Original subtitles

Woman on PA: Ladies and gentlemen,

there is a Brooklyn-bound focal' train one station away.

I moved from New York when I was about 12.

But the city really has been the, um,

I guess, the early inspiration for a lot of my art.

And the first thing, of course, in the city

was that, of course, everything was tall, everything...

So my... My first impulse was

to get on top of a building,

you know, to... Oh, can I get to the roof?

It was just a constant wonderland.

Well, obviously that's what... I paint what is around me.

Yeah, well, I did...

Joan Cenedella: I think I was

very worried about your schooling.

I mean, I think I really cared about that.

I also think that I felt competitive with you.

I... you know, I felt that

mother liked you better than she liked me.

All of that stuff.

Well, I just think during your whole childhood,

I was very admiring of you as an artist.

I mean, I understood something about...

Even... even I worried about how you were gonna

get through with things or read books or...

Bob: There was no time

that I remember not wanting to be an artist.

As far back as four or five years old,

I remember looking at "Moby dick,"

illustrated by Rockwell Kent.

And I could look at those pictures and thinking,

gee, I want to be able to do something like that.

Jess Korman: I have a wonderful little

etching of Bob's of two people,

obviously a married couple

sitting across a table from each other

and just staring daggers.

I mean, they're probably screaming at each other.

And the name of it is "flowers."

It's funny, it's funny, and it's real, and it's...

I was sitting at the top of the stairs

in a house in Wilton, Connecticut,

and my mother and father were having an argument,

which was nothing unusual.

And, he wanted...

To take my sisters and me to New York.

My mother said to him,

"well, you're not gonna take Bobby.

He isn't eve yours."

So, I find this out at six, and at six, you're not...

You... you know, you block it.

But I had this recurring dream, you know, for years,

and it would come back to me.

So, as you grow up, you're like... you say,

"wow, I'd better watch out in this family."

It's like, "I'm not really one of them."

I thought, growing up, that my deficiency as

a student came from being switched

from being left-handed to right-hand.

Then I couldn't read, and then I had dyslexia.

It was... it was a nightmare for me,

all the way through school, absolute nightmare.

Art, from Clay one for me,

was the special part of life,

the... the part of life that was above the gutter.

Everything about New York fascinated me.

Every Clay was a experience that you would enjoy.

And, you... It was a learning.

I mean, you could learn so much just by, um,

walking around the city, by going, you know, not...

You didn't have... You had...

Neighborhoods had different kinds of food.

You go down to 42nd street, which was so fantastic.

It had the penny arcades.

In the old clays, had a peep show...

Who might be some hookers.

Stephen Geller: Bob is a denizen of New York.

He revels in, uh, in the New York scene,

and the different ethnic diversity.

A New York sense of humor...

The culture of New York.

And, I think it's had

a tremendous influence on his art.

Bob: I think that my art

has a lot to do with, uh, the energy of the city.

And, so, the city was reality.

Man: Are you a member

of the communist party,

or have you ever been a member of the communist party?

Bob: I grew up in a household

fairly well-off until 1950,

uh, I don't know, 1953, or...

Somewhere around there.

My father was the head of the radio writers guild

and Helen Hayes would only use his scripts.

So, we were doing pretty well.

Senator: I have offered to go before

any committee, do anything you ask,

if I can just get you to come down here and take the oath

so we can get the answers to some questions.

Now, you're not... you're not fooling anyone at all.

- Man: Senator... - Senator: I'm sure of that.

Bob: He was asked, "are you now,

or have you ever been a member of the communist party?"

And he basically said,

"that's none of your goddamn business.

I'm an American. I don't have to tell you this."

My father was blacklisted.

He never was a communist, but that's not the issue.

And because of that,

we went into poverty, almost immediately.

So, I grew up in a house where...

The... the strong... The issue was principle.

It was about...

You talk about justice, human rights,

about community, all of that,

and I think that was very, very strong in our family.

The other thing is... I always felt very secure

about the fact, hey, that he would never be

on the wrong side of a... Right.

Of an issue, and... From my point of view.

And. Uh... But, he..

And, also, I felt that he was not, um...

Devious, or... He was very...

He was who he was.

As a father, he was like growing up

with Hamlet or something, you know,

indecisive, couldn't handle money.

Even when he had money, we were always having to...

Shell in to keep things going.

His mother, my grandmother,

sent me, over the years, $2 bills.

I had a collection of them, on my wall.

I was very proud of these things.

I mean, when I say a collection,

I mean I had like maybe $500 worth of $2 bills.

There's a story of, he was away at camp,

Bob was away at camp. And he came home,

and his collection of $2 bills

that he had saved assiduously for a long time,

that he had tacked up on the wall, had been taken.

And I'm looking at my... Through, into my room,

and there were no $2 bills.

He went in, and he took all the $2 bills off the wall.

He took Bob's money and never paid it back.

It's devastating if you're, like, 14 years old

and you've now amassed this whole thing.

But, then again, I suppose somewhere in my head,

I said, "oh, yeah, but that came from his mother."

Bob's concern about injustice, here and there...

Comes out in his work.

There's a painting he did called "give to Cenedella,"

which is his father collecting money

in a street fair in his undershorts.

Bob: The first "saleable" item

I created was called the "I like Ludwig" button,

and it was in competition with the "I love Elvis."

I never responded to Elvis Presley.

It just didn't ring with me.

Beethoven, you know, that's what I listened to.

And I had a perfect audience.

The button became a national seller.

They wrote about it first in the "new yorker,"

and then in places around the country and so on.

I sold thousands of these buttons.

So, I... I put myself through the art students league

with the money I made from the Ludwig buttons.

I really didn't know what the league was about

other than it was an art school,

and that they didn't require me

to have a high school diploma.

I walk into the room, and I see all these

other students with pads.

I had a little pad,

and I had a pencil.

I was probably the youngest one. I was 17.

And they were 50-year-old, or 60-year-old.

And all of a sudden, this man walks in

with a gray suit, vest,

white shirt, black, polished shoes.

He went around the room.

I remember, he came to me.

He said I need a bigger pad, I need charcoal, not a pencil.

And he told me just to make as big a drawing

as I could on this pad, which I did.

