Robert Henry De Niro Sr. was an American abstract expressionist artist and sculptor. He was associated with Abstract Expressionism and blended in his works gestural abstraction with observed colours and forms.
Background
Robert De Niro Sr. was born in Syracuse, New York, United States, on May 3, 1922. He was the son of Henry Martin De Niro, whose parents emigrated from Ferrazzano to the United States, and Helen M. (née O'Reilly). De Niro was the eldest of three children in the family. He and his siblings, John and Joan, were raised in Syracuse, New York.
Education
Robert De Niro Sr. started to paint at age five and showed immediate and immense talent. Eventually, he enrolled in adult classes at the Syracuse Museum. When he was only 12, he impressed his teachers so much that he obtained his own studio in the museum school. His mother encouraged his painting, while his father did not. Despite his father's disapproval, De Niro continued developing his artistic skill.
In the summer of 1939, De Niro studied with well-known painter and teacher Hans Hofmann. The same year he received a scholarship to study at the avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he was taught by Josef Albers. However, De Niro disliked Albers' strict theories of colour. In 1941, De Niro left Black Mountain.
Robert De Niro Sr. returned to Hofmann's school in New York, as he felt a stronger connection to Hofmann's style of creating abstract movement through colour. For the next several years, He studied under Hofmann in both New York and Provincetown.
De Niro started his career working at Hans Hofmann's school. In 1940 he joined the staff of Hilla Rebay’s legendary Museum of Non-Objective Art, working there until 1945. In 1945 he was included in a group show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in New York. It was a leading gallery for the art of both established European modernists and members of the emerging Abstract Expressionist group like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still.
In 1946, when he was 24 years old, De Niro held his first solo show at the gallery, a major exhibition space at the time. Clement Greenberg was among the critics who strongly eulogize his work. Greenberg wrote, "the originality and force of his temperament demonstrate themselves under an iron control of the plastic elements such as is rarely seen in our time outside the painting of the oldest surviving members of the School of Paris."
De Niro's artworks during his early period were abstract, often with figural references. Although he drew from the gestural abstraction of his New York School peers, he was more strongly influenced by the colour palette and motifs of French Fauvism as well as the Old Masters. De Niro became an outsider within the New York School community. In fact, he condemned his peers' desire for a fully unconscious creation of art. By the 1950s, De Niro had established what would be his ultimate artistic style for the remainder of his career: modern painterly representation.
In the 1950s Robert De Niro Sr. started to exhibit his works regularly alongside other Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. The artist received positive critical support from a number of writers, including Frank O'Hara. He called De Niro "one of the most original and powerful younger painters showing today." By the mid-1950s, De Niro was regularly included in important group exhibitions such as the Stable Annual, the Whitney Annual, and the Jewish Museum.
Yet, De Niro did not sell enough of his artworks to take up painting full time. He mostly depended on occasional financial support from his fellow artists, such as de Kooning. While new artistic movements such as Pop art and Minimalism became popular, Robert De Niro Sr. was committed to his personal style. The artist moved to France in 1961. Collector Joseph Hirshhorn bought a number of the artist's paintings and artworks on paper during this period through De Niro's gallerist, Virginia Zabriskie.
He returned to New York in 1964 after falling into depression. During the late 1960s and 1970s, he continued producing and exhibiting work. At the same time, he also taught at a variety of schools, including The State University of New York at Buffalo, Cooper Union, and the School of Visual Arts. De Niro was a visiting artist at Michigan State University's Department of Art in the spring of 1974.
In 1974 Robert De Niro Sr. created two lithograph series at Tamarind Institute in New Mexico. In addition to his paintings and sculptures, he was also a writer and poet. In 1976 he published a volume of poetry called A Fashionable Watering Place and also contributed to art magazines such as Art/World. He moved to San Francisco in 1977, but by 1980 was back in New York, where he remained until his death in 1993.
Quotations:
"The whole idea of 'action painting' is foreign to me, and, I believe, detrimental to painting, which is what Leonardo called it, 'a mental thing.' A physical action is painting, when it dominates, dulls sensitivity to nature and to one's own feelings, precludes subtlety, and institutes a dead mechanical routine."
Connections
Robert De Niro Sr. met painter Virginia Admiral while studying at Hans Hofmann's school. The two married in 1942. Their son Robert De Niro Jr., the award-winning actor, was born in 1943. Hans Hofmann, who considered De Niro one of his greatest students, became his son's godfather. However, two years later, the couple separated, after De Niro came out as gay. In 1944 Robert De Niro Sr. had a relationship with Robert Duncan, an American poet.