Warrington Colescott
Encyclopedia
Warrington Colescott is an American artist best known for his satirical etching
s. He lives and works in Hollandale, Wisconsin
where he and his wife, artist Frances Myers, operate Mantegna Press.
, in 1921 to parents of Louisiana Creole
descent. His brother, artist Robert Colescott
, was born in 1925. Creole culture—which the artist described as “a rich tradition of cuisine and music, of skeptical judgments, of irony and humor in expression” —played a large role in family life. Both food and music were key components of his upbringing. Comic strips were also important to the young Colescott, especially the work of Jay “Ding” Darling
; the caricatural and narrative components would greatly influence his mature work. As a teenager, Colescott discovered vaudeville and the burlesque at the Red Mill/Moulin Rouge theater on 8th Street in Oakland. The broad humor and slapstick, as well as the eroticism of the burlesque performances, would inform his art and humor throughout his career.
, graduating in the summer of 1942. At Berkeley, he majored in fine art, and was active with the university humor magazine, the Pelican, as well as the university newspaper, The Daily Californian
, submitting cartoons and writing for both publications. He served in the armed forces in World War II
from 1942 to 1946, then returned to Berkeley to take a master’s degree in fine arts and to earn a teaching certificate. Colescott taught art at Long Beach City College
from 1947 to 1949. In September 1949, he began his career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
, where he taught for 37 years, retiring in 1986. During those years, Colescott continued his education in Europe, first on the GI Bill to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière
, Paris, in 1952–53 and again on several fellowships and awards: in 1956–57, he was a Fulbright Fellow
at the Slade School of Fine Art
, University of London, and in 1963, he returned to London on a Guggenheim Fellowship
.
in 1948 while he was teaching at Long Beach City College
. He continued to paint, draw, and make screenprints when he moved to Madison
to teach drawing and design at the University of Wisconsin. The art faculty at Madison included several members who were both painters and printmakers, including Dean Meeker, Alfred Sessler, and John Wilde
. Sessler introduced Colescott to etching in the mid-1950s, and Colescott furthered his education in the medium at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, studying with Anthony Gross. During that time, Colescott experimented with hard-ground etching while continuing his screenprinting; in a few instances, he combined the two media, as in Night Wings from 1957.
By the early 1960s, Colescott had all but abandoned screenprinting, devoting his time, rather, to complex etchings in color. He achieved a major breakthrough in his work when he began to cut and shape the copper etching plates with mechanics’ shears. In addition, he started incorporating bits of letterpress (typically zinc letterpress used for newspaper printing) and recycled etching plates into his compositions. At the same time, his work became less abstract and more narrative in nature, which allowed him to unleash his satirical talents in work such as In Birmingham Jail (1963), which is based on the civil rights struggles in the South, and lambastes the racism and violence of a corrupt system; or Christmas with Ziggy (1964), a social satire of businessmen entertaining their mistresses at a posh London restaurant. That same year, Colescott began an etching about the Depression-era gangster, John Dillinger
, which grew into a suite of images mixing fact and fiction about the farm boy-turned-outlaw who mesmerized the public in the 1930s. "A storyteller who skips all the dull parts," as author and curator Gene Baro has called him, Colescott had no compunction about enhancing the narratives with imagined details and anachronistic additions.
Colescott’s mature style found fruition in his series Prime-Time Histories: Colescott’s USA (1972–73) followed by The History of Printmaking (1975–78), perhaps Colescott’s best-known work. In this suite of images, which includes twenty-one intaglio prints, two lithographs
, and a handful of watercolors and drawings, Colescott imagines critical moments in the history of printmaking. In each print, Colescott starts with historical fact, and then adds his own interpretation, often borrowing from the featured artist’s own style or themes. For instance, in one scene we witness Alois Senefelder
, the inventor of lithography, receiving the secrets of this medium from devilish creatures in the Black Forest; in another plate, Colescott imagines Pablo Picasso
at the zoo, admiring animals such as the minotaur that recurs in his work. For his riff on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
, Colescott imagines the fin-de-siècle artist (and enthusiastic chef) in his kitchen, whipping up a lunch for his friends,
characters from Lautrec’s oeuvre. In 1992, he returned again to an art-historical theme in My German Trip, in which Colescott imagines encounters with the great German printmakers Albrecht Dürer
, Käthe Kollwitz
, Otto Dix
, George Grosz
, and members of the German Expressionists, with highly comic results.