And then, when he took off his jacket,

and rolled up his sleeves, ready to work.

But that was very serious.

I had no idea.

Certainly didn't know who George Grosz was.

I felt an authority was there.

I felt the presence of someone who was confident.

When I left, I thought,

Hey, I think maybe I had a great Clay.

Maybe... I'll be back tomorrow."

This painting is called "the fight."

I've always like the way the painting was planned out,

with a circle around the fighters, and, uh...

This was outside, when I lived on west 86th street.

It... it had a very New York moment.

It has an emotional quality, and yet,

I'm not sure how much is just

the kind of a humorous aspect of New York.

Here was a street in New York,

and it had obviously been set up

with police barricades.

And there was policemen in the crowd,

holding people back.

Here's the paramedics standing by, and...

She's got the bag flowing in the air.

She's punching him out.

And the crowd is cheering,

and people are holding babies, and...

It had this great energy.

You look at this, and you say,

"something was going on in New York."

When I did the drawing for the painting,

I guess I saw my parents in this.

It's in keeping that my mother would be winning the battle,

if that's my father.

That's probably me. I never even thought of that,

but that's probably me with my artist's smock.

Jess: I think Cenedella was aware

that the world was become a kind of a media circus.

Cenedella just doesn't do realism,

but he does a realism that is... Is always journalistic.

It's people's art.

It's people's art in the same way that...

That it was people's art in Germany,

in George Grosz's time.

George Grosz was a painter in the post-world war I period

in Germany, and his use of satirical elements

in his work to ridicule the powers that be

really anticipated the rise of Hitler.

Bob: I had a political bent

from early on.

In high school, I wrote this article

on the atom bomb drills.

Narrator: That signal' means to stop

whatever you are doing,

and get to the nearest safe place, fast.

First, you duck,

and then, you cover.

They had you scared. The government had you scared.

Hey, you know, you got the atom bomb, and this...

You gotta watch out for the communists, and the...

You know, and...

I felt a need to write this thing

because the atom bomb drills were so stupid.

I had an A.B. Dick mimeograph machine,

and I printed 2,000 of these articles,

and I handed them out to everyone in the school.

And then they had this special assembly

and one of the heads of the school said,

"all you students read it, and you thought it was funny."

He said, "this is not humor."

He said, "this is propaganda!"

We were supposed to sign loyalty oaths in those clays,

which I also didn't do.

My father was trying to get me to sign it because

he wanted me to graduate high school.

On the one hand, he stood by me for,

you know, writing this article, but then he wanted me

to sign a loyalty oath which he wouldn't sign himself.

And, you know, it, uh... Well, I...

I couldn't, I just couldn't do it.

And then I was expelled.

The thing that I would want most was to have

a painting at the metropolitan museum.

The metropolitan, to me,

that was more special than a church.

Right after school, I went three, four times a week.

In those clays, there was no fee.

You just walked in. You had a lot of guards,

and a few people.

And I loved it. I thought it was...

What a great thing. And I would go in.

It was never crowded.

I'd go look at Vermeer.

I'd look at Raphael.

My favorite artists, Grant wood,

George bellows, and they've had legitimacy.

Their art was in books,

in places of respect.

If there's one painting that I was drawn to,

it was Pieter Bruegel's, "the harvesters."

Everything about it... The detail of the wheat,

figures, the way the figures were done.

I could never see enough of it.

Richard Armstrong: A museum's role,

and what's historically valid,

it's really a decision among curators.

And to me, it always looks like

a real exercise in animal behavior,

what's better, and what's less good, and why.

It's almost inexplicable,

and the conspiracy, I think, is genetic, not social.

Bob: The league, you know,

it has a great reputation.

It has history to it, it has that,

but also, they had nude models.

Aside from knowing that now I had a place to learn,

but I also knew that I was gonna walk into a room, and I was...

There was gonna be a,

um, you know, a nude woman.

So, I walk in, and then I see this...

I do see this nude woman.

Now, here she is, 400 pounds, and...

But, fantastic in the sense that,

the perfect model to draw, really.

One of the first things that Grosz said

that I found startling,

"there's no such thing as a line, in nature.

It's all in our head."

He used a phrase that I have always remembered.

He says, "you want to learn to think with your hand."

How... how wonderful that is.

"Think with your hand."

Talking to Grosz, it was never small talk.

You always felt you were talking about something important.

The way we thought was like a total connection.

He always would say that age has nothing to do

with how you relate.

You know, I always tell people, he taught me how to draw,

but he also taught me how to drink, you know?

I had my first beer with Grosz.

I told people he was the first adult I ever respected.

Now, I'm sure my parents were not too happy with that.

We had very intellectual... Parents.

We had very intellectual... Parents.

Right? I mean... I mean they... Well, we had a very?

Intellectual father. I mean-yeah.

I wouldn't say mother was intellectual.

You think so? Um, yeah.

I think she was intellectual in a very...

More human way. I mean, when I say "human,"

I mean more, um, gutsy.

You know, a mother, a... you know, someone who's...

I-I saw two different...

I don't know if you perceived it that way.

- No, actually, I didn't. - No.

I look at mother.

When she was drunk, she was the worst.

And when she was not drunk, she was the best.

I mean, that's how I... Mm-hmm.

That's how I see her.

When I was 21, my mother said

I had something to tell you.

She was drunk.

She says, "daddy is not your father."

And I remember very clearly, I said, "oh. Is it Russ?"

Jess: His true father, whom I met

a couple of times, uh, very, very different.

He was a gentleman, an English professor, uh...

Intelligent, soft-spoken way about him

that I... I liked very much.

My relationship with Speirs

was letters, mostly, over the years.

He also did doodles and little cartoons that

he would send me.

I then got a letter from Russ,

and basically what it said, he said,

"it must have been quite a revelation to you."

To find out... But...

and, you know,

and that was the end of it.

And it's bizarre.

To have a relationship with someone

who is your father but you never called him your father...

We never even talked about it.

It just gets outrageous,

and it was forcing me... To be a liar.

So, for him, it was okay to be a liar.

And I think it...

I think it affected my painting tremendously.

Boxing, in a way, is kind of crazy,

when you think about it. Two guys getting in a ring

and just trying to beat the crap out of each other.

Then, if you put two older guys,

then it really becomes absurd.

Liz: Bob puts a lot of his anger

at his family secret in his work, of course.

And then, of course, I heard all the stories about

his family and everything,

which was, you know, pretty amazing.

I started the painting like all of my paintings.

I make a charcoal drawing.

As I was doing the drawing, it was quite clear to me

that I had drawn one of my fathers... Cenedella,

the father that brought me up.

And then, I decided why don't I put my other father,

my real father, Speirs, on the other side.

I'm drawing this...

As a satirical piece on...

You know, on boxing.

So now, they're punching each other,

and I was the one getting hurt.

This was definitely a painting where

I was doing therapy on the canvas.

As I did that painting,

I ended up... You know, I was alone.

I started to... To cry, you know?

So...

So, what... you know, what else are you gonna call it?

Yeah. "father's day."

Marvin Kitman: Bob is ahead of his times

by five minutes.

They would never show Bob's stuff.

There's just too much material in it

and too many thoughtful things going on.

And we live in a...

In a society that doesn't like to think.

You know, I think we were a dysfunctional family.

Do you?

Yeah. how about it?

I started off painting exactly when

abstract expressionism came on the scene.

Abstract art is half of art.

It's all technique.

It's like only part of what a painting is.

That's the way I see it.

You cannot paint a face.

You have a technique, which limits you

in so many ways that certain subjects

simply cannot be portrayed.

In... in the way that, um... um...

Pollack painted,

which I think is brilliant,

because the way he painted,

you can do no wrong, basically, in my opinion.

See, in other words, there's a perfection.

People today WILL say, well, hey, there's a bad hopper,

or there's a bad El Greco, or this is a bad that.

But I've never seen anyone say,

"oh, this is a bad pollack."

Either they're all bad, or they're all good.

That's the beginning of the marketplace

dictating to artists.

Before, the artist was reflecting

on what was around him.

And now, the commercial side,

the galleries and so...

Are telling the artists what's happening.

Richard: Collections can't be sacrosanct,

and yet, they have to be treated very gingerly.

The museum collection should always be seen as dynamic,

meaning that it calls for adjustments,

changing, trading, selling, adding, subtracting.

In the '50s, right after the war,

when all of a sudden abstract expressionism

came on the scene, you had a form of art

that was like a perfect thing to completely ignore

what this country had been going through.

Now, you had an art form

which negated anyone who had a point of view.

My heroes were guys from the '20s and '30s,

people like Ben Shahn, people like,

uh, bellows, Virgil marsh.

You know, they... They'd paint bread lines,

lynchings in the south, the depression.

That's what interested me in art.

So, I follow in that tradition,

and they recorded history.

I don't just talk about politics and...

You know, it's part of what I paint,

'cause I think it's... I think it's...

Part of... of the world that I live in.

The art world doesn't look

to see why that painting is effective.

It's effective the way I painted it.

"Southern dogs"... It was reversing

the head of the policemen

with the dog and so on.

I mean, that made it more than just a copy of a...

Um, of a... incident.

When you see that policeman with a dog's head,

and then the dog with a policeman's head,

and his genitals hanging off the back,

and another policeman looking up the dog's rear end,

you know, that... that hurts a little bit, you know?

I'd been told by galleries that,

Bob, you've missed the boat.

This kind of art is over with.

No one does this anymore.

Again, I'm not... I'm not legitimate.

Richard: It's a very gossamer veil

that separates the inside from the outside.

And it's permeable.

So, you can move from being not known,

or not valued, to the other side.

But I'd say it's a little bit...

About chance, and a great deal about geography.

I studied with Grosz, basically, for two years.

And in '59, he was gonna go back to Berlin

because his wife was sick,

and she... She wanted to go back.

And, he never wanted to go back.

In the fall of '59, I was gonna go and, um,

study with him privately.

The last Clay of school, and he makes sure.

That he comes to class to say good-bye to the students.

And then he invites me to go to this party on the ship.

You know, one thing led to another.

They were serving champagne,

and I-l think... I don't know when I lost count...

But we had had over 20 glasses apiece.

So, we were drunk enough that he decided

that I should come to Berlin on the boat.

So, I got into this closet and, you know...

The boat takes... takes off, and I'm in this closet, and...

In his little room.

And then... And they discover me.

So, I'm dropped over the side of the boat,

and taken to shore.

That was the last time I saw him.

Towards the end of the...

The summer, I got this letter from his wife.

It was basically a card.

She had got my address wrong, so I found out

almost a month after it had happened.

That he died...

Literally a week after he got back to Berlin.

In the write-up, there was nothing that said

how he died, so then there was just speculation

as to whether, when he went back to Berlin,

he still had enemies, people he...

This is a man who had cut apart the society

and seen through it before anyone else did.

He was found at the bottom of the stairs.

And I was, you know, devastated.

The title of the painting is, "the death of George Grosz."

And, for a while,

it was sort of the death of Bob Cenedella.

And the painting...

Takes me right back to 1959.

A lot of the figures are from his paintings,

and I put it together in a kind of an allegorical way.

I guess I chose not to think that he got drunk

and fell down a flight of stairs,

but at the time, it was important to me that

that was not the image.

It would be better if he had been pushed

down a flight of stairs.

In his shadow, I put my signature.

And even that is symbolic of

would I ever get out from under, uh,

the shadow of George Grosz.

Man and woman: ♪ detergent scrub bubbles ♪

♪ Scrub bubbles ♪

♪ Scrub's in the bubbles in Brillo soap pads ♪

Woman: ♪ it's the first... ♪

Bob: There was an artist named James Harvey.

He was an abstract painter, but he also worked,

to make a living, in a packaging company.

He designed the Brillo box.

Man and woman: ♪ scrub's in the bubbles ♪

♪ In Brillo soap pads ♪

Ivan Karp: Even though it represents

sort of a commercial symbol,

that the design itself is rather attractive,

and Artie... Andy sort of makes you see it.

That's what his art is about.

Now it was a whole different world, now.

It was, uh... it was promotion it was, uh...

Woman: Andy, do you think that

pop art has sort of reached the point

where it's becoming repetitious now?

Uh, yes.

Do you think it could break away from being pop art?

