Auvers-sur-Oise (Crow in the Wheat Field)

Robert Colescott’s paintings transform well-known masterworks into “satirical homages,” in order to confront racial and gender stereotypes. Auvers-sur-Oise (Crow in the Wheatfield) evokes Vincent van Gogh’s famous 1890 painting, Wheatfield with Crows, apocryphally cited as the artist’s last work. Colescott reworks the familiar scene by adding a grinning van Gogh hovering above the fields, and in the foreground, a likeness of Colescott himself, with his ear wrapped in headphones rather than bandages. The figure is shown concentrating not on the wheat fields but on a pair of skeletons posing in feminine undergarments. Bold, humorous, outrageous, and unsettling, Colescott’s work courts controversy, provoking viewers to look again at the received wisdom of art and history.