Virginia Holton Admiral or Virginia De Niro was an American painter and poet.
Background
Admiral was born in Oregon, the daughter of Alice Caroline (née Groman), a school teacher, and Donald Admiral, a grain broker. Admiral was a Presbyterian. Her father had English, Irish, German, French, and Dutch ancestry, and her mother was of German descent.
By 1930, Virginia"s parents had divorced and she was living with her mother and sister in Berkeley, California.
While in Berkeley, her mother became a school teacher.
Education
She studied painting under Hans Hofmann in New York, and her work was included in the Peggy Guggenheim collection. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago under Hans Hofmann.
Career
In 1938, she worked on the Federal Art Project, in Oakland, California. Among them was Anais Nin and Kenneth Patchen. With Duncan, she produced an issue of the magazine Epitaph (later renamed The Experimental Review).
Admiral, a painter, met Robert De Niro, Senior, an aspiring artist, at one of Hans Hofmann"s painting classes in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
They first moved into an loft apartment on East. 14th Street, then later to an apartment on 8th Street, and then settled into one on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. Foreign a time she worked as a typist for Anaïs Nin.
She and Robert De Niro divorced in 1945, but remained close throughout their lives. When Robert Senior was stricken with cancer, she took him in during his last years.
Later, in New York, she wrote for True Crimes magazine.
In 1942, Admiral exhibited her art in the Springs Salon for Young Artists at Peggy Guggenheim"s "Art of This Century Gallery" in Manhattan. That same year she sold a painting to the Museum of Modern Art for $100. She was the first of her artist cohort to sell a painting to the Modern.
Jackson Pollock had his first sale to the museum only two years later.
She had a solo show at the same gallery in 1946 and her work was included in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at the Venice Biennale in 1947. In later years, from 1973 to 1980, her art showed at Buecker and Harpsichords gallery.
She was active in political movements against the Vietnam War and for the rights of artists and the poor. In the 1960"s she was instrumental in obtaining low-cost housing for artists working in the SoHo area of New New York
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Politics
While living in Berkeley, California, she had been part of an off-campus art and socialist and literary scene.