Vibrant and bold, spiritual and poetic, Did We Have to Come Here? stands as a remarkable example from Robert Colescott’s Cairo period, a short sojourn during the mid 1960s that marked a formative turning point in the artist’s practice. In the present work, Colescott envisions a chorus of kaleidoscopic figures suspended in rhythmic harmony, offering a rich and immersive visual experience. While the canvas presents a lyrical orchestration of color and gesture teeming with joyous energy at first glance, sustained looking reveals poignant racial undertones that speak to the artist’s biography and foreshadows the polemical explorations of race, colonialism, and power that would come to define his later work.

Born in 1925 in Oakland, California, Robert Colescott grew up amidst the hardships of the Great Depression in one of the few African American families in the area, informing his acute awareness of his racial difference at a young age. His artistic passion was fostered by his musician parents and further encouraged by the esteemed sculptor Sargent Johnson, a family friend who, like Colescott’s father, financially supported his creative pursuits by working as a porter for the Southern Pacific Railroad.

After serving in World War II and earning an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Colescott spent a formative year in Paris studying under the French Cubist painter, Fernand Léger. Léger encouraged the young artist to renounce the gestural abstract style in which he had been trained at Berkeley in embrace of the human figure rendered with pure colors and bold outlines. Colescott returned to Berkeley to complete a master’s degree, after which he began teaching at Portland State University. In 1964, he received a grant to study contemporary Egyptian art as an artist-in-residence at the American Research Center in Cairo. He extended his stay by teaching at the American University in Cairo, but his time there was cut short in 1967 when the outbreak of the Six-Day War forced him to leave for Paris.

“The paintings that Colescott created during the second half of the 1960s consisted a significant and underappreciated body of work and it’s impossible to understand it without also knowing the profound personal changes that he underwent at the time.”
Matthew Weseley, “Robert Colescott: The Untold Story,” Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, p27

Art historian and co-curator of Robert Colescott’s landmark 2020-22 traveling retrospective, Matthew Weseley, credited the artist’s time in Egypt as “the most pivotal turning point in his career,” while Northwestern art history professor Huey Copeland echoed this sentiment in his 2009 Artforum tribute following the artist’s passing stating that Colescott’s trip to Egypt afforded him an “optic through which to perceive both the provinciality of American culture and the erasure of blackness from Western artistic practice.” (Huey Copeland, "Truth to Power," Artforum, October 2009, vol 48, no. 2, p. 59).

Particularly influenced by the narrative quality of Egyptian art he encountered and visits to the Valley of the Queens in Luxor, the burial site of ancient civilization’s female rulers, Colescott’s practice underwent a critical transformation in both subject matter and style. His work embraced a more spiritual dimension, moving beyond planar concerns to explore layered compositions and discontinuous space. Furthermore, the experience of living in a non-white culture offered Colescott a newfound sense of liberation, freeing him from the constraints of his Eurocentric artistic training. In reflecting on his time in Egypt, Colescott remarked “I felt freer in Egypt and more involved with ideas about culture and cultural overlays…there were experiences there that I thought were fundamental to my art and identity.” (Robert Colescott, quoted in Susan Fitzgerald, "Robert Colescott Rocks The Boat," in American Visions: The Magazine of Afro-American Culture, June-July 1997, p. 18). The artist also credited his time in Egypt for helping him to “find color again,” prompting a dramatic shift in his palette. He moved away from the muted greys and greens that characterized his early 1960s work in Portland, embracing instead bold hues of saturated color that would become a hallmark of his mature style.

“My paintings coming out of the period were really quite poetic and they were about spirits. The paintings became abstract because the figures and spirits of the dead did not necessarily stand on two feet and so it encouraged me to be very liberal about the way I saw form, human form and the environment.”
Robert Colescott, quoted in Susan Fitzgerald, "Robert Colescott Rocks The Boat," in American Visions: The Magazine of Afro-American Culture, June-July 1997, p. 19

The vibrant color palette and narrative quality that emerged during Colescott’s brief but formative time in Cairo—when Did We Have to Come Here? was created—would become enduring hallmarks of his career. These elements are fully realized in later masterworks such as George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook. Much like that painting and others from his mature period, the present work reveals Colescott’s deep engagement with art history. Here, he subtly alludes to Matisse’s La Danse, a reference he would revisit more overtly in his 1979 self-portrait Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder. Yet in Did We Have to Come Here?, Colescott approaches the homage with a freer hand, adopting the Fauvist palette to evoke a similarly joyful bacchanal, rich in simplicity and dynamic movement.

Left: Henri Matisse, La Danse, 1910, The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Right: Robert Colescott, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, 1979. Portland Art Museum. © 1979 Robert Colescott.

Beneath the joyful ode to life, however, the present painting also marks a critical keystone in Colescott’s oeuvre, as it bears one of the first references to race—a dark brown-skinned head, isolated on the right side of the composition, gazes toward two stark white figures on the left, while a lighter brown-skinned figure floats below. This latter figure may serve as a surrogate for the artist himself, as due to his Creole ancestry, Colescott’s parents had encouraged him to “pass” as white throughout his childhood. His time in Egypt was instrumental in embracing his African American identity, a turning point that would later underpin the satirical explorations of race and history for which he became best known.

Robert Colescott at 1969 Fountain Gallery Opening, Portland. Photo. Beth Fagan, "New Colescott Exhibition Called Allegory of Contemporary Life," The Sunday Oregonian, 9 March 1969, p. 18.

Beyond its significance as a precursor to the racial themes that would define his later work, Did We Have to Come Here? also represents a rare surviving painting from Colescott’s Cairo period. Many of his works from the 1960s and ’70s were tragically lost in a fire at Portland’s Fountain Gallery, where this piece was first exhibited, further underscoring its importance within his oeuvre.

Visionary Fountain Gallery founder, Arlene Schnitzer, who opened the gallery to promote contemporary artists from the Northwest region, played an instrumental role in establishing Colescott’s professional career as an artist, and by 1997, he was honored as the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Today, Colescott is recognized as one of the most significant figurative artists of the 20th century, whose work critically interrogates canonical historical narratives and challenges prevailing assumptions about inclusion and representation within the historical record. His legacy continues to resonate through the work of the next generation of artists, including Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Kehinde Wiley, who carry forward his charge to decolonize the canon and redefine cultural representation.