Warrington Colescott: Wisconsin’s Master Printmaker

The more time you spend at the Milwaukee Art Museum exhibit “Warrington Colescott: Cabaret, Comedy & Satire,” the more you will appreciate it. With approximately 100 prints filling the museum’s lower-level contemporary wing, this expansive retrospective honors a Wisconsin printmaker who continues to actively and inventively pursue art at age 89. The remarkable diversity of Colescott’s work, both in technique and theme, makes the exhibit worth visiting multiple times before it closes Sept. 26.

On one level, the Colescott retrospective reads as a pure testament to the artist’s skill and legacy in printmaking. From his first prints in the 1950s, when Colescott secured a Fulbright Fellowship in London to study the intaglio process, the artist created his own inimitable style.

Colescott began incorporating scavenged letterpress plates into his prints with Triumph of St. Valentine (1963). His “Hollandale Tapes” series from the 1980s adds a spit bite aquatint, relief rolls through stencils and a marbling technique to intaglio’s basic elements. Boo Boo in Silo Sixteen (1984)layers these various techniques over his indisputable printmaking expertise.

Colescott enjoys using unusual materials to enhance his prints, including the teal glitter of An Environmental President Meets Hole in the Ozone (1992)and theprinted text and crayon featured in The Future: Recreation.His ingenuity is a study in itself.

In another context, Colescott’s retrospective can be seen as an advanced course in his chosen medium. His series of 12 master prints from the 1970s humorously relates the“History of Printmaking,”ranging from Durer at 23, In Venice, In Love, His Bags Are Stolen to homages to Ben Franklin, Lautrec, Picasso and Rauschenberg.

Colescott’s final image in this series, The Last Printmaker,portrays an artist working in the caverns below a big city after some unidentified world destruction. Colescott may not be the last printmaker, but he remains one of the most unique. How fortunate that he continues to offer delightful insights through inventive processes and images.