Uh, no.

Are you just going to carry on?

Uh, yes.

Bob: So, pop art came, and-

and there's... There's humor.

But, then, when it became

the thing that people were selling,

then you had to take it seriously.

The art only meant... Was like...

Like 1%, and the rest of it was going to...

To parties, uh, getting the right people to come

to your show. We... who really cares...

♪ I'm in with the "in crowd" ♪

♪ I go where the "in crowd" goes ♪

♪ I'm in with the "in crowd" ♪

Jess: There has always been about the art world

some sort of certain sanctimony

about the way the art world talks about itself,

with a certain dead... Dead seriousness.

Bob was not coming from that place at all.

Bob was looking at the way

the world was really working,

not the way people said the world was working.

Ed McCormack: I've said in print that

he's a pain in the ass.

Bob's a pain in the ass. That's why I'm doing this

right now, because Bob's a pain in the ass.

He wanted to advertise his work in... in...

On the back cover of our magazine.

We told him that we had a back cover that he could have.

So, he gives us a copy that he did

of a, uh, a Rothko painting,

and it says "bullshit" on it.

So, Bob put me right away in the position

of either having to censor him,

and say "we can't run this,"

or having to kind of endorse this.

So, what I chose to do was, we're gonna run it.

But I did it with a certain kind of annoyance, you know?

Like, "what a fucking pain in the ass this guy is."

Bob was really a traditional painter.

He understood the basics.

And a lot of the painters of that era

were really saying things like,

"painting doesn't matter. It's about... something else."

Bob: It was 1965.

I said, I'm gonna create an art show

that WILL get more publicity

than any other artist this year, including Andy Warhol.

And I did.

And I called it, "yes art."

♪ I'm in with the "in crowd" ♪

Whereas Warhol was painting pictures of green stamps,

we gave out green stamps with a sale of art.

You got so many books of s&h green stamps,

and you could get yourself a TV with them,

or a dog house, or a toaster.

Jess: His attitude for this-

is a kick in the shins to what

appeared to be a corrupt system in the art world.

Bob: The media was looking

to make it into the next pop art,

and I was trying to make the point

that something was wrong.

There were people who got it,

and there were people who didn't.

The show was obviously absurd,

but I had to do it in such a way that the public would

see no difference in what was being clone

in a lot of other galleries.

I think it's interesting that at this late date,

Bob does the Heinz can.

But, in a sense, I think that's the part

of his work that's, on a certain level, beneath him.

And I thought it was funny that he said,

"well, it's actually a better soup," you know?

Everyone's saying, "oh, Bob, you've got to continue.

Yes art, it's a new movement."

For me, to continue that show...

The... the part that I would be most proud of

is that I said no. I said, "that's it."

Yes art is over

because...

I would've just been one of them.

I did this show as a farewell to art.

And I didn't really paint for the next ten years.

And finally I get this job in this agency.

I didn't have any experience.

I guess the agency... I came in,

and they said, "oh, who... this is this guy

who's in the newspaper."

Murray Kempton had written about me,

Dick Schaap.

I called my father.

"Hey, dad, uh, I just got hired by this..."

He says, "what?

"You mean you have a job?!

"A job like 9 to 5?

And... are you kidding?"

You know, he's like, he was, like, he was devastated

that I had a job...

A fucking job from 9 to 5.

It was the only job I ever had 9 to 5, by the way.

I thought that, you know, you came up with the concept,

that you would write it,

that you would do the visuals,

and you'd put the whole thing together,

which is what I did.

The client bought the whole thing.

So I am the wonder boy,

but the writer and art director

went to the client

and said, "are you sure?

"Are you sure this is the right...

You know, we don't wanna..." Right?

Boom, the rug is pulled from under me.

It's like I got a knife right in the back.

When I was in this agency,

I...

Would do these drawings,

these black and white brush and ink drawings.

I think that these were in some ways

the most important pieces of art that I've done,

because people are compelled by them.

I developed a line from what I learned from Grosz.

That ten-year period was lost to painting,

but I had a marriage... Didn't last too long.

Well, it lasted long enough.

I had a son, I had a business.

I went into the poster business

even though I had, quote, given up on art.

What I knew was how to make images.

The images that I put down

were images that meant something to the public.

I was in that business at the right time.

We were producing two, three new designs

sometimes in a week.

But they were political, they were...

They had a message.

And so that... That worked for me,

because, you know,

I wasn't doing paintings with a message,

but I was doing posters with... With a message.

In the '60s,

there was a lot of animosity in the country.

So I... I made a target.

The, uh, hostility dartboard.

I actually had... The CIA came to me,

they said that this was a violent thing.

I was on the side of,

you know, uh,

slowing down the violent nature of that time.

I'm taking violence off the street

and putting it into your living room.

By the time the interrogation was over,

they asked if they could have.

A Johnson dartboard of all things, can you imagine?

The Nixon board wasn't going that well,

so I wrote him a letter.

"Dear Mr. Nixon, I make these dartboards,

"and yours is so popular

"I want to give you an opportunity

to use a better picture."

I got a letter back,

and it was signed by Rose Mary woods,

the executive secretary to Richard M. Nixon.

And they sent me a better picture.

The, uh, people in charge.

It's not what they show that bothers me.

It's what they don't show.

Mediocrity...

Deciding the fate of genius...

Especially in the case of Grosz, that's what happened here.

I saw him as...

Clearly, as a brilliant artist.

Grosz, you know, he felt like a loser.

He said...

That he was a...

A failure.

And you don't like to hear that.

Even with the situation,

you know, knowing that he's not my...

But I didn't, uh...

I... that always bothered me.

"George Grosz in America"

was the only painting I did

from 1966 to 1975.

I'm sure that I'm... I'm painting myself,

I'm feeling... I'm saying it's George Grosz,

but I'm sort of feeling like it's me.

I'm looking through a series of windows,

and I was in a room, and I'm going through one house

to another house to another house.

I was trapped.

So that painting, its darkness,

it's probably a self-portrait.

Not a portrait of Grosz.

George Grosz didn't consider himself a success.

The guy who did one career in Germany

and another career in America.

He said that they cut off his right arm

when he came to America,

and what he meant by that was that...