More satires and fictional histories have followed. Since the 1970s, Colescott has continued to pursue social satire in his work. As art historian Richard Cox has written, Colescott casts his net wide: "Greed vanity, pride, lust, social ambition, silly fads, and fashions—[Colescott] adapted the traditional targets of artists and writers as his own. With wit and disarming humor he has drawn many entertaining and zany prints, everything from good-natured spoofs to harsh, stinging parodies. Greek gods, American presidents, newspaper tycoons, academics, gangsters, cops, cowboys and Indians, Pilgrims, accountants, scientists, generals, joggers, hunters, show girls, movie stars, the artist himself—you name it, all have been skewered by Colescott’s needle."
Recurrent themes since the late 1980s show a different focus. These include burlesque, popular culture, and the afterlife (see The Last Judgement triptych, 1987–88). The artist also focuses on some of his favorite locales, such as California (his birthplace), Wisconsin (where he resides), and New Orleans, the home of his Creole ancestors, as seen in his recent series, Suite Louisiana. Colescott has turned his attention to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in prints including Imperium: Royal Lancers Attack Wog Armor—Heartland Saved (2005) and Imperium: Down in the Green Zone (2006).
, Metropolitan Museum of Art
, Whitney Museum of American Art
, Museum of Modern Art
, National Gallery of Art
, New York Public Library
, Victoria and Albert Museum
, Tate
, Columbus Museum of Art
, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
, among others.
In his home state of Wisconsin, numerous institutions hold his work; these include the Chazen Museum of Art
in Madison, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
, the Museum of Wisconsin Art
in West Bend, the Racine Art Museum
, and the Milwaukee Art Museum
, which has the largest collection of his work in the world, numbering more than 250 prints, drawings, and paintings.
) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1988–89, which was accompanied by the publication Warrington Colescott: Forty Years of Printmaking, A Retrospective, 1948–1988 and a retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1995, which published a small catalogue Warrington Colescott. A major retrospective of Colescott’s graphic oeuvre will be presented at the Milwaukee Art Museum June 10–September 26, 2010. A full catalogue raisonné of Colescott’s graphic works co-published by the Milwaukee Art Museum
and the University of Wisconsin Press
accompanies the exhibition. Read more about the catalogue or purchase it from the University of Wisconsin Press http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4558.htm or the Milwaukee Art Museum Store http://store.mam.org/cat-17-1-3/books__media.htm.
, New York, in 1953, and in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art
in 1955 and 1956. He exhibited frequently throughout the subsequent decades and was honored with numerous grants, fellowships, and awards (see below).
Critics liken Colescott's work to his contemporaries as well as historic antecedents; as art critic Mario Naves has summarized, “Mr. Colescott is not a satirist, cartoonist or Red Grooms
, though he resembles each. (…) He’s a mischievous humanist with a bottomless appreciation for the absurdities of life and…the afterlife. He’s as many-sided and unsentimental as Twain
, Hogarth
or Bosch.” Others have compared his graphic style, as well as his mixture of satire and humanism, to artists of preceding generations, such as Francisco Goya
, Honoré Daumier
, Max Beckmann
, and George Grosz
. "Imagine a lumpish amalgamation of Saul Steinberg and George Grosz, leavened with Red Grooms
and peppered with Mel Brooks
, and you will have some idea of the erudite slapstick Mr. Colescott engages in."
in 1965, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts
in 1979 and 1983. He is a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, and was named an Academician of the National Academy of Design
in 1992.
