The Prints of Warrington Colescott

Since the 1940s, printmaker Warrington Colescott has trained his brilliant artistic eye on the fashions and foibles of human behavior. A satirist in the tradition of William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, and George Grosz, Colescott utilizes his sharp wit and vivid imagination to interpret contemporary and historical events, from the personal to the public, the local to the international. He is especially noted for his exceptional command of complex printmaking techniques and for his innovative approach to intaglio printing.

The Prints of Warrington Colescott: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1948-2008 is the first fully illustrated catalogue to document Colescott's extensive and varied graphic career. Author and curator Mary Weaver Chapin has worked closely with Colescott, interviewed him at length, and had unique access to his private papers and archives. She documents his personal and artistic life in a detailed biographic sketch, and her extensive essay "Research Printmaker and Mad-Dog Attack Artist" examines the evolution of his printmaking career, focusing on his technique, iconography, and his place in American printmaking. The catalogue documents and depicts all 359 of Colescott's editioned prints, providing title, date, media, dimensions, and selected exhibition history and collections for each print, along with comments and anecdotes by Chapin and Colescott.

Published in collaboration with the Milwaukee Art Museum

- The exhibition "Warrington Colescott: Cabaret, Comedy & Satire" will open at the Milwaukee Art Museum in June 2010. Visit www.mam.org Finalist, Arts Book, Midwest Book Awards
About the Author: Warrington Colescott (b. 1921) was born and educated in California. He served in the anti-aircraft artillery and the infantry in World War II and was professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1949 to 1986. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and many other museums. Colescott is still actively making art in his home studio in Hollandale, Wisconsin. He is co-author, with Art Hove, of the book Progressive Printmakers: Wisconsin Artists and the Print Renaissance, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Mary Weaver Chapin is associate curator of prints and drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum. She earned her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and trained in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she coauthored the exhibition catalogue Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre.