OUTRAGEOUS VISIONS : COLESCOTT SEES HUMOR IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Imagine Botticelli’s and Veronese’s nude Venuses rolled into one and transformed into a voluptuous African fertility goddess.

Picture Rodin’s “The Thinker” as a black lumberjack, sitting on a stump and dreaming of a buxom woman in a bright pink bikini.

Fancy Shirley Temple as a black girl wearing a lei and a grass skirt, dancing the hula on the beach while Bill Robinson, her dancing partner in movies, grins on the horizon.

Robert Colescott has not only had such outrageous visions, he has made them concrete in ironically witty canvases that make high sport of racial stereotypes. His controversial paintings and several charcoal drawings of concupiscent nudes are in a solo exhibition at the Koplin Gallery in West Hollywood through May 17.

“It’s a subject that’s at risk,” he says of the black characters in his paintings. “Unless you are gushingly positive or make them heroic,” he explained during an interview at the gallery, “images of black people in paintings may be suspect.

“But I’m very proud of the fact that more people get what I’m after than I expect. Oddly enough, more white people than black people accuse me of being a racist. I’m more often criticized by women for being a sexist.” The images that his feminine critics “pounce on,” according to the 60-year-old artist, are “about men’s lust,” something “you can’t talk about unless you show it.”

Quietly gregarious and well educated, Colescott is no glib jokester. What he is after in his art is a way of communicating the absurdity of human behavior--from carnal instincts to racial prejudice. Luring his audience with broad humor and cartoonish vulgarity, he rewards viewers with lush, vibrant painting and such hilarious details as brilliantly painted toenails and a halo of stars on his black Venus.

Colescott was born and raised in Oakland and has recently moved to Tucson, where he is on the faculty of the University of Arizona.

Though he has shown his work all over the world, the Koplin show is his first in Los Angeles. Now affiliated with Semaphore Gallery in SoHo, he has exhibited his work regularly in New York since 1970 and has been represented in the biennials of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, and in the 1984 “Content” show at the Hirshhorn Museum, also in Washington.

A son of musicians, Colescott says he always drew but wasn’t “one of those kids who made all the maps for the teachers.” He did, however, have an illustrious role model, black sculptor Sargent Johnson, who made his living working on the railroad with Colescott’s father.

Colescott is well known for rewriting what he calls “a potpourri of history”--especially art history--with black people as subjects, but his distinctive style evolved slowly. He moved from youthful narratives to abstractions of Mondrian-like purity during his student days at UC Berkeley, to figurative works done under Fernand Leger’s instruction in Paris and to Expressionistic paintings that he likens to Willem de Kooning’s.

“I had put black people in my paintings, the same way I’d put in a guitar or a bottle, but they had no real significance until I went to Egypt,” he says. Having won a grant from the American Research Center to study and teach in Cairo in 1963-64, he became submerged for the first time in “a non-white culture.”

The experience freed him from “the limitations of European art,” he says, and “allowed me to draw on other sources. Race became part of my subject matter. It was the most crucial year of my life.”

Colescott was on sabbatical leave from Portland State University and had to return there, but after a year he went back to Egypt to help establish an art department at the University of Cairo. When war broke out in Egypt in 1967, he and his family left the country, settling in Paris for three years and finally returning to the Bay Area, where he taught at Cal State Stanislaus, UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Now working with punchy ironic narratives, Colescott says he struggles with subject matter. “Ideas are hard. Sometimes I wish I painted stripes. For every painting I need an idea. They may come from a word or a song, maybe something I read.”

“Shirley Temple Black (Aloha Shirley)” was inspired by her name and by a photograph of the young actress in a hula skirt. The image is “kind of silly,” he acknowledges, but it asks a serious question: “What if Shirley Temple had been a little black girl?”

A 1979 painting transforming the Greek sculpture “Laocoon” into a pink-skinned mother and two small daughters in the grip of an octopus’ tentacles comes from a news story about an actual octopus attack that he remembers from childhood.

While some of his subjects are easily interpreted by anyone with a rudimentary art history education, others are more complex. His latest painting, “Knowledge of the Past Is the Key to the Future: St. Sebastian,” for example, combines the familiar martyr with a commentary on apartheid in South Africa. The arrow-pierced saint is half black man, half white woman.

“I thought if I split him down the middle, he would represent both races and sexes and show the violence done to everybody,” Colescott explains. “The lesson of history is that violence not only hurts the victims, it causes great pain to the perpetrators. I believe that the white people doing all that stuff to black people in South Africa will be greatly harmed by it. The Holocaust damaged the psyche of the German people.”

Colescott once painted the scene of Robert Kennedy’s death, but he’s leery of depending on current events for ideas. “You have to be careful that you’re not just reporting or your work will have no meaning after the event is forgotten. It has to be about something universal, about the human condition--life, death, love, lust, something bigger than reportage.

“It’s easy to get carried away with subject matter and forget about the visual strength that’s necessary. I want a balance.”