Etching
Etching is the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal...
s. He lives and works in Hollandale, Wisconsin
Hollandale, Wisconsin
Hollandale is a village in Iowa County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 283 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Madison Metropolitan Statistical Area.-Geography:Hollandale is located at ....
where he and his wife, artist Frances Myers, operate Mantegna Press.
Early life and influences
Colescott was born in Oakland, CaliforniaOakland, California
Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724...
, in 1921 to parents of Louisiana Creole
Louisiana Creole people
Louisiana Creole people refers to those who are descended from the colonial settlers in Louisiana, especially those of French and Spanish descent. The term was first used during colonial times by the settlers to refer to those who were born in the colony, as opposed to those born in the Old World...
descent. His brother, artist Robert Colescott
Robert Colescott
Robert H. Colescott, was an American painter. He is known for satirical genre and crowd subjects, often conveying his exuberant, comical, or bitter reflections on being African-American. He studied with Fernand Léger in Paris...
, was born in 1925. Creole culture—which the artist described as “a rich tradition of cuisine and music, of skeptical judgments, of irony and humor in expression” —played a large role in family life. Both food and music were key components of his upbringing. Comic strips were also important to the young Colescott, especially the work of Jay “Ding” Darling
Jay Norwood Darling
Jay Norwood Darling , better known as Ding Darling, was a Pulitzer-Prize winning American cartoonist....
; the caricatural and narrative components would greatly influence his mature work. As a teenager, Colescott discovered vaudeville and the burlesque at the Red Mill/Moulin Rouge theater on 8th Street in Oakland. The broad humor and slapstick, as well as the eroticism of the burlesque performances, would inform his art and humor throughout his career.
Education
Colescott earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, graduating in the summer of 1942. At Berkeley, he majored in fine art, and was active with the university humor magazine, the Pelican, as well as the university newspaper, The Daily Californian
The Daily Californian
The Daily Californian is an independent, student-run newspaper that serves the University of California, Berkeley campus and its surrounding community. It is published Monday through Friday during the academic year, and twice a week during the summer...
, submitting cartoons and writing for both publications. He served in the armed forces in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
from 1942 to 1946, then returned to Berkeley to take a master’s degree in fine arts and to earn a teaching certificate. Colescott taught art at Long Beach City College
Long Beach City College
Long Beach City College, established in 1927, is a community college located in Long Beach, California. It is divided into two campuses. The Liberal Arts Campus, known as LAC, is located in the residential community of the Lakewood Village section of Long Beach, on Carson Street west of Clark Avenue...
from 1947 to 1949. In September 1949, he began his career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
, where he taught for 37 years, retiring in 1986. During those years, Colescott continued his education in Europe, first on the GI Bill to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière
Académie de la Grande Chaumière
The Académie de la Grande Chaumière is an art school in the VIe arrondissement of Paris, France. The school was founded in 1902 by the Swiss Martha Stettler , who refused to teach the strict academic rules of painting of the École des Beaux-Arts. It opened the way to the "Art Indépendant"...
, Paris, in 1952–53 and again on several fellowships and awards: in 1956–57, he was a Fulbright Fellow
Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...
at the Slade School of Fine Art
Slade School of Fine Art
The Slade School of Fine Art is a world-renownedart school in London, United Kingdom, and a department of University College London...
, University of London, and in 1963, he returned to London on a Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
.
Mature work
Colescott had studied painting at the University of California, Berkeley, and only began to make screenprintsScreen-printing
Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate...
in 1948 while he was teaching at Long Beach City College
Long Beach City College
Long Beach City College, established in 1927, is a community college located in Long Beach, California. It is divided into two campuses. The Liberal Arts Campus, known as LAC, is located in the residential community of the Lakewood Village section of Long Beach, on Carson Street west of Clark Avenue...
