Warrington Colescott, Your Day in Court, from the portfolio Wisconsin Graphics, 1971

Warrington Colescott

Your Day in Court, from the portfolio Wisconsin Graphics, 1971

Drypoint, etching, aquatint, woodcut, & soft-ground etching, w roulette, vibrograver, letterpress plate, & relief rolls through stencils

Hand signed, dated (lower right) and numbered (lower left) artist proof by the artist.

30 x 22 inches

"Your Day in Court" depicts an intensely crazy chaotic, colorful courtroom scene filled with eccentric characters, typical of Warrington Colescott's biting satire and social commentary, and a wonderful work for any lawyer, law firm or person who has ever been engaged in any kind of crazy litigation.

The work is a hand signed and annotated Artist's Proof. The only other example we've found of this work on the price database going 40 years was also an Artist's Proof, and there's an Artist's Proof in the permanent collection of the University of Wisconsin. We have not ever seen any examples of the "Wisconsin Portfolio" described in their collection which leads us to surmise this work was created for a portfolio that was never realized - and hence the only examples in existence are Artist's Proofs, as there appear to be none from the regular edition.

Artist Biography:
Warrington Colescott was an important figure, as teacher and artist, in the post World War II flowering of printmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was one of the innovators in advancing technique and imagery in print culture that made Madison one of this country’s creative hotspots. He taught printmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1949 to 1986; he is the Leo Steppat Chair Professor of Art Emeritus, a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy and an Academician of the National Academy of Design. His prints are held in most major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The Milwaukee Art Museum honored Colescott with a retrospective exhibition of his prints and paintings in 2005.

Colescott's mature style found fruition in his series Prime-Time Histories: Colescott's USA (1972–73) followed by The History of Printmaking (1975–78), perhaps Colescott's best-known work. In this suite of images, which includes twenty-one intaglio prints, two lithographs, and a handful of watercolors and drawings, Colescott imagines critical moments in the history of printmaking. In each print, Colescott starts with historical fact, and then adds his own interpretation, often borrowing from the featured artist's own style or themes. For instance, in one scene we witness Alois Senefelder, the inventor of lithography, receiving the secrets of this medium from devilish creatures in the Black Forest; in another plate, Colescott imagines Pablo Picasso at the zoo, admiring animals such as the minotaur that recurs in his work. For his riff on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Colescott imagines the fin-de-siècle artist (and enthusiastic chef) in his kitchen, whipping up a lunch for his friends, characters from Lautrec's oeuvre. In 1992, he returned again to an art-historical theme in My German Trip, in which Colescott imagines encounters with the great German printmakers Albrecht Dürer, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and members of the German Expressionists, with highly comic results.

More satires and fictional histories have followed. Since the 1970s, Colescott has continued to pursue social satire in his work. As art historian Richard Cox has written, Colescott casts his net wide: "Greed vanity, pride, lust, social ambition, silly fads, and fashions—[Colescott] adapted the traditional targets of artists and writers as his own. With wit and disarming humor he has drawn many entertaining and zany prints, everything from good-natured spoofs to harsh, stinging parodies. Greek gods, American presidents, newspaper tycoons, academics, gangsters, cops, cowboys and Indians, Pilgrims, accountants, scientists, generals, joggers, hunters, show girls, movie stars, the artist himself—you name it, all have been skewered by Colescott's needle."

Recurrent themes since the late 1980s show a different focus. These include burlesque, popular culture, and the afterlife (see The Last Judgement triptych, 1987–88). The artist also focuses on some of his favorite locales, such as California (his birthplace), Wisconsin (where he resides), and New Orleans, the home of his Creole ancestors, as seen in his recent series, Suite Louisiana. Colescott has turned his attention to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in prints including Imperium: Royal Lancers Attack Wog Armor—Heartland Saved (2005) and Imperium: Down in the Green Zone (2006).

The same print can be seen at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.