You know, he wasn't being acknowledged,

even for what he had clone or what he could do.

I was outraged,

furious... I mean,

there's no words to describe

my feeling for the art world.

It... I despised it.

Richard Armstrong: The very worst fate

for an artist is to be ignored.

Same for their work.

If it becomes irrelevant, illegible, ignored.

These are all, you know,

shades of, you know, permanent disappearance.

Everyone is dealt a certain deck of cards.

So I was dealt a certain hand,

and I had a number of thing

that I wished weren't true.

If I got depressed, I would withdraw.

I didn't... I didn't want to see people.

I had week, two-week depressions.

So what my mother often said to me was,

"don't look for the answers on the outside.

Look... they're inside."

And every time I would get out of a depression,

I was feeling so good, I said,

"that could never happen to me again."

And then, who knows?

I came to a point where I decided

not to be a tragic figure.

I didn't graduate from high school.

I was illegitimate.

But, in the end, hey, I have my art.

I would not say that I am...

An expert on music.

I just love music, you know?

I'm one of those people who say, "I listen to what I like."

My interest was in the audience.

So the painting's not...

It's not of the orchestra

from the audience looking in, but it's from behind them.

I'm not sure of the year,

but in the late... Somewhere in the late '70s,

I started a series of paintings

using musical backgrounds.

In the balcony, I'm looking at the crowd

from the point of view of what a... some guy

who's playing the violin or the oboe or something

and he's... He's hearing, you know,

people blowing their nose, you know, coughing,

all that kind of stuff.

I'm able to express something

that I know must be on the minds

of the poor guys down there who are slaving away,

you know, trying to make music

and competing with the audience.

Every once in a while, you're working on something,

and I... I saw the...

The idea of a political conductor.

Once I had established Hitler as the...

As the conductor, well...

You know, you can criticize Hitler and say,

"yeah, but he had plenty of people

that were playing ball with him."

So they became-they had little mustaches.

And then... and then of course you had to have the people.

They had to kind of go along,

and so they, in the audience,

you see the little mustaches.

So, again, the art of any painting

is not the commentary, and that's why I say

I throw the commentary in at no charge.

I just charge for the color and the composition.

When I first met Raphael Soyer,

he said to me...

"Where do you get your ideas?"

And I... I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't understand an artist asking me that.

"Where do you get your ideas?"

He was a guy who would give time to younger artists.

And he himself said,

well, for him to do a painting,

he had to have a model

or something sitting in front of him.

Artists are all different,

but, for me, I've never been in my studio and said,

"oh gee, what am I going to paint today?

He then said, "well, where do you get

your ideas from," you know?

I didn't have an answer then.

Painting my painting or painting in general

is about ideas, you know,

so I did one painting in the music series

where the... all the players are fighting each other

and, you know,

and crashing a drum

over the other guy's head.

Broken violin.

A conductor running off the stage.

I was called, by Rosita Florio,

who was the head of the art students league.

"Bob," she said,

"how would you like to teach the old George Grosz class?"

And, of course, I... you know, I'd never taught anywhere.

You know, I walked into this class,

and of course it brought me right back to 1959.

You know, you were walking on the floor

that Grosz walked on.

George Grosz was teaching at the league

because he didn't need a degree.

He couldn't have taught at

one of the lofty art schools like Yale.

Took off my jacket, and I rolled up my sleeves,

and I took a piece of charcoal,

and I started to show people what I knew.

Not just paying back,

but to remember the things that got you to where we are.

As we...

Continue this, we see...

This little piece of charcoal,

piece of paper,

and your eye and hand starting to work together.

And it's the greatest discipline in the world.

All right, hey.

So, when we do spaghetti sauce,

we do it... We do it big.

In my search to find out

who I am,

the name "Cenedella," that's an Italian name.

Certainly no one has ever accused me

of looking like an Italian,

including my own family.

One of the secret ingredients in there was celery.

And also...

Carrots.

So that our sauce becomes like a... almost like a stew.

Some people put sugar in the spaghetti sauce.

We never do it, that's the...

That's the Cenedella secret.

Or maybe it's... Well, anyway.

It could be the Speirs secret.

But any... but...

And that's the, uh...

Hey, hey.

Oh, is this the... No, no.

Oh, this is not the good stuff.

It's not the good stuff, no.

I just don't understand

how you could not be a good father.

You know, I had two fathers

that didn't... together, they didn't make up one, right?

And then I'm thinking...

And then I have... David.

Yeah, I was the black sheep in the family,

because I was a lawyer.

Yeah, right, right,

he actually had a job.

Had a job, you know, hey.

That made him a black sheep of the family.

You spend time,

and you treat them

the way you would want to be treated,

you know what, it's gonna work out great.

A true story.

I grew up in a family

in which my father

literally saw losing in sports

as losing in life,

so that there was no separation.

David: When I was a kid,

we used to go, like, literally crazy at the games.

Actually, he's not a good sport.

He's actually not a bad loser.

He's actually a really horrible winner, though.

David: That is,

he always roots for the underdog.

Always.

Bob: Losing is like being a failure in art.

It's like being a failure at everything.

Not that winning means that I'm a success.

Doesn't work that way.

Just, winning just means I didn't lose.

Oh, well...

Yooo!

Whoooo!

Look at that, hey.

Jess Korman: There's an aspect of violence

in every Cenedella painting.

I mean, there are people fighting,

and he loves sports,

and so he loves the... the confrontation.

He's clone many football paintings.

And so, I mean,

I think he's a... You know, he's a guy's guy,

you know, Bob likes to mess it up,

and there's drama in that.

And he also sees comic value in it.

The humor in his paintings

is never ceasing.

No matter how bad things are,

you've gotta have a sense of humor,

and I recognized the humor,

the whimsy,

and the sardonic gallows humor

which he has in his work.

Humor lives eternally,

you know, in his paintings.

I think my art is very serious.

But it makes people laugh.

My wife and I got

an invitation to an art show.

I remember walking into this gallery,

and the show was called "giants."

And it showed a football field with tiny players

and giant people

in the tradition of George Grosz characters.

But the odd thing about the exhibit was

they all seemed to be the same picture.

You went around, there were,

like, maybe 60 pictures on the wall,

and every one of them looked like

it was a reproduction of the same picture.

