Robert Cenedella will be exhibiting his painting George Grosz in America in the upcoming exhibition The Masters: Art Students League Teachers and Their Students. Cenedella’s painting will be on view in the Art Students League’s Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery (one of three venues for this exhibition), from November 1 through December 1, 2018.

Of the creation of this portrait, Cenedella explains: “George Grosz in America is the only painting I did during a time when I went into a self-imposed exile, a way to avoid the commerciality of the art world, 1966 to 1975. Grosz’s despair came from his being rejected as an artist in America – something I, too, felt during my years of exile. Grosz’s last words to me in 1959 were: ‘Art is dead.’ It’s something I grapple with to this day. I went back to painting a year or so after painting George Grosz in America, which has a dual meaning: half self-portrait and half portrait of my mentor.”