Educational Media Reviews Online

From the credits rolling on New York City subway signs at the start of the film, to the final listing of the titles and artists referenced in the film, Art Bastard, a biographical sketch of the artist Robert Cenedella, is enlightening, exuberant, entertaining, and colorful.

Cenedella was born in 1940 in Milford, Massachusetts. He was not a great student, but he loved art and New York City, where he attended high school. He studied with and was mentored by the German expat satirical artist George Grosz at The Art Students League of New York, where Cenedella still teaches. Like Grosz’s work, Cenedella’s art is political and often satirical. Cenedella’s oil paintings, prints, and posters feature bold colors and portraits of people and city scenes. His controversial “Presence of Man” showing Santa Claus being crucified caused a stir when it was hung in the Saatchi & Saatchi building in downtown New York. Cenedella was commissioned to paint a mural for the upscale restaurant, Le Cirque. He placed the late gossip columnist Liz Smith sitting next to President Nixon, generating buzz in her column.

Cenedella narrates the story of his life and career with ebullient humor and charm. He reveals that he found out as a young boy that his biological father wasn’t his mother’s husband, Robert Cenedella, Sr., a blacklisted radio scriptwriter, and he later finds out his father is an English professor, Russell Speirs. He’s still painting—his recent portrait “Fin del Mundo” features Trump as the devil, and he’s leading a class action suit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He loves the Met but claims that his career has been hurt by being excluded from its collection. He produced an art show in 1965 called “Yes” making fun of Andy Warhol, about whom he notes, “Whereas Andy Warhol painted green stamps, I gave them out.” The question for him, he says, “isn’t what is art, but what isn’t art.” He designed and sold thousands of a button that said “I like Ludwig,” his send-up of the popular “I Like Elvis” button.

Featuring interviews with Cenedella’s wife, sister, students, friends, artists, and the Guggenheim director, Richard Armstrong, this multidimensional portrait of an artist swirls and flows with gorgeous images and irreverent wit. Cenedella likes going to bars which he sees as “little one-act plays.” We see him in the classroom instructing students to “think with your hand” and “draw what you see, not what you know.” I didn’t know much about this artist, and I was drawn by what I saw—a beautifully written, shot, directed and loving tribute to an artist whose work I hope to see one day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Awards

• Best Documentary and Best Director Documentary, Idyllwild, 2016
• Best Documentary Manchester Film Festival, 2016
• Focus on Art Award, Orlando, Florida 2015
• Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Creativity at the Utopia Film Festival, 2015