“What I did was to take something that is admirable, mess it up, and make you question everything that the artwork stood for.”
A veritable masterpiece of unparalleled formal rigor and graphic grandeur, Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook from 1975 stands as one of the most iconic paintings of Twentieth Century Art. Providing a satirical intervention in American history, culture, and politics, Colescott confronts the canon of Western art history upon its own terms, boldly commandeering the grand artistic genre of history painting. Both in title and composition, George Washington Carver references Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware from 1851, held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In the present work, Colescott boldly takes on an iconic image that within the public imagination represents American ideals of freedom and political liberation, unveiling its inherent racial bias. While in Leutze’s iconic scene Washington is dramatically depicted as the hero and father of America at its inception, captured at the turning-point of the American Revolutionary War, Colescott’s adaptation radically rewrites the American national self-mythology, parodying the grandeur of historical genre painting while exposing the structural racial divides of the United States. Colescott turns the original image on its head, holding a mirror to American culture using essentialized racial caricatures to underscore the glaring omission of the African-American narrative within the prevailing representations of American history, and highlight how that history is built on a legacy of racism and inequity. Teeming in a melee of animated forms, vibrant, garish hues, and sumptuous painterly marks, Colescott enacts the racial tensions prevalent in American society; simultaneously highly familiar and distinctly uncanny, his characters serve as cartoonish allegories for complex social issues, employing satire to critically engage questions of implicit bias which implicate its viewers and society at large.
Acquired directly from John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco in 1976, George Washington Carver has remained in the same esteemed private Midwestern collection ever since. As the definitive embodiment of Robert Colescott’s revolutionary and highly acclaimed painterly oeuvre, the present work has been included in nearly every text on the artist, and is presented as a touchstone of American art in virtually every survey on Twentieth Century art history. Further testifying to the painting’s importance, the work has been included in every major exhibition on the artist, and has been exhibited alongside other masterworks of art history in numerous seminal exhibitions of the twentieth century, including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1978 exhibition Art About Art, and Thelma Golden’s seminal 1994 exhibition The Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, also at the Whitney Museum. Recently, the work was prominently included in important exhibitions including Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas at the Seattle Art Museum in 2018 and We Fight to Build a Free World at The Jewish Museum in New York in 2020-21.
George Washington Carver's Illustrious Exhibition History
In George Washington Carver, Colescott re-imagines Leutze's iconic scene with George Washington Carver as the focus, replacing his namesake at the prow of the ship. A Black man born into slavery in the 1860s, Carver went on to become a pioneering agricultural scientist at the Tuskagee Institute whose innovations in the field would help struggling sharecroppers in the South, many of whom were themselves former slaves. Surrounding Carver on the ship, Colescott paints a rowdy cast of Black characters whose caricature-like representations are clearly informed by racist popular imagery and meant to represent common racist stereotypes of the twentieth century that have informed mainstream (glaringly White) consciousness, including a cigar-smoking banjo player, a servantly chef, an inebriated farmer, and a "mammy" figure, among others. Unapologetic, brash, and at times even vulgar, Colescott exposes the stereotypical portrayal of African American people in our country's history: while the pejorative caricatures are immediately recognizable to the viewer as they have been widely seen and ingrained in our consciousness, less recognizable and known is the story of George Washington Carver.
"Ever since I started doing those appropriations, there's been criticism… I started doing that in '75 when I painted George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware—which is a much more complicated painting than a lot of people think…It's a lot more than a one-line… it's about white perceptions of Black people. It's the satire that kills the serpent."
Private Collection. Art © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Painted in 1975 - the same year that kicked off the United States Bicentennial celebrating the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution - the present work offers Colescott's own bicentennial statement on American history. Taking on a painting that stands as one of the most recognizable images in the American popular imagination, Colescott paints a radical counter to the exclusionary narrative that has long dominated art history. Colescott offers a brash, sardonic critique aimed not only at American national self-mythology via this revered icon of the American Revolution, but also at Western canonical masterwork paintings. Taking as its starting point the grand genre of “history painting”, one that holds both a celebrated and fraught position in the history of Western art, George Washington Carver radically upends the traditional cannon, brazenly denigrating the traditional mode and values it stands for, and asserting his own counter-narrative. Traditional history paintings such as George Washington Crossing the Delaware were commissioned by the wealthy and powerful elite in order to commemorate a historical event. Standing before George Washington Carver, Colescott calls to question the beliefs and mythology that grounds every aspect of our national identity, and, more poignantly, what voices and which demographics were left out of those narratives.
