Art Revolution: Politics and Pop in the Robert Colescott Painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware

Robert Colescott (Oakland, 1925 - Tucson, 2009) was an energetic painter who pushed his presence into the history of American art on his own terms. His prolific fifty-some-year oeuvre is characterized overall by a stew-like mix of crude figuration, splashy, garish color and uncensored sexual and racial themes, grounded in a deep attachment to past art but inspired more immediately by the popular, prosaic culture of his era. While his later works are increasingly complex in form and symbolic terms, he is best known for raw and cartoonish paintings of the 1970s, which impacted the art world significantly across spheres (studios, academia, markets, museums) by bringing the matter of into the (traditionally white) mainstream in such blunt form that it could not be ignored.In fact, Colescott's posterity remains closely identified with one painting, first exhibited publicly in 1975 (John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco), titled purposefully, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1974-75, private collection).Rendered in bright, flat acrylics, the composition is instantly apprehended as a bawdy, blackface take-off on the famous 19th-century painting, George Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emmanuel Leutze (1851).In Colescott's version, the rendering of the bespectacled agricultural scientist Carver, who replaces the standing Washington at the pinnacle of the foreground figure group, and his crew of servants, is obviously informed by historically racist popular imagery. Inserted in the top left corner in stenciled lettering is the beginning of the title, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware, which serves as an explanatory and identifying caption such as those found on postcards or published illustrations. It also suggests the innumerable reproductions of the original in circulation from Leutze's time (beginning with several of his own prints) to the present, including history textbook illustrations, through which it has become both an icon and cliche of national identity (see Hutton).Colescott's outing of by then clandestine but still widely recognizable stereotypes in a contemporary art context was an affront to mainstream art cognoscenti. Since then, the Carver painting has achieved iconic status approaching that of its source, via several widely circulated survey texts on twentieth century art and art catalogues, where it is positioned as a harbinger of subsequent postmodern painting in its blend of self-investigation and committed social commentary (see Arnason; Heartney; Hunter, Jacobus, Wheeler; Phillips, et al.; Sandler). The painting has been exhibited intermittently across the country into the new millennium and featured in innumerable attendant periodical reviews. By the 1990s, its purview had expanded into the discourses of history as a kind of documentary image related to the United States Bicentennial (see Todd; Jaffe). It was usurped for a new edition of Ishmael Reed's novel Flight to Canada (1976; Scribner's, 1998), a sharp parody of ante-bellum slave narratives (Rushdy, Chapter 4), and for the cover of a reprint of Constance Rourke's classic study American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931; Random House, 2004). Rourke's work included among the first frank discussions of the appeal of black-face minstrelsy for whites in an interdisciplinary discourse of race and representation that has expanded exponentially in recent decades (a term search at www.worldcat.org yielded about 300 results from c. 1980 in an array of media). It would seem Colescott's Carver painting was on the cutting edge.Below I would like to flesh out the trajectory of the painting's journey to its current somewhat ironic canonical status and the scope of its cultural meaning. The painting has proved malleable, in a heuristic sense, as art trends and changing relations in American society have recast some of its fundamental aims in various ways. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.