. He continued to paint, draw, and make screenprints when he moved to Madison
Madison, Wisconsin
Madison is the capital of the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Dane County. It is also home to the University of Wisconsin–Madison....
to teach drawing and design at the University of Wisconsin. The art faculty at Madison included several members who were both painters and printmakers, including Dean Meeker, Alfred Sessler, and John Wilde
John Wilde
John Wilde was a painter, draughtsman and printmaker of fantastic imagery. Born near Milwaukee, Wilde lived most of his life in Wisconsin, save for service in the U.S. Army during World War II. He received bachelor and master degrees in art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught...
. Sessler introduced Colescott to etching in the mid-1950s, and Colescott furthered his education in the medium at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, studying with Anthony Gross. During that time, Colescott experimented with hard-ground etching while continuing his screenprinting; in a few instances, he combined the two media, as in Night Wings from 1957.
By the early 1960s, Colescott had all but abandoned screenprinting, devoting his time, rather, to complex etchings in color. He achieved a major breakthrough in his work when he began to cut and shape the copper etching plates with mechanics’ shears. In addition, he started incorporating bits of letterpress (typically zinc letterpress used for newspaper printing) and recycled etching plates into his compositions. At the same time, his work became less abstract and more narrative in nature, which allowed him to unleash his satirical talents in work such as In Birmingham Jail (1963), which is based on the civil rights struggles in the South, and lambastes the racism and violence of a corrupt system; or Christmas with Ziggy (1964), a social satire of businessmen entertaining their mistresses at a posh London restaurant. That same year, Colescott began an etching about the Depression-era gangster, John Dillinger
John Dillinger
John Herbert Dillinger, Jr. was an American bank robber in Depression-era United States. He was charged with, but never convicted of, the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana police officer during a shoot-out. This was his only alleged homicide. His gang robbed two dozen banks and four police stations...
, which grew into a suite of images mixing fact and fiction about the farm boy-turned-outlaw who mesmerized the public in the 1930s. "A storyteller who skips all the dull parts," as author and curator Gene Baro has called him, Colescott had no compunction about enhancing the narratives with imagined details and anachronistic additions.
Colescott’s mature style found fruition in his series Prime-Time Histories: Colescott’s USA (1972–73) followed by The History of Printmaking (1975–78), perhaps Colescott’s best-known work. In this suite of images, which includes twenty-one intaglio prints, two lithographs
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
, and a handful of watercolors and drawings, Colescott imagines critical moments in the history of printmaking. In each print, Colescott starts with historical fact, and then adds his own interpretation, often borrowing from the featured artist’s own style or themes. For instance, in one scene we witness Alois Senefelder
Alois Senefelder
Johann Alois Senefelder was a German actor and playwright who invented the printing technique of lithography in 1796.-Actor, playwright:...
, the inventor of lithography, receiving the secrets of this medium from devilish creatures in the Black Forest; in another plate, Colescott imagines Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
at the zoo, admiring animals such as the minotaur that recurs in his work. For his riff on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern...
, Colescott imagines the fin-de-siècle artist (and enthusiastic chef) in his kitchen, whipping up a lunch for his friends,
characters from Lautrec’s oeuvre. In 1992, he returned again to an art-historical theme in My German Trip, in which Colescott imagines encounters with the great German printmakers Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since...
, Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century...
, Otto Dix
Otto Dix
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.-Early life and...
, George Grosz
George Grosz
Georg Ehrenfried Groß was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s...
, and members of the German Expressionists, with highly comic results.
More satires and fictional histories have followed. Since the 1970s, Colescott has continued to pursue social satire in his work. As art historian Richard Cox has written, Colescott casts his net wide: "Greed vanity, pride, lust, social ambition, silly fads, and fashions—[Colescott] adapted the traditional targets of artists and writers as his own. With wit and disarming humor he has drawn many entertaining and zany prints, everything from good-natured spoofs to harsh, stinging parodies. Greek gods, American presidents, newspaper tycoons, academics, gangsters, cops, cowboys and Indians, Pilgrims, accountants, scientists, generals, joggers, hunters, show girls, movie stars, the artist himself—you name it, all have been skewered by Colescott’s needle."