After about ten minutes there, someone came up to me,

said, "have you gotten it?"

I said, "gotten what?"?

So he said, "have you found yourself?"

I said, "what are you talking about?"

And I... I assumed

maybe I was one of the faces in the crowd.

So I looked at the painting I was standing in front of,

and I wasn't in there.

But then it turned out

that everyone he had invited to this show,

he had put their face in one place.

And that was the only thing that was different.

One face was changed.

And when you found the one with your face on it,

his assumption was that you'd buy the painting.

Bob: It was around 1987.

Everyone was talking about

that one day

the stock market would go over 2,000.

I had met a stockbroker.

He was interested in my art.

And said you ought to do a painting

of the stock exchange.

He had a seat,

so he was able to get me actually on the floor.

There was more integrity on the floor of the stock exchange

than the art world itself.

It was refreshing to be with honest crooks

rather than the kind of crooks that I deal with

in the art world.

I was able to incorporate a lot of this stuff

in the painting.

♪ Easy money, comes and goes ♪

♪ You may have it, you may owe, well ♪

♪ Everybody dies ♪

♪ And everybody knows ♪

♪ If you wanna make your Mark ♪

♪ You better make it show ♪

♪ My bitty mow mow ♪

♪ Took your money now how ♪

♪ Ever WILL you pay the man? ♪

♪ Skinny Minnie moo moo ♪

♪ Took it off of mow mow ♪

♪ Gave it all to dapper Dan ♪

♪ Jr. tiny juju ♪

♪ Can get it off of Daniel ♪

♪ 'Cause he's a heavy-liftin' dude ♪

♪ But juju's baby mama ♪?

♪ May cause a bit of drama ♪

♪ All depending on her mood ♪

♪ Easy money ♪

♪ Comes and goes ♪

♪ You may have it, you may owe ♪

♪ Well, everybody dies ♪

♪ And everybody knows ♪

♪ If you wanna make your Mark ♪

♪ You better make it show n'

Let's make it happen.

People may have thought it was ironic

that Robert Cenedella was doing this drawing

about the home of capitalism,

but that's what Cenedella is.

Ironic, that's a good...

One-word encapsulation of everything that he's done.

People are buying art only for investment.

People are buying art only for investment.

I can't give you percentages,

but a high percentage of 'em

buy a piece of art

with the hope that it's going to increase in value

when they walk out of there.

The art world really is a...

Kind of a... A dreary place right now.

It's all based on money,

it's based on collectors.

It's based on...

I mean, I don't know how people are hustling so hard

and trying so... So much to get famous.

Bob: I consider myself

a contemporary artist because I'm painting today.

So contemporary art... Who defines what it is?

And I have a big problem with that.

Woman: For the first time in its history,

the frieze art fair is being held in New York City.

With so much to see in contemporary art,

visitors can spend hours at the fair.

Kelly crow: Contemporary art,

that's the wild west.

That's where you have a chance to maybe buy something

that WILL be worth millions someday.

Um, but it also means that you may lose your shirt.

Morgan long: Contemporary art is seen as-

as pushing the envelope.

And a lot of times you can get something

that's, um, you know, a pile of garbage, literally.

But it's an art installation.

Bob: I say the establishment is

narrow-minded about work that doesn't fit

their monthly designation

of who's in and who's out.

An artist can rise and fall

in recognition within the art world.

There is no one player who can make an artist.

You can move from being not known or not valued

to the other side,

but you have to be lucky enough

or clever enough or talented enough

or beautiful enough or...

The companion or friend or whatever...

Neighbor of someone who can help you do that.

It can't be done alone.

Bob: So we've come to believe

now that, every month, there's another great,

you know, American artist.

How many great artists are there?

Jeff Koons, he has a vacuum cleaner.

All right, now it's art.

At some point, it's gonna become just a vacuum cleaner again.

That's really where we're at at this point.

It... the question isn't "what is art?"

It's "what isn't art."

Judd Tully: What's important?

What's valuable?

We're not talking about critical value

or museum value.

We're just talking plain old dollar value.

Bob: Everyone has the right

to make anything they want.

It's not what they show that bothers me.

It's what they don't show.

And that's really a kind of form of censorship.

I do not think a work of art

is worth what someone's willing to pay for it

because some of the most important works of art

are not for sale.

Bob: What I tell my students,

I said, if you wanna be an artist,

don't get rid of your Clay job.

You can bastardize everything else in your life,

but if you compromise with your art,

why be an artist?

You have to remember that, when we look there at the model,

there are no lines, there's no such thing...

That was one of the first things

that Grosz said to me that I found startling.

He was like, "oh, there is no such thing

as a line in nature."

It's an invention of man, see?

So use line to make all these other things.

."Okay, so this could have been...

More this line...

You look there, don't look at the page.

Let it... let it happen.

Okay, there...

If you make a foot that's this big...

Eventually what happens is

you see part of this drawing, you say, oh, wow.

That really feels like an arm.

Or that feels like a thigh.

The rest of it, you forget about it.

I always tell this story about this girl.

I said, "how long have you been drawing?"

"Oh, I've been drawing for three years."

So I handed her a piece of charcoal.

And she said, "what's that?"

Then I realized

that she had been drawing with a computer

and got herself an MFA.

By the end of the Clay,

she was so mad

that she had spent three years in an art school

and never held a piece of charcoal...

Right, and thought she could draw.

In 1988,

I had my Saatchi & Saatchi show

right at their headquarters.

And this was a major show.

Saatchi, of course, is known for

their, um,

sensations show.

The Brooklyn museum gave Saatchi-

they allowed him to put his private collection

into a public museum.

Just on the face of it, it's like,

what the hell is that all about?

They called it "sensations."

So I had planned the show out pretty carefully.

The lobby has white marble on both sides,

but at the very end,

there's a fantastic white marble square

for the painting that I had built the show around.

This would've been almost like

being in a church.

I think I had the idea

of putting Santa Claus on a cross

from the early '60s.

I must've had trouble as a kid with Christmas.

Everything was going fine

until they looked at my work.

Santa Claus hanging on a... On a cross.

That was more than they could take.

The Santa Claus painting,

I don't think it ever really made it to the wall.

