Incompatibility, even, with Romania, where he was born the son of a diplomat who was arrested in 1952, then convicted, without a trial, of “intensive activity against the working class” and imprisoned for four years? The Cădere family lost everything.Ī “young with a ‘bad dossier,’” Andrei Cădere graduated from high school and was drafted into the “labour brigades,” a conscription “very close to penal servitude.” Despite diribau, as “the forced labour performed by those who had ‘problems with the regime’” was termed, curator and scholar Magda Radu writes, Cădere “entered the art world as a life model and assistant in the studios of artists who received official commissions or worked within the state system.” The gigs paid him a basic income, but Stalinized life was brutal. The incompatibility of the exile, of the emigrant? YOU COULD SAY, couldn’t you, that André Cadere’s métier was incompatibility? Bruce Benderson, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession He’s spent his whole life waiting for luck, looking for signs of it with a kind of fatalism, and he supplements this fatalism with the best skills of a shrewd hunter and gatherer, picking up booty like me. André Cadere presenting his work on West Broadway, New York, December 11, 1976.
