ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION | MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY

Warrington Colescott

Internationally known for his trademark style of blending several printmaking techniques into one image, Warrington Colescott draws from a diverse range of pop culture influences and personal experiences to create each piece. Throughout his body of work, Vaudeville theater and burlesque shows, radio and early filmmaking (Westerns, B-gangster films, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers), as well as the pomp, rhetoric and violence of war (he served as World War II company commander), all make appearances.

The California native returned home to study art on the newly enacted G.I. Bill. After receiving an M.A. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, he taught at Long Beach (Calif.) Community College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although he produced his first serigraph (print made using silkscreen process) in 1948, Colescott was primarily known for portrait, genre and landscape painting throughout the 1950s. Following a subsequent stint as a Fulbright Scholar in London where he worked under a well-known etching instructor, the artist made two major shifts to his work: he focused his printmaking on non-traditional intaglio (process using drypoint, engraving and etching), and he developed his use of the human figure in narrative work. Colescott experimented with narrative satire and mastered more printing processes throughout the next decade. He extensively researched the history of satire and its components: greed, vanity, pride, lust, social ambition, fads and fashions. Many times, his prints have underlying social messages-usually against the abuse of power existing in American society.

Rockford Art Museum owns 11 prints from Colescott's History of Printmaking series. Produced throughout the 1970s, it pays homage to the pioneers of printmaking-and critiques the myths surrounding these artistic legends. As a tongue-in-cheek nod to his subject matters, he employs each artist's method to create the respective prints. Because Alois Senefelder discovered the process of lithography, Colescott's work Senefelder Receives the Secrets of Lithography is a lithograph. In the print, he parodies the moment the Bavarian playwright, looking for a cost-effective way to distribute his plays, discovers the process-the legend goes that Senefelder tricked ancient Teutomic gods into giving him the secrets of lithography. The gods surround him, naming different elements needed for the process. Thunder god Thor bellows out the underlying secret: "Grease repels water."