Colescott, Robert (1925- ) , African American painter, whose raucous, colorful works deal with racial themes. Colescott parodies traditional paintings of historical events with an ironic wit and a lushly expressive style.

Since the 1970s Colescott has painted reinterpretations of many of the most famous paintings of Western art, substituting African Americans for white figures in these well-known works. In George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975, Robert H. Orchard Collection, Cincinnati, Ohio) Colescott recast the characters from a well-known work by American painter Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), as caricatures of early 20th-century black minstrels. Colescott’s borrowings honor great paintings even as they criticize them.

Les Demoiselles d’Alabama (Des Nudas) (1985, Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina), for example, is a tribute to Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City); at the same time, Colescott ironically alludes to Picasso’s use of art forms then considered primitive, such as African masks.

In more recent work, Colescott’s paintings have addressed current racial issues such as urban violence (Emergency Room, 1989, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), the subjugation of black women, and the complexities of racial mixing.

Colescott was born in Oakland, California, and attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned both his B.A. (1949) and his M.A. degrees (1952). He studied in Paris in 1949 and 1950 with French artist Fernand Léger, who urged him to avoid abstraction, a form of art that Léger considered too remote from the interests of most people. Nevertheless, in his early career Colescott explored both abstract and representational painting and was strongly influenced by the figurative paintings of artists of the San Francisco Bay area such as Joan Brown and Richard Diebenkorn.