Robert Colescott Sharpens His Cutting Edge : Art: His tough new work draws on frustration with the black experience--his own and what he sees around him.

Artist Robert Colescott is well known for painting broad lampoons of racial stereotypes. Always appreciated by insiders, he came to wider notice in the late ‘70s with a series of pastiche variations of historical works such as his “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware.”

He winced at its mention during a recent interview. Artists get a little prickly when they are too closely identified with a single image, and for good reason. As Southern Californians saw in Colescott’s recent show at the Linda Cathcart Gallery in Santa Monica, his current work is a departure. New Yorkers will get their first glimpse of his new look in a similar exhibition at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in the SoHo district, Jan. 12 to Feb. 13.

Richly painted and more inclined to space-bending montage, his recent Expressionistic paintings bring to mind both Max Beckmann and the late Philip Guston. The subject matter is tougher and more political.

“School Days” shows black kids dealing dope and killing each other while white students graduate with idyllic decorum. “Emergency Room” sees American society as a chaotic, badly run hospital and its prisons as zoos that turn black inmates into the baboons rednecks want them to be.

His paintings bring around $25,000 and sell briskly. Significantly, museums have recently been buying Colescotts, including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and others in Baltimore, Atlanta and Akron. He says one museum considered buying “School Days” but selected a different picture when the school board disapproved. “That’s like asking doctors to judge the artistic merit of Thomas Eakins’ ‘The Gross Clinic,’ ” Colescott complained.

One current painting, “Grandma and the Frenchman,” is a montage that revolves around a black woman torn between having her identity crisis treated by a tribal shaman or a medical doctor. Roundabout, couples of disparate races stand in amorous poses.

Colescott explains that the work is somewhat autobiographical. His own skin is light. “The mix-up came generations back when my people were still slaves in New Orleans. Back then they had something like 36 degrees of classification for how much black blood you had. There were quadroons and octoroons, but as far as they were concerned if you were a little black you were all black.” It reminds him of the Nazi attitude toward Jews.

Although his childhood environment was scruffy, racially mixed and tough, he thinks things are worse today. “We had fights but we didn’t shoot each other,” he said.

Colescott grew up in Oakland, where his father worked for the railroad as a dining-car waiter. The family’s circle of friends included at least one artist, the legendary sculptor Sargent Johnson, an important early influence. A later inspiration was Elmer Bischoff, a pioneer of Bay Area figurative art.

At 65, he’s lean and handsome with gray beard, black-rimmed glasses, Levi’s jacket, corduroy pants and cowboy boots. The boots may reflect his residence in Tucson, where he became a professor at the University of Arizona six years ago.

He’s mild-mannered for a satirist and looks 15 years younger than he is, a circumstance he ascribes to the effects of good whiskey. He’s been married four times and has five sons. He chalks up all those changes to “bad judgment.”

“In the movies you can pick a woman because she’s cute and it works. Not in the real world. Anyway I got some great kids out of it,” he said.

The young painter’s world expanded when World War II erupted. He wound up in Europe driving a jeep for an officer. He was not too pleased, but the GI Bill made it possible to study in Paris under the great Fernand Leger.

“I was painting abstractly but he rejected that,” recalled Colescott. “He was a communist and said abstraction didn’t communicate to ordinary people. He influenced me to work from the figure. He was stolid and quiet. His crits were usually limited to ‘Good’ or ‘Not good.’ He impressed me with the idea of strong drawing, simple color and monumentality.”

Returning to the United States, Colescott was impressed anew that blacks were seen only in subservient positions. Nonetheless he pressed on and got a master’s degree from UC Berkeley. With that and his Paris credentials in hand he thought he’d be a shoo-in for a university teaching job. He had to settle for a junior high school in Seattle, finally graduating to a post at Portland State University.

In 1965 he cobbled together a grant that allowed him to spend two years in Egypt. “It was an eye-opener to spend time in a nonwhite society and be part of a majority. I had 3,000 years of non-European narrative art to study. I felt my identity enhanced. Unfortunately, when the 1967 war started they threw us all out.

“I’m an observer in my work. I have no doctrine. I want to talk about the foolishness of it all. I want to encourage people to relate rather than to punish one another. I don’t even know what to be angry at. We all share a common destiny,” he said.

“Conditions are improving for black artists. It’s no miracle but we do have a foot in the door. Some of the most innovative work is being done by black and Latino artists.

“There is no coherent black style but there is a feeling. It’s like a quality of passion you can get from listening to a record and suddenly knowing those have to be black musicians.”