Art Bastard

There's a lot to like in this rather fascinating documentary, directed by Victor Kanefsky, on the life and work of iconoclast artist Robert Cenedella. In addition to the satirical humor throughout the movie, they'll be lots of surprises along the way.

As Cenedella tells his story, we learn his father, who was head of the Radio Writers Guild, was blacklisted in the 1950's during the Joe McCarthy era, which brought instant poverty to his family. Also, how and when Cenedella learned who his biological father really was. Another factoid was how he designed the I Love Ludwig lapel button, which became wildly popular selling thousands and financing his art school education. There's many other tidbits like this throughout the film.

All in all, Cenedella's anti-establishment and political bent plus his refusal to kowtow to trends such as pop art and abstract expressionism has caused him to be ignored by many in the mainstream art world,, but that has never stopped him from continuing on a path that he felt was true to himself and his work.

The musical score is so loud that it drowns out the speakers. Neither my wife nor I could understand what the artist was saying. Either the director wasn't paying attention or whoever was responsible for the music was completely deaf. It's a shame, because Cendella's work was interesting. We finally gave up.

When I read the New York Times review of ART BASTARD, I wondered why I'd never heard of Robert Cenedella before. The description of his artwork as "a garish New York panorama of traffic, street fights, subways and bars that explode from the canvas with a jostling, rowdy exuberance" made me want to rush to see this. The documentary shows us quite a bit of his artwork, enough to satisfy one's curiosity, but also, in my case, to make me want to see a full gallery exhibit of his work. However, the film raises more questions than it answers. I understand that the reluctance of museums and galleries to exhibit his work is probably what accounts for his relative obscurity, but the film never tells us how he's been able to survive as a painter for nearly six decades. How did he make a living? Did he ever sell a painting? Did any gallery ever take him on? He seems to possess every painting we see in the film, so he can't have sold much. We do learn that he worked briefly in advertising in the 1960s and I would love to have seen what his ad campaigns looked like. Did he succeed in this field? If not, why not? The film jumps to the next phase of his life pretty quickly after that, so we never learn. He then designs counterculture posters offering satirical political images and it's obvious that he captured the zeitgeist of the time and made a lot of money but we hardly see any of the posters and we're not told how he got into that line of work and how he was able to make a success of it. This is, for me, the second most interesting part of his story, after the paintings that made his reputation, and it's glossed over pretty quickly.

We do see shots from his "Yes Art" one-man show of 1965, which was designed as a riposte to Andy Warhol, who is seen briefly in archival interview footage. I wanted to know more about this show, which sounds like the signature achievement of Cenedella's early career and the first time he was recognized in the media, yet we hardly see any of the work that made up the show, so we only have a vague idea of what it was about. We see more about a controversy late in his career when, during his tenure as a teacher at the Art Students League, he was asked to install a "Christmas painting" in the window of the institution for all passersby on West 57th Street to see and he chose "The Presence of Man," a 1988 painting that had caused some controversy when first exhibited because it depicted Santa Claus on a crucifix. This time it caused an even greater commotion and we see some of the media coverage of it, including a call by Bill Donohue of the Catholic League to have it removed because it might offend children passing by. Even here, the film cuts away before answering the obvious question: how did the Art Students League respond to the protests? Did they remove the painting or allow it to stay up for the full month? There's a long section about a mural Cenedella painted for the restaurant, Le Cirque. It's certainly interesting, but it gets way more time than whole phases of his earlier career.

The timeline throughout is blurry and we don't always know what decade we're in. The story jumps back and forth in time. We see footage of Cenedella from earlier productions, but these are never identified and we don't know when they were shot, although one is obviously a documentary about Cenedella's mentor, German caricaturist George Grosz, who had taken the teenage Cenedella under his wing at the Art Students League back in the late 1950s. (The parts about Grosz are quite good.)

IMDb doesn't list the other interview subjects, who include Cenedella's wife, Liz; his sister Joan; TV critic Marvin Kitman, evidently a friend of his; Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim Museum; art appraiser Paul Zirler; and Ed McCormack, managing editor of Gallery & Studio Magazine. The end credits include a slide show of every painting by another artist that was used in the film, complete with a full shot of each painting and full identifications. I don't believe I've seen anything like it in any other art documentary and I found it very helpful.

I knew nothing about Cenedella before seeing this film so I certainly came away knowing more, but at 82 minutes, the film is short enough to have allowed for the inclusion of more details and greater context. Still, despite its omissions, if you're a fan of art documentaries, you should find this worth a look.

Greetings again from the darkness. Writer/director Victor Kanefsky sets out to show that both definitions of the titular "B" word are fitting descriptions of the unfairly obscure NYC artist Robert Cenedella. The artist learned at age six that the man he called Daddy was not his biological father, and then later his decades-long battle against the cliquish art world establishment relegated him to a career that was stifled at most every turn. In an interesting twist, Mr. Cenedella (now age 76) has embraced his life as an outsider, and used it as inspiration for his incredible paintings and drawings.

Much of the film comes directly from interviews with the engaging, opinionated and often quite funny Mr. Cenedella. One of his best and most insightful (to his persona) quotes is: "It's not what they show that bothers me. It's what they don't show." He is of course discussing museums and art galleries, and how the recurring theme of "legitimacy" is decided by a relative few, thereby determining what the public is allowed to see … which in turn impacts what pieces are bought and sold.

Due to his relative obscurity (I knew nothing of the artist prior this doc), Kanefsky includes a biographical structure that begins with an unstable childhood and continues with his tutelage under German artist George Grosz … Cenedella's mentor for art and life. With direction such as "think with your hand", Grosz inspired the young artist to transfer his observant eye to the canvas and paper.

Unfortunately for Cenedella, his development as an artist paralleled the boom of modern abstract art … something that didn't play well for the man who captured the energy and people of NYC on the page through satirical group caricatures. He was termed the anti-Warhol, and the film presents the 1965 "Yes Art" showcase as the biggest achievement of Cenedella's career. And this exposes the only real weakness with the film – we never really understand the economics of Cenedella's art. Did he sell paintings? How did he earn a living? We know he sold a lot of "I Like Ludwig" buttons, and we know he later painted a wall mural at Le Cirque restaurant, but the movie would have us believe Cenedella was an immensely talented painter who should be living in poverty based on his inability to get accepted by the art world.

This muddled point is key because so much of the film is dedicated to Cenedella's disgust with the commercial side of the industry, and how critics and the power brokers have turned the art world into a haven of collectors who buy and sell for profit, rather than enjoyment. What determines the value of art? It's a question as old as the cave drawings. Is the value in the aesthetics, the emotion or the monetary return? Cenedella believes the public should be allowed to decide for themselves, rather than being spoon fed only what the elite determine "good enough".

Robert Cenedella proves to be a fascinating subject for a film, and it's a reminder that some of the best documentaries introduce us to interesting people to whom we might ordinarily not be exposed. When Cenedella asks "If you compromise with art, why be an artist?" he is really telling us to be true to ourselves. It's a message we should take to heart … he certainly has.