Artist Biography & Facts

Warrington Wickham Colescott Jr

"Warrington Colescott, Who Etched With a Satirical Edge, Dies at 97," Obituary, The New York Times, By Richard Sandomir, October 4, 2018

Warrington Colescott, an innovative printmaker who deftly navigated the intersection between tragedy and high comedy with biting etchings about civil rights, history, politics and the Internal Revenue Service (which audited him), died on Sept. 10 at his farmhouse in Hollandale, Wis., southwest of Madison. He was 97.

His son, Julian, confirmed the death.

“Etching quickens the blood, lights up the eye, affects the satirical mind in the same way that a low-cut neckline affects Dracula,” Mr. Colescott wrote in a catalog for an exhibition of his prints at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1996.

A Fulbright and Guggenheim fellow whose prints are widely collected, Mr. Colescott employed a figurative style that tinkered liberally with reality in wildly colorful, cartoonish and sometimes disquieting ways.

In Birmingham Jail (1963) was inspired by the bloody demonstrations in the Deep South against segregation in the 1950s and early ’60s. Its two panels show rows of darkened jail cells where protesters are beaten by grotesquely drawn police officers — images that Mr. Colescott interspersed with pictures of a girls choir and Bart Starr, the Alabama-born quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, his favorite team.

Nearly 30 years later, in An Environmental President Meets Hole-in-the-Ozone (1992), Mr. Colescott depicts a party-like flight to space on Air Force One with President George Bush, his wife, Barbara, and his staff. While flight attendants serve coffee and sunscreen, Mr. Bush peers through binoculars at the gaping hole in the ozone.

“Golly!” he says. “A big mother.” Beneath the jet, a whale is harpooned in the middle of an oil spill.

“He was a dyed-in-the-wool Democratic progressive,” Mary Weaver Chapin, who curated a retrospective exhibition of Mr. Colescott’s prints at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2010, said in a telephone interview. “And this was really an attack on Bush’s environmental policy.”

Mr. Colescott sometimes created series of etchings, like one about Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, another about the bank robber John Dillinger and a third, A History of Printmaking, that re-imagines historical moments in graphic arts involving Benjamin Franklin and artists such as Rembrandt, Albrecht Dürer and Robert Rauschenberg.

In the riot of bellicose images that compose Goya Studies War (1976), Mr. Colescott shows Goya — the Spanish master who created a series of prints in the early 19th century called “The Disasters of War” — talking to a general and taking notes while a corpse is removed on a cart.

“What makes Colescott’s work so appealing is its mix of erudition and irreverence,” the critic Jennifer A. Smith wrote in 2010 in Isthmus, an alternative weekly newspaper in Madison, about an exhibition of his work that year at the city’s Grace Chosy Gallery. His prints, she added, were in the tradition of artists and social critics like William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier.

Warrington Wickham Colescott Jr. was born on March 7, 1921, in Oakland, Calif., to Creole parents from Louisiana. His mother, Lydia (Hutton) Colescott, was a schoolteacher who played the piano; his father, Warrington Sr., was a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad and played the violin.

As a boy, Warrington was drawn to artifacts that his father brought him from fighting in France during World War I — like a gas mask and a dented helmet — and used them to play war with his friends and scare people on Halloween. He drew pictures, too, and was influenced by newspaper comic strips.

“My drawing style has, in many ways, remained constant since childhood,” he said in the book Progressive Printmakers: Wisconsin Artists and the Print Renaissance (1999), which he wrote with Arthur Hove. “The marks of the pen or brush spill out with a kind of attack. Ultimately, they all fuse together and become a narration.”

He drew cartoons for his high school newspaper and for the campus newspaper and humor magazine at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in art. One of his cartoon creations was adapted into Berkeley’s mascot, Oski the Bear.

In 1942, Mr. Colescott was drafted into the Army and served in Okinawa late in World War II and in Korea as part of the postwar occupation. On his return, he got his master’s in art from Berkeley and began teaching drawing and painting at Long Beach Community College in California. He joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1949, where he taught painting and printmaking for 37 years.

Mr. Colescott started out concentrating on painting and silk screens but became fascinated with etching after a year of study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1950s under his Fulbright grant. His initial etchings were abstract, but they soon evolved to a more figurative look that suited the events and figures he would illustrate.

The shift to etching on copper plates — part of the group of intaglio techniques that includes engraving, drypoint and aquatint — transformed his career. But he said the process was physical and time-consuming. “Etching is so slow that you have a lot of time to think while you work on your plates,” he said in a 1995 oral history interview with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mr. Colescott created Inside IRS (1974), a Bosch-like descent into a hellish government fortress, not long after he was audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

Not long after he was audited by the I.R.S., he created Inside the IRS (1974), a Bosch-like descent into a hellish government fortress where agents wear Cossack uniforms and a taxpayer is forced to hang by his heels while being shaken down for his last cents.

“The composition is divided into clear-cut regions, almost like an El Greco painting,” the art historian Richard Cox wrote in 1988 in the catalog to an exhibition of Mr. Colescott’s prints at the Elvehjem Museum of Art (now the Chazen Museum of Art) in Madison.

“But in this instance,” he added, “the taxpayer cannot expect to find any heavenly solace above, for there he meets other webbed-footed tormentors who pull his hair and grab for his testicles.”

Mr. Colescott produced his last print in his farmhouse studio two years ago.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his daughter, Lydia Cole Scott, and seven grandchildren. Another son, Louis, died last year. His wife, Frances (Myers) Colescott, an artist and printmaker, died in 2014; previous marriages, to Vera Sedloff and Ellen Moore, ended in divorce.

His younger brother, Robert, a painter whose work was garishly satirical, died in 2009. They had a distant relationship and, with their Creole heritage, differed over their racial makeup. Robert considered himself African-American; Warrington considered himself white.

Asked to compare his and his brother’s work in 2011, Warrington Colescott told the magazine of the alumni association at California, Berkeley, “He’s a very good painter and he’s much rougher than I am.” Then he added: “He’s an attack artist … I’m not that narrow. Sometimes I feel good, I make people happy. But I enjoy the attack as well.”

Warrington Colescott was born in Oakland, California in 1921. His parents, Warrington, Sr. and Lydia Colescott, moved to Oakland from Louisiana in 1920. Earning his B.A. and M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, he continued with studies at the Grande Chaumiere, Paris, and the Slade School of Art, London.

He received prestigious fellowships with a Guggenheim in 1959, followed by a Fulbright in 1966, and National Endowments for the Art Artists Fellowships in 1976, 1979, and 1983. Colescott was a Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin at Madison between 1949 and 1978 and was named Professor Emeritus in 1986.

His early graphics were abstractions created in the medium of serigraphy. By the early 1960s he turned his focus on intaglio printmaking and his imagery evolved into social satire and commentary. He has produced a number of narrative satires, including one on the history of printmaking.

Colescott has exhibited internationally and his work is included in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Bibliotheque Nationale-Paris, and numerous other public collections.