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A "REVIEW" by VICTOR NAVASKY Editor-in-Chief, The Nation Because he doesn't fit into any classic (or modem, for that matter) tradition, Cenedella complicates our ability to think of him as an artist. His work has been compared to that of George Grosz, under whom he studied for three years, but Cenedella's color is too gay and garish and there is a sweetness lurking in his inhuman comedies that would be unthinkable in Grosz's bitter and pessimistic portraits of moral decay in Germany in the twenties. Also, for what it's worth, Grosz fled Germany in 1932, whereas Cenedella was kicked out of New York's High School of Music and Art in the fifties for writing an article satirizing the school's atom bomb drills. His people-jams have reminded some critics of Breughel although the first time that comparison was made he was in his late teens and an old school chum working in his father's gallery told Cenedella, "Breughel is better." It doesn't help that when he isn't using his thumb to paint, he sticks it in the eye of, or thumbs his nose at the art world. Until recently, rather than exhibiting in the museums and galleries favored by his more conventional peers, he preferred places like MAD Magazine (Grosz, incidentally, was a steady contributor to simplicissimus). He once even mounted an entire show satirizing the fads and pretensions of the art world which at the time was celebrating Andy Warhol's rendering of the Campbell soup can. Calling his show Yes Art, Cenedella went the master one better and instead of offering renditions of Brillo boxes he offered the Brillo boxes themselves. "If a Yes artist folds your Brillo box it will cost $6.75," Cenedella explained. "If you fold it yourself it costs $5.75." The high point of the show was his homage to Duchamps' Mona Lisa with a moustache - Joseph Albers' "Homage to the Square" moustache. (The Yes Art show also featured a live statue named Sophia Blickman.) To further complicate his image, during much of his career, if you can call it that, he subsidized his art with a series of suspiciously successful business ventures. For example, he is responsible for the hostility dart boards of the sixties (Nasser and LBJ were his best sellers), he published hundreds of posters and he invented the "Out of Order" sticker, to be pasted on defective public telephones and other modem inconveniences. The truth, of course, is that it is a mistake to compare Cenedella to anybody, including even Reginald Marsh and Thomas Hart Benton, for whose work he seems to have an affinity. This cagey outsider is an original. He glories in oxymorons (in "Unpopular Decision" and "Westway" high color and a fiendishly comic sensibility capture the brutality of spectators at a boxing match and the degradation of city politics). He revels in puns on perspective ("Giants" features a football field with Goliath spectators cheering on pygmy-sized players). He has the gall and glee to drop in random caricatures (of Mayor Koch with his pants down) and even an occasional commercial (the name of one of his heroes or collectors on the back of a truck in his "Second Avenue"). And going to a concert with Cenedella (my favorite, "The Symphony," is available in a limited edition lithograph) is like a night at the opera with the Marx brothers, the difference being that Cenedella knows how to paint music. If he were merely a satirist with a palette it would be easy to locate Cenedella as the most recent in a long line of protest artists and simply to concede that he is giving protest art a good name. If he used his entrepreneurial gifts only to subsidize his art, we could honor him for inventing a new form of artistic subsidy call it auto patronage. But Cenedella invests his art with a sensibility which is at once alienated and entrepreneurial. It is appropriate that so many of his pictures focus on the audience, the spectators, those who can't get a seat at his "The All American Bar"; as an outsider, he must remain on the sidelines. At the same time, as an entrepreneur he has access to the society he mocks and is thus in an optimal position to know what it deems to be holy so that he may impertinently raise his pertinent questions. In this sense it might be said that Cenedella chooses to play the role of court jester, but since he does so with such astonishing color and form and since his wit is strangely passionate, he complicates not only our ability to classify his work, but to think about art itself. |
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A "REVIEW" by M. KAY FLAVELL "CENEDELLA AND THE ART OF EVERYDAY LIFE" Robert Cenedella's artistic vision draws its strength from his absorption in the density and the contradictions of everyday life. He begins by studying the surfaces of people and things and gives us a panoramic realism that highlights the individual variety of our lives. He is a brilliant social observer. But he does more than just reproduce these surfaces. By adding a surrealistic color, collapsing the usual laws of space and exaggerating facial details, he moves us beyond realism into a symbolic universe of frenzied giants and midgets, buyers and sellers, players and spectators. These are the contrasts we find in our everyday world, but there we fail to see them because they are so familiar. In Cenedella's art we are transformed back into tourists in our own town, watching our neighbor suddenly become Everyman. Cenedella, like Renaissance artists, often includes his patrons and friends in his paintings. And like Breughel in sixteenth-century Antwerp or Grosz in Berlin in the 1950s he draws his viewers sharply into the teeming life of his paintings. His is an original voice, but at the same time it reminds us of the long tradition of satirical painting that has taken contemporary manners as its target. No other artist chronicles the everyday life and the changing rituals and mythologies of sex, sport, art, politics, money-making, etc. in contemporary America with his combination of imaginative vitality, precision and humor. This art puzzles, delights and provokes us into looking with fresh eyes at ourselves and at each other. |