Recurrent themes since the late 1980s show a different focus. These include burlesque, popular culture, and the afterlife (see The Last Judgement triptych, 1987–88). The artist also focuses on some of his favorite locales, such as California (his birthplace), Wisconsin (where he resides), and New Orleans, the home of his Creole ancestors, as seen in his recent series, Suite Louisiana. Colescott has turned his attention to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in prints including Imperium: Royal Lancers Attack Wog Armor—Heartland Saved (2005) and Imperium: Down in the Green Zone (2006).
Collections
Colescott’s work is in museum collections across the United States and Europe, including the Art Institute of ChicagoArt Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
, Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
, New York Public Library
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
, Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
, Tate
Tate
-Places:*Tate, Georgia, a town in the United States*Tate County, Mississippi, a county in the United States*Táté, the Hungarian name for Totoi village, Sântimbru Commune, Alba County, Romania*Tate, Filipino word for States...
, Columbus Museum of Art
Columbus Museum of Art
The Columbus Museum of Art is an art museum located in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Formed in 1878 as the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, it was the first art museum to register its charter with the state of Ohio.-Building:...
, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...
, among others.
In his home state of Wisconsin, numerous institutions hold his work; these include the Chazen Museum of Art
Chazen Museum of Art
The Chazen Museum of Art is an art museum accredited by the American Association of Museums located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. It was known as the Elvehjem Museum of Art until 2005...
in Madison, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art — MMoCA, formerly known as the Madison Art Center, is an art museum located in Madison, Wisconsin. A three-story glass facade "icon" on the corner of State and Henry Streets serves as the museum's main staircase, as well as its architectural...
, the Museum of Wisconsin Art
Museum of Wisconsin Art
The Museum of Wisconsin Art is dedicated to showcasing and collecting contemporary and historical art from the state of Wisconsin. Founded by The Pick family of West Bend, Wisconsin in 1961, its initial focus was on the work of Carl von Marr...
in West Bend, the Racine Art Museum
Racine Art Museum
The Racine Art Museum and RAM’s Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts are located in Racine, Wisconsin.-History:The Charles A. Wustum Museum was founded in 1941. Jennie E. Wustum, widow of Charles A. Wustum, donated their house, property and small trust fund to the City of Racine, Wisconsin...
, and the Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee Art Museum
The Milwaukee Art Museum is located on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Beginning around 1872, multiple organizations were founded in order to bring an art gallery to Milwaukee, as the city was still a growing port town with little or no facilities to hold major art exhibitions...
, which has the largest collection of his work in the world, numbering more than 250 prints, drawings, and paintings.
Exhibitions and publications
Colescott has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions and one-man shows. Among the most important are the exhibition A History of Printmaking originated by the Madison Art Center in 1979, which traveled to many subsequent venues; the retrospective at the Elvehjem Museum of Art (now known as the Chazen Museum of ArtChazen Museum of Art
The Chazen Museum of Art is an art museum accredited by the American Association of Museums located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. It was known as the Elvehjem Museum of Art until 2005...
) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1988–89, which was accompanied by the publication Warrington Colescott: Forty Years of Printmaking, A Retrospective, 1948–1988 and a retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1995, which published a small catalogue Warrington Colescott. A major retrospective of Colescott’s graphic oeuvre will be presented at the Milwaukee Art Museum June 10–September 26, 2010. A full catalogue raisonné of Colescott’s graphic works co-published by the Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee Art Museum
The Milwaukee Art Museum is located on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Beginning around 1872, multiple organizations were founded in order to bring an art gallery to Milwaukee, as the city was still a growing port town with little or no facilities to hold major art exhibitions...
and the University of Wisconsin Press
University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press is a non-profit university press publishing peer-reviewed books and journals. It primarily publishes work by scholars from the global academic community but also serves the citizens of Wisconsin by publishing important books about Wisconsin, the Upper Midwest, and...
accompanies the exhibition. Read more about the catalogue or purchase it from the University of Wisconsin Press http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4558.htm or the Milwaukee Art Museum Store http://store.mam.org/cat-17-1-3/books__media.htm.
