"The Social Comedian" by Peter Schjeldahl

        The most interesting thing about Robert Colescott is that he paints beautifully. Everything else that is interesting about him is interesting in relation to that beautifulness. This includes his race, which is African American, and his visual stories on themes of race. Many people are African American, and all people have racial attitudes that, if poked, will emit stories. Colescott vests these unremarkable conditions in painterly bliss. How many people do that?
        Few people singly represent the United States on a world stage, as Colescott did a year ago at the Venice Biennale with 19 paintings whose subsequent national tour has now come to Queens. With due respect for the Queens Museum, a splendid facility in eerie and ravishing Flushing Meadows (if you've never been there, go now), one might have expected a more prominent local venue for this honored work.
        But then, local ambivalence about Colescott has always been intense. Not only is he a figurative expressionist of humanist persuasion -- a type rarely welcomed around here -- but he is a Northern Californian variant of the same. New York might as well have immune antibodies to Colescott's 1950s generation of Beat fellow travelers from the Bay Area: jokey-serious artists including Joan Brown, William Willey and Jay DeFeo, whose reputations have tended to drown in the Hudson while swimming to Manhattan.
         Then there's the racial stuff. Or, rather, there is Colescott's nerve-wracking refusal to cast his art's racial provocations in any negotiable stance of political virtue. If only he didn't have so much fun with, say, subjects of interracial sex, which plainly excites as much as bemuses him. Predictable efforts to heroize him politically keep running up against the embarrassing insouciance of his Beatnik-esque, principled self-indulgence.

to creative fulfillment, like that of James Baldwin and many black musicians, led through Paris. He soldiered in France during World War II and returned there in 1949 to study with Fernand Leger. A seasoned, raffish Gallicism feeds Colescott's rugged nonchalance about race and sex, and friendly quarrels with Picasso and other Parisian masters do not cease to percolate in his art.

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