A Big Yes and A Little No

An illustrated portrait of a fiercely independent artist who superbly sketches the fault lines of postwar American art.

Robert Cenedella has always stood just outside the center of American art. Shaped by a formative mentorship with George Grosz, Cenedella built a career that resisted easy categorization—moving between painting, conceptual practice, murals, and advertising while consistently challenging art-world orthodoxies.

A provocateur in the press and gallery, he regularly made headlines: in the tabloids for the show’s removal of his crucified Santa painting, in the New York Times for selling shares in a single painting. A Big Yes and a Little No is the first comprehensive account of this career, from his early days at the Art Students League of New York to Yes Art, his satirical art movement in which he positioned himself as the anti-Warhol. Based on extensive interviews with the artist and featuring a foreword by Cenedella himself, this book brings together full-color reproductions of paintings, murals, archival photographs, and exhibition ephemera, with accompanying writing explaining his critiques of consumerism and art trends, the anxieties of the Atomic Age, his upbringing and mentorship, and how his work has consistently run up against the shifting political and social landscape of postwar America.

A Big Yes and a Little No offers a richly contextual portrait of an artist who worked across systems by brilliantly critiquing them. Part biography, part visual archive, and part cultural history, it demonstrates how a career built at the margins can illuminate the center of American art.