Robert Cenedella


Robert Cenedella Jr. is an American artist. He became well known for several of his paintings, including commissions by Bacardi, Heinz, Absolut Vodka and Le Cirque.

Early life

Robert Cenedella was born in Milford, Massachusetts in 1940. He was the youngest of his 2 sisters. At the age of 4, Cenedella looked at Moby Dick, illustrated by Rockwell Kent, which inspired him to pursue art. He recalls "I look at mother. When she was drunk, she was the worst, and when she was not drunk, she was the best". Robert started painting at the age of 6. His mother forced him to switch from his left hand, to his right hand since she felt is was criminal to paint with his left hand. At the age of 6 1/2, he learned that Robert Cenedella Sr., the blacklisted head of the Radio Writers Guild, was not his biological father, through an conversation that he overheard when his mother said "You can't take Robby, because hes not even yours". It wasn't until when he was a young adult that he figured out that long time family friend and Colgate University English professor Russell Speirs is his father. His mother was drunk, and at the age of 21, his mom told him "Daddy, is not your father". Robert responded with, "Oh, is it Russ?". He wrote to Russell in the 1950s all the way to the late 1960s in which Russell sent him letters with "funny cartoons" in them until he eventually stopped. He stayed in Connecticut with his mother until he was 12, and Robert moved in with his father in New York because he wanted to learn how to read since he had severe dyslexia. By the time he was 13, he was reading Dick and Jane. He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York, but was expelled for writing a satirical letter about the atom bomb drill to the school's principal. In 1957, in response to the "I Like Elvis" button craze, Cenedella and Edmund Leites made the "I Like Ludwig" button, since he listened to Beethoven a lot. The button became a national seller, making it in an article of Observation Post and a comic of Peanuts where Charlie Brown sees Schroeder wearing the button. He sold thousands of buttons which with the money he made got him in the Art Students League. Cenedella continued to receive his formal education at The Art Students League of New York, where he studied under the late German satirical painter George Grosz. In 1988, he took over the George Grosz Chair at The Art Students League and taught three courses from 1988 to 2016. He was replaced with Gregg Kreutz and Kreutz still teaches there to this day.

Career

1950s-1960s Satirical paintings of pop art, experiencing the death of George Grosz

In the 1950s, Cenedella began to paint, the same time when there was a boom in abstract expressionism. His main inspirations were Virgil Marsh, Ben Shahn, and George Bellows. Due to the themes of "lynching in the south" and The Great Depression, so he followed the tradition. He had George Grosz from '57 to '59. In '59, Grosz wanted to go back to Berlin because his wife was sick and he wanted him back and he didn't want to go back. In the fall of '59 Robert was supposed to study with George privately. In the summer of '59 on the last day of him teaching art school, he says goodbye to all the students and he invited Robert to go to a party on a ship. They were serving champagne on the ship and they had 20 wine glasses, and George was drunk enough to let him sail with him to Berlin. The ship employees discovered Robert in the closet in his room and they got him back to shore. That was the last time Robert saw George. At the end of summer of '59, he got a letter from his wife and she got the address wrong, so Rob got the card almost a month after she wrote it. The letter read this:
GEORGE GROSZ
26 JULI 1893- 6 JULI 1959
FUR DIE BEWISE HERZILCHER ANTERILNAHME
DEN BESTEN DANK
EVA GROSZ

Robert was devastated when he heard the news because George just got back from Berlin and even felt worse when he founded out his body was founded at the bottom of the stairs. As a response, he painted a painting in '62 called The Death of George Grosz with Grosz' paintings along with the image of him falling down the stairs, making it sort of a dedication piece.
Inspired by James Hardie and Andy Warhol for their Brillo soap-pads pop art, he did an art show called Yes Art from October 19- November 6 of '65, giving out green stamps and TV's, satirizing pop art to the point of absurdity. He did it as a farewell to art'' and didn't paint for the next ten years.

1960's- Poster agency and ink drawings, Hostility dart boards, and The Communist Manifesto

He got a job at an agency somewhere in the 1960s, and he didn't have any experience. He called his father that he got hired for the job and his dad said "What? You have a job? Like nine to five? Are you kidding?" Robert summarizes how he worked there "I thought that you know, came up with the concept, you would write it, that you came up with the visuals, and you put the whole thing together which I did." While working his 9 to 5 job, he did ink drawings in his spare times and he used some of the lines techniques of Grosz. Of course, he did some satirical and political work on the posters. One of the most controversial works he did was the Hostility Dart Board which had the faces of Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon, The Lady Bird, Bobby Kennedy, and Neil Reagan. It was originally released in 1967. One time he was interrogated by the CIA because it was a "violent thing". Cenedella defended himself by saying he was on the side of slowing down the violent nature. By the time the interrogation was over, they asked Cenedella if they can have a Johnson dartboard, which he handed to them. The boards were later discontinued in June 12, 1968 by Robert himself, since it wasn't slowing down the violent nature. In 1968, he made illustrations for the Karl Marx book The Communist Manifesto which has his signature satirical style. WBAI sold Cenedella's 1968 version of the book after his recognition from the 2015 documentary Art Bastard.