The powers that be at Saatchi & Saatchi

saw it, and they said, "oh, my god."

They... you know, they...

And they just literally took it out of the show.

I attempted to show this painting

for the next ten years.

Never could get into a gallery.

Never could get into anyplace.

Getting people's attention

in New York and other places today

is really a job unto itself.

And the thing you recognize

in working inside this world

is that recognition is the only thing

we can really offer one another.

Bob: A lot of people including,

I guess, my wife think I spend too much time in bars.

But the truth is I seem to have a pretty good time in bars.

What happened to my drink?

Oh, here we are.

I thought you took my drink.

It would be just like you, you know?

I see bars as

little one-act plays.

You might meet someone

that you like or that you don't like.

I see people who I might...

Disagree with in politics, this, that, and the other thing.

And yet most people you can really find a camaraderie with.

And where... Where do you live now?

- Boston. - Boston!

- Yeah. - oh, that's where I was born.

I was born in Boston. Really?

Are you a Red Sox fan?

♪ Howling everywhere ♪

♪ And no one's going down ♪

♪ Lost inside the memories ♪

♪ Of this lonely town ♪

♪ So many things ♪

♪ That can make a man feel this way ♪

♪ You might win sometimes ♪

♪ But then you're gonna have to pay ♪

♪ But keep rollin" on ♪

Backing singers: ♪ rollin' on ♪

♪ Keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

♪ Lived our life ♪

♪ Just keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Future come along ♪

♪ It can bring you right to the ground ♪

♪ Keep on laughing ♪

♪ There's enough laughter to go around ♪

♪ Rollin' rollin' ♪

♪ You keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

♪ Keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Just keep rollin' ♪♪

Bob: Russell Speirs was

a friend of Cenedella and my mother

when they were married.

So he was always in the picture.

Russ had been sick for quite a while.

And I had been going up to see him in the hospital.

I got this call from Jim Stafford,

who was his personal lawyer.

He wanted to acknowledge me in writing.

I hardly knew what that meant,

but, uh, I thought it was maybe a good idea.

So we're in Stafford's office,

and he said,

"Bob, why don't we go have some lunch?"

So here we were in this bar,

and he ordered a scotch,

and so I said, "well, I guess,"

you know, a little early, but I had one also.

So we drove to the hospital.

And in the backseat he had an Olivetti typewriter.

So he sits on the bed,

and he had one piece of paper with him.

Now he's gonna...

Start asking questions.

"Russ, are you, um, here to state

"that you are...

"The father of your said son?

Are you aware of his birth?"

So Russ said, "well, yeah,

of course I was aware of his..."

"Ahh, good.“

he stamps it, he signs it. My father signs it.

And he spelled "affidavit" wrong.

And he spelled her mother's name wrong.

And my last name was spelled wrong.

And he got the date of my birth wrong.

But other than that, the thing is like, you know,

it's pretty, pretty, uh, pretty, pretty accurate.

He was commissioned to do a mural

for this fancy lunch place

on Madison Avenue.

And the owner of it told him to do all the celebrities

that patronize Le cirque.

Le cirque was, oh, just about as popular

and as famous and as exciting

as any restaurant could ever be.

I... well, I said, "I've never been there.

I don't know what..." So I got to go to Le cirque.

And the owner, Sirio, said, "it's not possible to..."

Um!

So I said I'd do it on a dare.

And if they didn't like the painting,

they wouldn't buy it.

And if they, uh, if they did, we'd come up with a price.

And so I said yes.

Sirio not only had the rich and the famous

and the recognizable.

There were a couple of people,

well, more than a couple of people,

that he wanted to have in there, including his doctor.

Bob: I just ate anytime

I would go there.

It was on the house, you know.

Sirio never told me what to paint or how to paint,

and I didn't tell him how to make his sauces.

Bob didn't have a list to begin with.

He really had to sit there

and watch when people would come in

and someone would say,

"that's Dr. Henry Kissinger."

Or "that's Barbara Walters."

And he would study them and, and, and do the sketching.

Bob: So I think it was

about 50 meals later that I told him that

I was gonna start the drawing.

And maybe it was another 50 meals later

that I had the drawing clone

and I had actually clone some painting

on this thing, you know?

And the only thing that he really directed me on

was who was in the painting, not where they were.

Liz Smith, I put her next to Nixon, right?

And then she was astounded when she saw herself next to Nixon.

So she wrote an article about it.

Woody Allen is way in the back,

'cause I never saw him as a hero of mine.

The portrait is not only a family portrait,

but it is emblematic of an era.

And Sirio wanted to capture that.

And Bob Cenedella did exactly that.

You feel it when you look at that mural.

You know what it must've been like

to be there at that time.

Bob: I was interviewed by

"New York magazine"

I said, "if you do a write-up of this thing,

I'll... I'll put you in the painting."

So he said, "definitely."

Sol put him in the painting,

and, um, it's now finished.

He was the last guy to go in.

And I'm waiting for the "New York" article

to come out.

And when it came out,

there was no picture of the painting.

There was no... But there's nothing I could do.

However, Philip Roth was writing a book

on sons and daughters of blacklisted parents.

He came to interview me.

I decided to take out the writer

for "New York magazine."

And I put Roth in the painting.

On opening night,

the painting was hung at the new Le cirque,

and the writer for "New York magazine"

comes with his wife,

his mother-in-law, a child,

and comes to show them

that he's where he is in the "Le cirque" painting.

And he- and he's kind of...

He can't find himself.

And he finally asks Sirio, "Sirio, where am I?

I don't understand."

So I got my revenge in the most amazing way.

But it's all because I was the son of a blacklisted writer,

and that Philip Roth was doing a book.

I never really have the instinct to do a political piece.

I'm much more taken by what's around me.

You're surrounded by trees.

You know, you're always aware of these slivers.

I did a series of very narrow paintings.

Some of them two and a half inches wide

and maybe five feet high.

I call them "slices of Maine."

By making this shape,

you go endlessly back.

Do you really have to see what's on the left

and what's on the right?

George Hudson: When we learned that

Russ was dead, and suddenly

the news came out that he'd left things

to this son that nobody knew he had,

we surmised that this was Russ's last practical joke.

