"Art Bastard" Paints Portrait of Robert Cenedella

You might not expect much tender concern for legitimacy in a film called Art Bastard. Its subject, artist Robert Cenedella, trumpets his rogue status with glee. But Victor Kanefsky’s empathic character study probes the soft underbelly beneath the swagger and exposes the scars of not belonging. Unless you’re a cold-blooded bastard, you’ll come away from this visceral portrait of sentiment, conscience and humor not only enthralled but ready to write your local museum.

The documentary opens with shots of New York City played over a jazzy, propulsive score. Already from the first frames you see what the artist sees: steel towers jutting in the background, a gush of humanity, chaos in motion. This is the playground that Cenedella has called home since age 12 and whose pulsing streets, raucous sporting jousts, grand concert halls and lusty barrooms have inspired his tableaux to this day.

It’s also where his signature style of agitation and charm, social realism and caricature was snubbed by the art world. In post-war America, the high priests of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Op Art made no room for his figurative and satirical compositions informed by painters from Pieter Brueghel the Elder to George Bellows.

As Cenedella says on camera, “It’s not what they show that bothers me; it’s what they don’t show. It’s a form of censorship.” Sporting a paint-flecked denim shirt and rumpled work pants, he reprised this cri de coeur when I visited him in his mid-Manhattan studio one moody afternoon in late March. The spit has not gone out of Cenedella, but at 75 he still smarts under the rejection of the cultural powers that be, even as he celebrates his five-plus decades of fierce independence. Make that six, if you count his scholastic career. A reluctant pupil but a ready troublemaker, Cenedella lampooned his high school’s bomb drills and refused to sign a loyalty oath, leading to his expulsion.

http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/1203/art_bastard_cenedella