Art Bastard

Art Bastard

To Robert Cenedella, his illegitimacy was the most important moment of his life. Seeing himself as different from the rest of his family ever since then, he also sees himself as different from the mainstream “art world,” which largely ignores him. This suits Cenedella just fine; in that part of the art world, a painting’s artistic value is determined by how much it’s worth financially.

“There is no word to describe my feeling for the art world,” says Cenedella. “I despise it.” Victor Kanefsky has made a beautiful profile of a man still going strong at 76 with “Art Bastard,” his engaging documentary about Cenedella, and a critique of an art world that doesn’t recognize (or know what to do with) people who don’t “fit.”

Cenedella’s people are all over his large paintings. His enormous works crowd them in elbow to elbow. They fill every inch, corner to corner. They’re talking to each other, jumping out windows; they’re dressed up like clowns or looking down their shirts while smoking cigarettes on street corners; they’re wearing top hats and carrying canes and urinating on fire hydrants rendered in drips of white paint. These paintings are funny very funny: gigantic belly laughs in a gallery size hallway funny. You need space around you when you look at them because you’ll be laughing so hard your knees will buckle.

His people move through New York City like smoke rings through foghorns through skyscrapers: loud, proud and completely unnoticed by anyone except themselves (and us). You know these people they’re us! In all our cacophony and chaos we’ve become invisible even to ourselves.

You can hear Cenedella’s paintings: People are screaming in them somewhere; cars are honking; subway trains are roaring by underground beneath the sidewalk where a flasher in a trench coat with a bandaged head is looking the other way while another guy is offering hot watches at a discount out of a suitcase. “2nd Avenue” has all this and more; so does “Red Light” and “42nd Street,” where Times Square seems to have collided with Union Square, and both are the better for it.

They’re not just funny, though. In fact, what’s really amazing about them is that they’re not just funny. Cenedella’s paintings take everything strange you’ve ever seen or heard happen on a New York street corner any New York street corner, anywhere in the five boroughs (or even upstate) and turn it into satire, irony and beauty. And they do it without making fun of anyone. Somehow he takes all these ridiculous things people do, some of which are sad (and some are just plan weird), looks at them right straight-on with his big blue eyes wide open, makes them into art that makes us laugh like crazy but also weep at ourselves.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view), Cenedella began painting around the same time as abstract expressionism was taking off; artists like Jackson Pollock were becoming stars; suddenly there was no place for representation in painting anymore people vanished from canvases there was only paint itself: flatness, color fields unbroken by lines representing anything other than themselves (whatever those colors might be trying to say). Abstract expressionism negated anyone who had a point of view.

Which means we need to ask some deeper questions: Who says what qualifies as art? Who says that this is “in” now and that is “out”? And how dare they? As Cenedella himself points out in Kanefsky’s film: It is mediocrity deciding over genius.(And isn’t that always the way?)

At one point he says it’s “mediocrity” (the gallery owners) deciding the fate of “geniuses.” They’re not geniuses, he says, because they make “good art”; they’re geniuses because their art is worth a lot of money. But isn’t that always what happens? The best soccer players aren’t geniuses at soccer; the ones who get paid millions are. Or put another way: Why doesn’t anyone ever ask an artist why their work isn’t worth more?

One of Cenedella’s greatest accidents in life was when he was a teenager and signed up for a painting class in the Art Students League in New York, taught by George Grosz, the German artist and caricaturist who worked during the Weimar Republic. Grosz was a politically conscious artist, a vicious satirist, making fun of fat cats, the rich, the powerful. He watched Nazism rise and knew what that warning bell meant.

His amazing work has also suffered from extreme official neglect. A troubled man himself, Grosz was perfect for a rebel student like Cenedella, who had been expelled from high school for refusing to sign a Loyalty Oath, whose father had been targeted by HUAC and who refused to answer any questions. “[Grosz] taught me how to draw,” Cenedella says. “And he taught me how to drink.”

Cenedella’s work is often inspired by people like Grosz, Grant Wood, George Bellows or Rockwell Kent’s illustrations for Melville’s Moby-Dick. He would go to the Met and stand in front of Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters saying, “I could never see enough of it.” (A very useful choice made by Kanefsky is ending the film with a credit-roll of all the paintings named throughout.)

The social and political protest art of the 1930s were inspirations to Cenedella art that depicted bread lines, racial tension, poverty and unrest so his work always got seen as funny and engaging but old-fashioned; not as “now” as Jackson Pollock might be considered. But Cenedella jokes: “I consider myself a contemporary painter because I am painting today.”

One great thing about Kanefsky’s approach here is how he lets the camera wander through Cenedella’s canvases: face after face after face flips past. The works are so large, so packed with information that they’re very hard (impossible, really) to take in all at once. The magnifying-glass approach helps illuminate the sheer amount of stuff going on in any given painting. Cenedella’s paintings are funny.

They’re funny when you look at them from a distance; but they’re even funnier when you get up close. They are personal, political, social. He’s a critic but he’s not humorless about it. He is part of a long tradition of social satirists, caricaturists, absurdists and cartoonists. One of Art Bastard’s great accomplishments is contextualizing Robert Cenedella’s work; putting him into the proper framework to understand his importance. Another is Cenedella himself a delightful interview subject, an insightful and amusing narrator of his own life.

The conservative art world makes decisions on what to show and who to celebrate; it’s the most rigid high school clique on the planet. “It’s not what they show that bothers me,” Cenedella clarifies, “it’s what they don’t show.” He tears up when he talks about the death of his mentor George Grosz and the fact that Grosz died thinking of himself as a failure because he was one. Grosz painted what he saw in his world; and what he saw was disturbing and dismaying: A 1920 piece called Republican Automatons cracks open a political system with brutal efficiency.

Toiling in such a way does not please or flatter; it tells the truth under the truth. Cenedella has also attempted to tell the truth beneath the truth in his work, and “Art Bastard” is an appropriate homage to him. As Grosz once said, “Great art must be understandable by all.”

Watch Art Bastard For Free On Gomovies.