1970s-present

He continued to paint in the '70s, mostly painting political commentaries or New York landscapes.
Following a tradition in art established by the likes of Pieter Brueghel, George Bellows, Marcel Duchamp, Honore Daumier, William Hogarth and George Grosz before him, Robert Cenedella's works are known for their pictorial satire, humor and fantasy. His art chronicles the changing rituals and myths of society in contemporary America.
In the last 20 years, Cenedella has amassed considerable international praise as well as inclusion in numerous public and private collections. His commissions include works for the Bacardi Int’l,Absolut Vodka, a theater piece for Tony Randall, and two paintings for the Le Cirque 2000 Restaurant in New York and Mexico City. Cenedella's “Le Cirque — The First
Generation” still hangs at the restaurant's entryway and is featured in the book “A Table at Le Cirque”.
In September 1985, Cenedella exhibited at the Château de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, a show sponsored by then-mayor Jacques Chirac. In 1988, he painted “Santa Claus” for a one-man show at Saatchi & Saatchi ad agency's headquarters in New York. The painting garnered controversy even before the show opened and was taken down by the agency. In December 1997, “Santa Claus” was displayed for the second time in public in a front window of The Art Students League of New York. Despite the complaints from New York's Catholic League, the school refused to take down the painting and kept it on display for the holiday season.
In 1990, Cenedella was included in the Amnesty International Exhibition in Soho, New York. In December 1994, he had a retrospective exhibit at the Galerie Am Scheunenviertel in Berlin, Germany, which was a tribute to his former mentor and ran concurrently with the George Grosz Centennial Exhibition at the Berlin National Gallery. That same year, Cenedella's concept of selling shares of stock of his painting "2001 — A Stock Odyssey" was disclosed in a New York Times feature article.
From 1995 to 2000, Cenedella exhibited and lectured around the United States. From March to May 2003, a retrospective of the artist's political works was sponsored by The Nation Institute and held at the New York executive offices of The Nation magazine. This covered subjects ranging from the Selma riots to the preemptive war on Iraq, and was the first exhibition given to an American artist by The Nation. On March 11, 2004, Cenedella unveiled “The Easel Painting Revival” at Le Cirque 2000. In the spring of 2005, Robert Cenedella held a solo exhibition at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and conducted a lecture entitled: “WHAT isn’t ART.”
Cenedella's life and works are the subject of the 2015 documentary film Art Bastard. The film was submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the 2016 Oscar race and was in consideration for the Documentary Feature category for the 89th Academy Awards. It has garnered multiple awards in the festival circuit, such as Winner of Best Documentary at the Manchester Film Festival and Winner of Best Documentary and Best Director — Documentary at the Idllywild International Festival of Cinema. The film showcases "the mischievous tale of a rebel who never fit into today's art world, yet has become one of its most provocative, rabble-rousing characters nevertheless... as energetic, humorous and unapologetically honest as the uncompromising man at its center: Robert Cenedella." To quote Cenedella, "You can bastardize everything else in your life, but if you compromise with your art, why be an artist?"
In 2015, Cenedella was commissioned to create a painting titled Fín del Mundo, a tryptich which "captures the chaos surrounding Donald Trump's march to the White House." It was displayed in time for the United States presidential election on November 2, 2016 at Central Park Fine Arts. In 2017, Fín del Mundo along with Cenedella's newest work, Pence on Earth, "which depicts Mike Pence dressed as the Pope, with a giant Trump standing over him in a uniform," were featured in Huffington Post.

Controversy

In 2017, he got controversy for displaying his 20 year old painting again, The Presence of Man, previously named just Santa Claus, which depicts a crucified Santa Claus with presents and reefs in front of him. Cenenella wrote a response, "I didn't replace Christ with Santa Claus: Commercialism and Capitalism did." The painting has gotten controversy in 1997 when it debuted. In 2018, he filed 2 complaints for The Metropolitan Museum of Art for not showing his art work and he tried to sue them for $100 million for starting an unlawful conspiracy, but Judge John Koeltl and the museums own lawyer William Cavanaugh, wouldn't budge, citing the claims as "implausible" and "completely baseless". They dismissed the case.

Selected list of works