Robert Colescott has been chosen to represent the
U.S. at the 1997 Venice Biennale, with
Santa Fe curator Mimi Roberts selecting
works dating from 1987-97. There is a good
likelihood that his oeuvre will enchant
Europe. A rich sample of it can be seen in
a show of drawings and works on paper at
Phyllis Kind.
This exhibition mixes colorful acrylics on
paper from 1995-96 with large charcoal
drawings from 1985-86. New York's MOMA
should acquire immediately some of the
charcoal drawings, particularly the
triptych Standing Demoiselles, What's It
All About? and Demoiselle II.
These modestly priced masterpieces bring
art into a super intelligent and sweet new
orbit. Although humor explodes in them,
pervading every pixel in the work, I am
thinking rather of their tenderness, and
their serious art implications. First,
Colescott's demoiselles are independent
figures, each deserving its own study. As
characters they become whole and self-
sufficient ladies who, if still involved in
bordello culture, have for sure cut out the
middle-man and taken matters into their own
hands. As art, Colescott's mademoiselles
take everything of value in Picasso's high
bordello portrait, which opened the door to
the sensuous, imaginative exploration that
is modernism. Each individual work rewards
looking with both anecdotal humor and
painterly invention.
Here are the precise line, the African
imports (arms like blimps, faces like
masks) and the proto-Cubist geometry, all
subsumed in Colescott's own tender line and
backgrounds, where the figures at times
dissolve. Still, what affords these
drawings masterpiece status is something
else, a kind of inversion or reversal of
modernism's poaching of African esthetics.
Colescott's work subsumes Europe's best art
as "the other" in his own African American
art discourse, thus returning the ball that
Picasso threw when he included, with
similar respect, African art in Europe's
discourse.
Colescott's high European interlude (he
studied for a year with Fernand Leger) and
his passage through Egypt (where he stayed
for two years) nourish his folkloric
reference. The acrylic-on-paper works seen
in this show are by an artist who made his
what was fed to him at school, what he
loved in cartoons, what he studied abroad
during his travels, the folk's art, and the
life around him. You can see the muscle,
the glands and the other tissues he grew
from all that good food and good laughing.
At 71, Colescott's self portrait could be
his The Harmonica Player where a young
African American male ecstatically plays
his music with a gumbo bowl in the
background. Right on, Mr. Colescott!
"Robert Colescott: Works on Paper," Nov.
9, 1996-Jan. 4, 1997, at Phyllis Kind
Gallery, 138 Greene Street, New York, N.Y.
10012.
EDUARDO COSTA is a writer who lives and
works on the Internet.
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