That he didn't really have a son,

but that he just picked somebody out of the clear blue sky

and just gave him everything, you know?

Russ was as... As full of tricks

and as much a prankster as anybody I've ever known.

His sense of humor was famous around here.

But they didn't tell you about that

until you'd fallen victim to it.

Russ was perpetually impish.

I mean, he looked as if he had a secret.

All these years, I thought

"was that kid really Russ's kid or not?"

He walks in the room,

and he's the living image of Russ.

So you think, "there goes that idea."

He's Russ's kid.

Couldn't be anybody else's in the whole world.

Bob: When I found out

who my father was, I mean,

humor was his great weapon.

So genes has a lot to do with everything,

I'm convinced of that.

Now, you got a...

You got a...

Interesting all right.

So all these little details.

Okay, so now you have this...

This string here, right?

So, if we have...

Again, better than a ruler,

better than tape,

it's a visual straight line.

I often tell my students

I used to take a cutout of a Rembrandt,

Holbein,

El Greco,

And you put these figures in one room.

And nothing looks real.

Because those worlds are all distinct.

They're... every painter, every great painter,

he creates

this world that you believe in.

And a painting, it's... a drawing,

you wouldn't even think about the background, right?

No. 'OK,

but now that it's a painting,

the background becomes,

you know, it's half... It's half the canvas, so.

He doesn't tell me what to paint or how to paint,

but he'll find something which is not working properly

within the composition and the color

or in the drawing or whatever it happens to be.

And he's very pointed.

And his critique.

And his intervention is minimal.

Which is marvelous, as far as I'm concerned.

The art students league

give the instructors a window for a month

to hang a painting.

They came to me, and they said,

"gee, Bob, do you have a Christmas painting?"

I said, "a Christmas painting."

I said... yeah, I said I have a Christmas painting.

I said...

I said, "but it's not framed."

I said, "so let... so...

"Uh, if you just hold the space

"on a Saturday morning,

"and I'll... I'll, you know, I'll have it framed.

"I'll have it... make sure that it gets put in the window,

and don't worry about it, right?"

Reporter: Outside the art students

league in Manhattan, a painting on display

pictures a crucified Santa with gifts at his feet.

Here's a look at Santa like you have never seen him before.

This untitled painting by artist Robert Cenedella

has sparked quite a controversy in New York City,

where it sits in a midtown window.

William Donohue: I'm not questioning

the motive of the artist,

but this is a very special time of the year.

This is a holy season.

You have to take into consideration

the number of people, including children,

walking down the street who might be

unwittingly offended by it.

I mean, it's not empirically obvious to everybody

what the intent is.

Bob: When people say, oh,

I was making fun of religion.

I didn't replace Christ with Santa Claus

as a symbol of Christmas.

They just say, "Santa Claus does not belong on a cross."

No, a good old human being.

Is what belongs on a cross.

I have a moral obligation

to paint what I feel is correct.

That's“ that's what I have a moral obligation to do.

I don't consider myself a political artist.

I'm an artist that does a lot of political' stuff.

"Battlefield of energy"

is the name of this painting.

Is actually the title Jimmy Carter came up with

when he was concerned about oil prices

and... and conserving oil.

On the battlefield of energy,

we can win for our nation

a new confidence.

Jimmy Carter was the first president to...

Deal with the scarcity of oil

that didn't exist.

The idea being that the corporations

were...

Somehow running the country.

And that was in 1979.

Energy...

Will be the immediate test

of our ability to unite this nation.

Sometimes I really get a kick out of

some of the things that I do.

I thought the Coca-Cola tank...

That was the first tank.

Then, of course, I had a Mobil tank

and a Chasel-Manhattan tank.

An army that's a bank of America army.

We now know that

corporations are people.

Something that didn't exist even then.

I think that you become a painter of history

just by painting,

you know, the world around you.

The last taboo in art right now

the last taboo in art right now

is the kind of sincerity that Bob has,

the kind of directness.

You know, everything's supposed to be ironic.

And it's uncool

to have the kind of passion that he has.

And he's just anti-establishment.

He calls it like it is.

And people like to smooth things over.

Not Cenedella.

He's a chronicler of his time.

And he... When he says it...

He's a truth-teller in many ways.

Various museums and...

Collectors in the establishment

decided...

That this is not art.

I see him as this kind of pugnacious character

rushing through, you know, he's...

He's kind of, you know, like a Don Quixote.

The art community as a whole

has always rejected him.

Not because of his talent,

but because of his message.

This is a form of censorship

they, um, they exert on him.

Bob Cenedella's got a hard-on for the world

and is not afraid to show it.

I can go to bed at night,

and I think I feel pretty secure

in what I've clone as a... as an artist.

♪ Howling everywhere ♪

♪ And no one's going down ♪

♪ Lost inside the memories ♪

♪ Of this lonely town ♪

♪ So many things ♪

♪ That can make a man feel this way ♪

♪ You might win sometimes ♪

♪ But then you're gonna have to pay ♪

♪ But keep rollin' on ♪

Backing singers: ♪ rollin' on ♪

♪ Keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

♪ Live your life ♪

♪ Just keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Well, keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

- ♪ Rollin' on ♪ - ♪ just keep rollin' ♪

♪ Oh, the world may change ♪

♪ But life keeps rollin' on ♪

♪ Future come long ♪

♪ It can bring you right to the ground ♪

♪ Keep on laughing ♪

♪ There's enough laughter to go around ♪

♪ Give your love to a woman ♪

♪ And she break your heart in two ♪

♪ Don't give up ♪

♪ I tell you what you gotta do ♪

♪ Keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

♪ Keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

♪ Don't be insane ♪

♪ Just keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' rollin' rollin' rollin' ♪

♪ Keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

♪ Well, keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Just keep rollin' ♪

♪ Well, the world may change ♪

♪ But life keeps rollin' on ♪

♪ Keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

♪ Well, keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

♪ Oh, live your life ♪

♪ Just keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' rollin' rollin' rollin' ♪

♪ Well, keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Rollin' on ♪

♪ Well, keep rollin' on ♪

♪ Just keep rollin' ♪

♪ Oh, the world may change ♪

♪ But life keeps rollin' on ♪