Warrington Colescott's "Night of the Artists," 1986 (detail).
When Warrington Colescott died on Sept. 10, staff at the Chazen Museum of Art knew they had to do something. The 97-year-old teacher, satirist and printmaker was a giant, not only at UW-Madison but nationally.
His obituary in The New York Times quotes Isthmus critic Jennifer A. Smith, who in 2010 noted, “What makes Colescott’s work so appealing is its mix of erudition and irreverence.” Smith also put Colescott in the tradition of such artists and social critics as William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier.
Colescott came to the UW in 1949, and taught painting and printmaking for 37 years.
“When we learned of his passing we started a conversation about how we could get out a body of his work for people who come to the museum, and people in the community, to pay homage to him,” says Amy Gilman, who has served as director of the Chazen since September 2017.
In her previous position as deputy director of the Toledo Museum of Art, Gilman was already familiar with Colescott. “His reputation certainly precedes him, out in the museum world,” she says. “I was not only aware of his work from that aspect, I was also very cognizant when I arrived of the deep influence he had on a generation of printers, of which Colescott was a key player.”
The Chazen has 146 Colescott works in its collection. “We wanted to find a selection of them that had a pretty broad range but would include some familiar pieces and really be able to show a little bit of the overall strengths and long history of his work here,” she says.
The result is a display of 16 prints on the museum’s second floor, all of them wryly humorous, many of them drawn from his series on the history of printmaking. The display has no closing date.
“Madison: View from W. Washington and R. Rabelais” (1973), references the bawdy Renaissance writer; play close attention to what’s going on in the landscape’s tiny windows.
Warrington Colescott's "Night of the Artists," 1986.
“The Battle at Little Bohemia” (1964) portrays a real-life shoot-out in northern Wisconsin between John Dillinger and FBI agents (one of them wearing a coonskin cap).
There’s also “Sunday Service” (2001), which shows gigantic, bulging Green Bay Packers players tussling like Macy’s balloons over a field of tailgaters.
“It’s a marvelous image that’s very famous,” says Gilman. “I love that it gently pokes fun at our obsession with sports but there’s nothing mean-spirited about it. It’s kind of a loving dig that you can direct at things for which you feel a great deal of affection.”
“He made me laugh out loud a lot,” says Colescott’s daughter, Lydia, his youngest child, who maintains her father’s farmhouse in Hollandale. “I really enjoyed that. He had a sharp wit.”
One of his best known works, however, may be Oski the Bear. While serving as editor and cartoonist at the Daily Cal in 1941, Colescott created the mascot for the University of California, Berkeley.