Critical reception
Colescott first gained critical notice in the 1950s, when he was included in the Young American Printmakers exhibition at the Museum of Modern ArtMuseum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New York, in 1953, and in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
in 1955 and 1956. He exhibited frequently throughout the subsequent decades and was honored with numerous grants, fellowships, and awards (see below).
Critics liken Colescott's work to his contemporaries as well as historic antecedents; as art critic Mario Naves has summarized, “Mr. Colescott is not a satirist, cartoonist or Red Grooms
Red Grooms
Red Grooms is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life...
, though he resembles each. (…) He’s a mischievous humanist with a bottomless appreciation for the absurdities of life and…the afterlife. He’s as many-sided and unsentimental as Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
, Hogarth
William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
or Bosch.” Others have compared his graphic style, as well as his mixture of satire and humanism, to artists of preceding generations, such as Francisco Goya
Francisco Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era...
, Honoré Daumier
Honoré Daumier
Honoré Daumier was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century....
, Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement...
, and George Grosz
George Grosz
Georg Ehrenfried Groß was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s...
. "Imagine a lumpish amalgamation of Saul Steinberg and George Grosz, leavened with Red Grooms
Red Grooms
Red Grooms is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life...
and peppered with Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows...
, and you will have some idea of the erudite slapstick Mr. Colescott engages in."
Honors
Colescott has been recognized by several major honors and fellowships. These include a Fulbright Fellowship to England in 1957, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
in 1965, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
in 1979 and 1983. He is a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, and was named an Academician of the National Academy of Design
National Academy of Design
The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the "National Academy" – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E...
in 1992.
Further reading
- Antreasian, Garo. “Warrington Colescott, Forty Years of Printmaking: A Retrospective, 1948–1988.” The Tamarind Papers 12 (1989): 78–79.
- Chapin, Mary Weaver. The Prints of Warrington Colescott: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1948–2008. University of Wisconsin Press and the Milwaukee Art Museum, 2010. http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4558.htm
- Colescott, Warrington, Bill Werner, and James Auer. Etched in Acid Warrington Colescott. [Milwaukee, Wis.]: Milwaukee Public Television, 1998.
- Colescott, Warrington. “Galleria: My German Trip.” Wisconsin Academy Review 39, no. 2 (1993): 10–13. http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/WI/WI-idx?type=HTML&rgn=DIV1&byte=184784
- Colescott, Warrington, and Arthur Hove. Progressive Printmakers: Wisconsin Artists and the Print Renaissance. With Arthur Hove. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0485.htm
- Cox, Richard. “Warrington Colescott: The London Years, 1956–1966.” The Tamarind Papers 14 (1991–92): 70–74.
- Gilmour, Pat. “The Discriminating Exaggeration of the True.” In Warrington Colescott, 6–15. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1996.
- ———.“Warrington Colescott actualise ‘Une Histoire de la Gravure.’” Nouvelles de l’estampe (October 1994): 53–56.
- Warrington Colescott: Forty Years of Printmaking: A Retrospective, 1948–1988. Madison: Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1989.
- Warrington Colescott. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1996.
External links
- Milwaukee Art Museum http://www.mam.org/
- Annex Galleries http://www.annexgalleries.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?Warrington-Colescott
- Colescott at Tate http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=928&page=1
- Spaightwood Galleries http://www.spaightwoodgalleries.com/Pages/Colescott.html
- Wisconsin Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards http://www.wvalaa.com/public/view_artist.php?user_id=24
- Peltz Gallery, Milwaukee http://www.artnet.com/gallery/851/peltz-gallery.html
- Perimeter Gallery http://www.perimetergallery.com/perimeter_gallery/home.html
- Grace Chosy Gallery, Madison, Wisconsin http://www.gracechosygallery.com/index.htm
- University of Wisconsin Press http://uwpress.wisc.edu/index.html