One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story

For the first 50 years of his life, Albert Wagner led an unexceptional, if rather disreputable, existence. He put together a living in a working-class neighborhood of Cleveland, drank to excess and womanized with abandon, siring 16 children with his wife and several more with two mistresses.
One of these women had a daughter from a previous marriage whom Mr. Wagner molested. He was arrested, spent five days in jail and, as he tells it in “One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story,” found himself in his basement one night contemplating the course of his life — and a paint stain on a scrap of wood.
He felt the presence of God within and began to paint his fears and loves: scenes of broken families, lynchings, Biblical tableaus, naked women, dissolute men. Continuing at a prodigious pace, Mr. Wagner, who died in 2006, set aside his vices and amassed a houseful of raw, startling images, as well as a growing reputation as an important folk artist.
Directed by Thomas G. Miller, “One Bad Cat” brings fresh light to the artist profile not only through his choice of subject, but also by his direct confrontation with the discomforting nature of Mr. Wagner’s work and the cultural complexities entailed when a poor black naïf is celebrated and collected by well-to-do whites.
Da The New York Times, 15 agosto 2008