Printmaker, satirist Warrington Colescott dies
Warrington Colescott, a printmaker and former art professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been described as a “social scold” and a “mad-dog attack artist” with a humorous and deeply humane side.
As an artist, he could touch a nerve. He explored a range of subjects from the war in Afghanistan to ice fishing. His prints are characterized by dense, colorful, spectacle-like scenes and sharp insights.
He once wrote that he was interested in “that black zone between tragedy and high comedy, where a little pull or push one way or the other can transmute screams into laughter.”
Colescott died Sept. 10 at his home in Hollandale, Wis. He was 97.
“I think deep down he was a humanist,” says Mary Weaver Chapin, who curated a seminal retrospective of Colescott’s work for the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2010. “He would unveil these human foibles and mistakes and misguided actions and still seem to have a little bit of sympathy for the protagonist.”
Colescott was born in Oakland, Calif., in 1921, to musician parents of Louisiana Creole descent. He attended nearby University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in fine art and, after serving in the Army during World War II, got a master’s degree in art as well.
In 1949, he accepted a job to teach drawing and design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for 37 years. It was at Madison where he found a clique of painter-printmakers who inspired one another’s work, artists including Dean Meeker, Alfred Sessler and John Wilde.
With others, Colescott established a “powerhouse of printmaking that continues decades later,” says Chapin, adding that serious training in printmaking was almost unheard of at major universities at the time.
“The number of people I met during my research (for the exhibit) who were trained by Warrington and then people who were trained by people who were trained by Warrington – it’s had a generational effect,” added Chapin, curator of prints and drawings at the Portland Art Museum.
Colescott was engaged in the art world close to home and beyond. He traveled during his early years at Madison thanks to various awards, including Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships. He gained attention in the art world’s proving ground, New York, and was included in important shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in the mid-1950s.
By the 1960s, Colescott’s work became less abstract and more narrative. In the tradition of Honoré Daumier, Francisco de Goya, William Hogarth and George Grosz, he often interpreted and subverted the news of the day. His work could be biting.
In “The Great Society: Inner Core,” inspired by riots in Milwaukee in 1967, a beefy cop rescues a nearly nude white woman, apparently enslaved by a black man. The work was meant to satirize white fears. “In Birmingham Jail,” based on civil rights marches and sit-ins, smug policemen look on as black men are beaten.
Colescott’s most significant works were his cycles of prints in which he explored subjects in some depth. “The History of Printmaking,” filled with art historical and literary in-jokes, is perhaps his most known series.
While much of Colescott’s work – particularly the political satire – has a hard edge to it, he made space for kneeslapping playfulness, too, including “Sunday Service,” which caricatures our state’s obsession with the Packers.
“Taken as a whole these prints represent not only Colescott’s own narrative, but the collective Wisconsin and American experiences,” wrote Graeme Reid for the Journal Sentinel in his review of the MAM show.
Colescott was preceded in death by a younger brother, the equally famous artist Robert Colescott, who died in 2009 at the age of 83. The brothers had remarkably parallel lives and careers. They both explored issues of race, often irreverently, and stylistically gravitated toward the cartoonish. Sadly, they were not close, there was “a gulf” between them, Chapin says.
Colescott shared a home studio with his wife, Frances Myers, whose work, like her husband’s, is in the collections of many major museums. She died in 2014.
Asked whether Colescott’s work – often so timely – will be lasting, Laurie Winters, the director of the Museum of Wisconsin Art, said it will be.
“I think there will be a moment in particular when art historians will want to look back at his work as a way of thinking about the last half of the 20th century,” she said.
Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel’s art and architecture critic. Connect with her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and subscribe to her weekly newsletter. Email her at mchumacher@journalsentinel.com.