Robert Cenedella Biography
Robert Cenedella (1940 -) was born in Milford, Massachusetts in 1940. He received his formal education from the High School of Music & Art of New York and the Art Students League of New York. From 1988 to 2020, he inherited the George Grosz Chair at The League, where he was invited to teach his life drawing course and a painting workshop. Following a definitive artistic tradition, like Brueghel, Daumier, Hogarth, and Grosz before him, Cenedella dedicated his art to chronicling the changing rituals and myths of contemporary American society. His commissions include works for the famous Bacardi International and Absolut VODKA, a theater show for actor Tony Randall, two historically important murals for Le Cirque 2000 Restaurants in New York and Mexico City. In September 1985 Cenedella exhibited at the Bagatelle at the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, an exhibition sponsored by Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris. In 1988 he held a solo exhibition at the Saatchi & Saatchi headquarters in New York and in 1990 he participated in the prestigious Amnesty International Exhibition in SoHo, New York. In December 1994, he held a major retrospective at the Galerie Am Scheunenviertel in Berlin, Germany, which was a tribute to his former mentor and took place in conjunction with the George Grosz Centennial Exhibition at the Berlin National Gallery. That same year, Cenedella's concept of selling stocks in his painting 2001 - A Stock Odyssey was disclosed in a New York Times article. The idea prompted SoHo gallerist Leo Castelli, who once compared the 1980s art boom to the rise of junk bonds, to call the experiment "a conceptual work of art." Cenedella also appeared in Norbert Bunge's award-winning documentary film George Grosz in America: Life's Fine in the Labyrinth, which premiered at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival. From 1995 to 2000, Robert Cenedella exhibited and lectured throughout the United States. From March to May 2003, The Nation Institute sponsored a comprehensive retrospective of the artist's political works. This exhibition, The Nation Hangs Cenedella, was held at the New York executive offices of The Nation magazine and covered topics ranging from the Selma riots to the preemptive war against Iraq. Cenedella's art and life were the subject of a book, "The American Artist as Satirist" and the artist was also the subject of Art Bastard, a historical documentary about his life and work. In August 2020, Cenedella moved from New York City to Maine with his wife.
