Robert H. Colescott, born in Oakland, California in 1925, was a painter of Afro-American life and social commentary in a semi-abstract, antic, cartoon, anecdotal style related in composition to the early Cubism of French artists Marc Chagall and Fernand Leger, with whom he studied in Paris for a year.

Of his figurative painting, it was written that his "garishly, powerful canvases lampooned racial and sexual stereotypes with rakish imagery, lurid colors, and almost tangible glee. . . .People of all colors haunt Mr. Colescott's paintings, mostly as chimerical stereotypes that exchange attributes freely. Their mottled skin tones often suggest one race seeping through another. Their tumultuous interaction evoke ...