Auvers-sur-Oise (Crow in the Wheat Field)

1981 acrylic on canvas 84 x 72 Corcoran Art Gallery Washington D.C.

        Is that who I think it is? I recognize the landscape, the three roads, one of them disappearing into the blue horizon, the black birds hovering ominously. Yes, this is the scene of Vincent Van Gogh's Crows Over a Wheatfield, one of the last works the artist painted before his suicide in the quaint French town of Auvers-sur-Oise. Didn't I once read that the stark masterpiece reflected Van Gogh's anguish in his final days, the crows representing winged harbingers of death? This is definitely the same setting.
        But who is that giant figure dominating the background, rising godlike in the gloaming? With that intense stare, red beard, and bandaged ear, it can only be Van Gogh himself. But this is the tormented genius as we've never seen him before: grinning, leering, his toothy smile at once mocking and triumphant.
         And what are we to make of the figures in the foreground: the black painter, dressed in an ill-fitting, floral-printed shirt and Van Gogh-ish straw hat, his ear covered not by a bandage but by a stereo headphone; the two skeletons saluting each other and wearing women's lingerie and high heels, decorative ribbons tied around their skulls? The images are laugh-out-loud funny, outrageous, unsettling, and complex, all at the same time. Welcome to the dazzling and rambunctious universe of American master Robert Colescott.
         Like all great satirists, Colescott has discombobulated people of various persuasions. Some white guardians of culture have felt he was spitting in the face of high art. African American arbiters of correctness have been horrified by Colescott's use of comically grotesque black images. He has been denied the widespread recognition of many of his white contemporaries, such as Rauschenberg, Johns, and Stella.
         Colescott is certainly referring to himself as the big black bird when he twists Van Gogh's title into Auvers-sur-Oise (Crow in the Wheatfield). Perhaps this is a painting about recognition. Those skeletal specters of mortality recognize each other, just as that grinning Vincent might recognize a kindred spirit hard at work in the foreground. Maybe in some distant horizon of eternity, Robert Colescott will, like his gloating Van Gogh, have the last laugh.
         Still, this wittiest of artists cannot resist a bit of self-mockery. Despite the beautiful, haunting landscape before him, the Colescott figure in this painting focuses his artistic attention on a skeleton's pink drawers. "I'm saying things about myself as a superficial representative of a superficial time," Colescott told Ann Shengold in a 1985 interview, "sitting there doing all the wrong things and representing all the wrong things, but I'm there, and I'm alive, and I'm noble."