S earing with biting satire, double-edged social commentary and tongue-in-cheek humor, Robert Colescott’s Café au Lait au Lit stages as an advertisement for what is assumed to be Créole Coffee—as it is noted top left—and presents a suggestive scene between a white male in bed and a black female dressed as a french maid about to serve him coffee. Executed in 1974, this work was painted a few years into Colescott’s initial exploration of his multiracial heritage and the dynamics of race in art and society as a whole. Up until the age of 45, Colescott did not acknowledge his mixed heritage and it was only after traveling to Cairo in the late 1960s that he began to embrace his black ancestry.

Colescott’s mother, Lydia Kenner Hutton, was a descendent of slaves serving two prominent families, William McWillie —who was the governor of Mississippi before the Civil War—and Chapman Levy. His father, Warrington Wickham Colescott Sr., was also mixed race, as he was the son of a white father and a mother who was likely part balck, part white, and part Native American. However, both of Colescott’s parents were light-skinned enough to pass as white, and would do so after moving from New Orleans to Oakland, California in 1919 where Colescott would grow up. (Matthew Weseley, “Robert Colescott: The Untold Story,” Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, pp. 14-15). In fact, neither his mother nor brother wanted to identify as black, though Colescott’s father was reportedly more forthcoming about their mixed ancestry. Moreover, these disputes of racial identity within his own home would have made Colescott hyper aware of racism and the differences that various people ascribe to identification with whiteness or blackness. He would use this keen understanding of views on race and gender to produce work which, like Manet before him in the 19th century, would shock audiences by defying traditional depictions in favor of crude, modern ones that revealed the social biases and perceptions at play.

A whirlwind of experiences in the late 1960s would spark various revelations for the artist that would lead to the evolution of his work into his signature style, decisive subject matters, and methodologies for expression. Beginning with two trips to Cairo where Colescott would serve as an artist-in-residence and later as a professor at the American University, he would there be made aware of the long history of art on the African continent, at once understanding that art history has not always been Eurocentric, nor that it needed to be. After Cairo, Colescott would visit Rome and France, exposing him to masterpieces of European art history before finally returning to the United States to find the country changed, with the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement dominating a climate of social unrest. Settling once again in the Bay Area—where the artist spent his childhood—and returning with a fresh perspective and under a new socio-political landscape likely resurfaced the family issues regarding race he had faced while growing up.

Though at first glance Café au Lait au Lit is centered on criticisms of stereotypes related primarily to race and sexism, the painting is also imbued with rich symbolism that is deeply personal to the artist. The name of the coffee itself—Créole Coffee—points towards Colescott’s status as a creole or person of mixed race, as well as his parents’ roots in New Orleans. Further references to New Orleans are also visible: a bottle of Delta Cream the woman holds, as well as french text and french maid outfit. Less explicitly, a black bird sits on the window overlooking the scene, which can be interpreted as the artist himself, who would paint himself into some of his later paintings such as Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder, 1979 and Susanna and the Elders (Novelty Hotel), 1980. Additionally, by including the bird, we are made aware of our own voyeurism within this highly sexualized scene, poignantly creating one of the first recognizable parallels Colescott makes between the artist and viewer. As curator Lowery S. Sims explains, pre-1975, Colescott places himself, by way of perspective, as a “voyeuristic observer on the periphery of the composition,” whereas later on in his career “as if to show he now feels less invisible to the world, he places himself squarely in the composition as an integral character in the narrative.” (Exh. Cat. Robert Colescott: A Retrospective, 1975-1986, p. 7).

Displaying a style reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec’s suggestive 19th century imagery for the Moulin Rouge, in the early 1970s Colescott would turn to appropriation of commercial images (and later on, in a different style, art historical images), as the principal method for enacting 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. The male figure in the work bears uncanny resemblance to Colonel Sanders, whom the artist would depict in a three-part series only two years earlier. The “Jacques Daniels” bottle on the ground gives us a further clue, as the infamous distiller Jasper “Jack” Newton Daniels had a similar mustache to the one portrayed here. By alluding to these particular individuals, who both became notorious business magnates, Colescott presents us with another critique towards structures of power and their abuse in commercial America.

Translating to “coffee with milk in bed” the quasi-metonymic phrase in Colescott’s pseudo advertisement for Café au Lait au Lit acts as a direct allusion to the subject of interracial coupling. The white male sits in bed with his hand hidden below the covers and hovering over his crotch, as we witness him fantasizing and directly projecting the white male gaze over a black female, who embodyies the stereotype of the sexualized other. Mitchell D. Kahan explains the emblem of the black woman, and in particular his highly recognizable appropriation of Aunt Jemima in other paintings, saying:

Colescott himself married 5 t.mes s throughout his life, with the first 4 of his wives being white women, and only the last being a black woman. This, together with his ancestry of interracial coupling, would make this subject matter one that was deeply personal to him, yet universal as it relates to race in society and human relations. As Matthew Wesley explains, “for Colescott, sex and race are inextricably mixed” (“Robert Colescott: The Untold Story, Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, p. 30). Café au Lait au Lit pertains to a series of paintings by Colescott in which he employs the pin-up girls of 1940s and 50s Hollywood as a method of satire for sexism and exoticism, similar to Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl with Ball. Lichtenstein took the image for this work from an advertisement, appropriated it into a painting created in his comic book-inspired style, and in so doing redelivers the image to the viewer as evidently artificial for our consumption.

The artist’s cartoonish style would play a significant role in the satirical power of his works. Beginning in the late 60s he would introduce ‘cartoonist exaggerations,’ as he would call them. Influenced by the cartoons of his childhood in the 1930s, which themselves developed from racist blackface performances and minstrels in the 19th century, it is fitting that Colescott would appropriate this style for his satirical depictions of race. It is through humor that the artist is able to further exaggerate the racial stereotypes at the foreground of his paintings, rendering them not only obvious but also obviously imagined. In so doing Colescott effectively subverts them and renders them dry of any validity, as the viewer—now made conscious of their own preconceptions—is made ridiculous for the ludicrous way their culture has imagined racial identities and differences.

The first African American to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1997—and the first painter selected for the honor since Jasper Johns, over a decade earlier—Colescott is revered for his uniquely American style of narrative figuration, and its capacity to address and investigate cultural stereotypes and symbols with unprecedented candor. Confronting us with and exposing the underbelly of American visual culture, the artist’s work is meant to stop us in our tracks and challenge us to rethink the tenets upon which our visual imagination is founded. Unapologetic, brash, and at t.mes s 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. Subverting conventional social, cultural, and artistic narratives, Café au Lait au Lit is an enduring test.mes nt, not only to the potency which characterizes Colescott’s distinctive graphic vernacular, but to his extraordinary contribution to the development of Contemporary American painting.

Artist

Robert Colescott