Born in Oakland, California in 1925, Colescott grew up during the Great Depression. After serving in World War II in a segregated army, he embarked on a career in art and earned his BFA at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied European Modernism. During this time, Colescott traveled to Paris to study with Fernand Léger, whose influence is readily apparent within the chaotic yet highly structured composition of the present work. In the early 1960s, Colescott travelled to Cairo, Egypt, where he spent several years studying and teaching. His time spent in Egypt was transformative for both his personal outlook and his art: he was exposed to a new perspective on race, and artistically was reintroduced to a refreshing attitude toward figuration and color. When Colescott returned to the United States in the mid-1960s, he came home to a county embroiled in the social and political tensions of the Civil Rights Movement. Excited by the different approaches to art he encountered in Egypt and dissatisfied with the narrow narrative scope offered by abstraction – especially as an African American within the heightened sociopolitical landscape – Colescott radically embraced a new figurative style and subject matter in his work. George Washington Carver emerges from the groundbreaking moment in which Colescott radically embraced this new mode, and masterfully captures the artist at the inception of his creative artistic brilliance.
Right: Jacob Lawrence, Struggle...From the History of the American People, No. 1, 1955
Photo © 2021 Jacob Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Art © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation / Art Resource, NY
"I felt freer in Egypt and more involved with ideas about culture and cultural overlays... When I went to Cairo, I found color again. Very bright, pure color. I think that the sense of ambiguity and mystery that a lot of the works of art represented has stuck with me in terms of what I do today."
The magnificent panorama of the present composition thunderously and radically declares the arrival of Colescott’s mature artistic project. Speaking to the inception of this painting, Colescott explains: "Ever since I started doing those appropriations, there's been criticism. . . . I started doing that in '75 when I painted George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware—which is a much more complicated painting than a lot of people think. . . . It's a lot more than a one-liner . . . it's about white perceptions of Black people. It's the satire that kills the serpent." (Robert Colescott, quoted in an oral interview with Paul Karlstrom, April 1999, Tuscon Arizona, courtesy Smithsonian Archives of American Art)
ART © 2021 ESTATE OF PABLO PICASSO / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
ART © 2021 FAITH RINGGOLD / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
The world Colescott depicts within George Washington Carver is one of searing dichotomies—between tragedy and comedy, respect and degradation, high and low, visible and invisible, Black and white, past and present. Yet within the painting, these juxtapositions are blurred, making distinct opposites more multidimensional and intricate than previously assumed. The figures that Colescott presents here serve as satirical allegories, allowing the viewer to explore difficult, uncomfortable inquiries via charged figuration. Underscoring Colescott’s incisive analysis is his decision to include the American flag, its familiar iconography and usual connotations both diminished and reframed by its presentation within the present work. Typifying the very finest of the artist’s oeuvre, George Washington Carver lures the viewer into Colescott’s vibrant, painterly world by the overpowering formal strength of the painting itself, the richly painted forms so urgently potent as to almost leap off the canvas. Once drawn in, Colescott confronts us with and exposes the underbelly of American visual culture, stopping us in our tracks and challenging us to re-think the tenets upon which our visual imagination is founded. Subverting conventional social, cultural, and artistic narratives, George Washington Carver is an enduring testament, not only to the singular potency which characterizes Colescott’s distinctive graphic vernacular, but to his extraordinary contribution to the development of Contemporary American painting. With its social and political resonance and sheer pictorial force, today Colescott's painting rivals the iconic quality of its source image, offering a critical reckoning with the history of American art.
