supposed to look like, it was ok. Later when I became more “sophisticated”, and the work became more distorted, my parents lost some of their enthusiasm.
KO: In nearly all of your history paintings, you use acrylic paint. Is there a reason?
RC: I had painted for nearly twenty years in oils before I started to use acrylics in the sixties. I was in Egypt and I had a hard time finding anything that wasn’t really funky to paint with. Before my second trip to Egypt, someone suggested acrylics. I got spoiled with it because I liked that it dried fast. It was rubbery so you could roll it easily, and I liked the purity and brilliance of color. I lay it on thick enough so that to many people it seems like oils.
KO: Do you know Keats’s lines about Cortez looking out at the Pacific Ocean from the Darien Heights in Panama?
RC: Yeah, sure.
KO: Well, my convoluted question springs from the fact that it was Balboa, not Cortez, who should be in that scene, but this screw-up is the only thing that still interests me about Keats, and maybe the whole 19th century. So, would it interest you to deliberately make anachronisms in your work, based on the idea of something like “to forgive is human, to err divine”? Or would you prefer to always have a specific political intent in re-painting history?
RC: Your question reminds me of a time at the zoo— this couple was standing in front of me; we were all looking at the hippopotamus, and the woman said, “What’s that?”.
The guy she was with says, “It’s a walrus!”
“A walrus!”, she says. “I didn’t know that’s what a walrus looks like”.
“Yeah”, he says. “Now you know what you’d be looking like if somebody said you looked like a walrus”.
They both laughed and walked away.
I think I do that. Somebody might be innocent enough to think that my painting of George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware could be true.
Anyway, people are often trying to get me to do their ideas. I even had a guy once who left a list of titles for my future paintings at a gallery.
KO: Did you use any of them?
RC: I made a drawing of one, but didn’t use it. It’s better when things are internally motivated.
I haven’t even done more than ten or so of the historical-switching series. I had been painting for more than forty years when those suddenly became signature paintings for me, and not necessarily justifiably so. I think when this is over George Washington Carver will have crossed, and he will go back to his home in St. Louis, and I don’t think I’m going to talk about him anymore.
KO: Did you see in Vanity Fair the article on Jean-Michel Basquiat after his death? It described him as the only important black American artist … “What about Jacob Lawrence?”, I thought.
RC: Did they really say the only?
KO: I couldn’t believe it either. I checked it twice.
RC: What about Romare Bearden? Anyway, there was this kid phenomenon in the East Village then, and Basquiat was used and used up by the media. I’m sure the pressures were so great on him. The media wants novelty, so they look for the youth, but I mean, he had no time to develop in a deep way. It was almost child molestation—leave the kids alone! When I was teaching at the Art Institute in San Francisco, I had New York dealers prowling the studios looking for talent. The few young people who get rave reviews are tokens, if you want to talk about tokenism. Most students should throw out their twenty or so MFA paintings, have some patience, go somewhere, and learn to paint.
KO: What advice would you give to a young black painter?
RC: Work harder than a white one. I mean, the problem for a black painter is the same as for a black scientist or a black in any other occupation: people just don’t have the same confidence. Even most black folk when they have a serious illness would rather go to a white doctor than a black doctor. Me included.
I’ve never had until recently a really first-rate gallery. When I got on the cover of Artforum in ’84 I thought “this is it”. But still I couldn’t get in anywhere. If collectors aren’t interested in blacks, how can a gallery sell your work? So, in spite of all the national publicity, I still couldn’t get into a top gallery, although my paintings were selling. Even still, now my prices are pretty low. My new gallery is very good and I’m getting as much publicity as anyone in the country outside of Leo Castelli’s stable, and still my prices are low.
