Warrington Colescott

Warrington Wickham Colescott Jr. (March 7, 1921 – September 10, 2018) was an American artist, he is best known for his satirical etchings.

He was a master printmaker and operated Mantegna Press in Hollandale, Wisconsin, with his wife and fellow artist Frances Myers.

Colescott was born in Oakland, California, in 1921 to parents of Louisiana Creole descent.

His brother, artist Robert Colescott, was born in 1925.

Creole culture—which the artist described as "a rich tradition of cuisine and music, of skeptical judgments, of irony and humor in expression" —played a large role in family life.

Both food and music were key components of his upbringing.

Comic strips were also important to the young Colescott, especially the work of Jay "Ding" Darling; the caricatural and narrative components would greatly influence his mature work.

As a teenager, Colescott discovered vaudeville and the burlesque at the Red Mill/Moulin Rouge theater on 8th Street in Oakland.

The broad humor and slapstick, as well as the eroticism of the burlesque performances, would inform his art and humor throughout his career.

That same year, Colescott began an etching about the Depression-era gangster, John Dillinger, which grew into a suite of images mixing fact and fiction about the farm boy-turned-outlaw who mesmerized the public in the 1930s.

"A storyteller who skips all the dull parts," as author and curator Gene Baro has called him, Colescott had no compunction about enhancing the narratives with imagined details and anachronistic additions.

Colescott earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in the summer of 1942.

At Berkeley, he majored in fine art, and was active with the university humor magazine, the Pelican, as well as the university newspaper, The Daily Californian, submitting cartoons and writing for both publications.

He served in the army in World War II from 1942 to 1946, then returned to Berkeley to take a master's degree in fine arts and to earn a teaching certificate.

Colescott taught art at Long Beach City College from 1947 to 1949.

Colescott had studied painting at the University of California, Berkeley, and only began to make screenprints in 1948 while he was teaching at Long Beach City College.

He continued to paint, draw, and make screenprints when he moved to Madison to teach drawing and design at the University of Wisconsin.

The art faculty at Madison included several members who were both painters and printmakers, including Dean Meeker, Alfred Sessler, and John Wilde.

In September 1949, he began his career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught for 37 years, retiring in 1986.

Sessler introduced Colescott to etching in the mid-1950s, and Colescott furthered his education in the medium at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, studying with Anthony Gross.

During those years, Colescott continued his education in Europe, first on the GI Bill to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, in 1952–53 and again on several fellowships and awards: in 1956–57, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, and in 1963, he returned to London on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

During that time, Colescott experimented with hard-ground etching while continuing his screenprinting; in a few instances, he combined the two media, as in Night Wings from 1957.

By the early 1960s, Colescott had all but abandoned screenprinting, devoting his time, rather, to complex etchings in color.

He achieved a major breakthrough in his work when he began to cut and shape the copper etching plates with mechanics' shears.

In addition, he started incorporating bits of letterpress (typically zinc letterpress used for newspaper printing) and recycled etching plates into his compositions.

At the same time, his work became less abstract and more narrative in nature, which allowed him to unleash his satirical talents in work such as In Birmingham Jail (1963), which is based on the civil rights struggles in the South, and lambastes the racism and violence of a corrupt system; or Christmas with Ziggy (1964), a social satire of businessmen entertaining their mistresses at a posh London restaurant.

Since the 1970s, Colescott has continued to pursue social satire in his work.

As art historian Richard Cox has written, Colescott casts his net wide: "Greed vanity, pride, lust, social ambition, silly fads, and fashions—[Colescott] adapted the traditional targets of artists and writers as his own. With wit and disarming humor he has drawn many entertaining and zany prints, everything from good-natured spoofs to harsh, stinging parodies. Greek gods, American presidents, newspaper tycoons, academics, gangsters, cops, cowboys and Indians, Pilgrims, accountants, scientists, generals, joggers, hunters, show girls, movie stars, the artist himself—you name it, all have been skewered by Colescott's needle."

Colescott's mature style found fruition in his series Prime-Time Histories: Colescott's USA (1972–73) followed by The History of Printmaking (1975–78), perhaps Colescott's best-known work.

In this suite of images, which includes twenty-one intaglio prints, two lithographs, and a handful of watercolors and drawings, Colescott imagines critical moments in the history of printmaking.

In each print, Colescott starts with historical fact, and then adds his own interpretation, often borrowing from the featured artist's own style or themes.

For instance, in one scene we witness Alois Senefelder, the inventor of lithography, receiving the secrets of this medium from devilish creatures in the Black Forest; in another plate, Colescott imagines Pablo Picasso at the zoo, admiring animals such as the minotaur that recurs in his work.

For his riff on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Colescott imagines the fin-de-siècle artist (and enthusiastic chef) in his kitchen, whipping up a lunch for his friends,

characters from Lautrec's oeuvre.

Recurrent themes since the late 1980s show a different focus.

These include burlesque, popular culture, and the afterlife (see The Last Judgement triptych, 1987–88).

The artist also focuses on some of his favorite locales, such as California (his birthplace), Wisconsin (where he resides), and New Orleans, the home of his Creole ancestors, as seen in his recent series, Suite Louisiana.

In 1992, he returned again to an art-historical theme in My German Trip, in which Colescott imagines encounters with the great German printmakers Albrecht Dürer, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and members of the German Expressionists, with highly comic results.

More satires and fictional histories have followed.

Colescott died on 10 September 2018, at the age of 97.