ARTIST OVERVIEW

Robert De Niro, Sr. (1922–1993) was a leading postwar artist whose paintings conjoined modernist abstract and expressionist methods with traditional compositions and subject matter. Part of the famed New York School of the forties and fifties, De Niro, Sr. painted representational subject matter—landscapes, still lifes, and figures—but used these themes primarily as formal constructs for exploring the possibilities inherent in paint, color, and form. De Niro, Sr.'s utilization of action painting and gestural expression places his work within the abstract expressionist discourse but it nonetheless remains firmly grounded in European, specifically French, antecedents.

Born in Syracuse, New York, De Niro showed artistic promise at a very early age. At 18, he attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he studied under Josef Albers. However, chafing under the rigidity of Albers' theories, he decamped to New York a year later, in 1941, to study with Hans Hofmann. Hofmann considered De Niro one of his best students ever,¹ and the impact of Hofmann's tutelage had a profound and lasting impact on De Niro's work.

De Niro quickly achieved critical acclaim in New York and, in 1946, had his first solo show at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, Art of This Century. Throughout the fifties he exhibited at the Charles Egan Gallery alongside artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston. In the 1960s, he moved to Paris, where he continued to paint and achieve critical acclaim, enjoying the patronage of legendary collector Joseph Hirshhorn and receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968.

An exacting perfectionist, De Niro, Sr. often executed hundreds of studies of a single composition and scraped and repainted individual canvases repeatedly until he achieved a perfect balance of color and line. He held a strong reverence for 19th-century French painting and greatly admired the French modernists, favoring the works of André Derain, Henri Matisse, Chaim Soutine, and Pierre Bonnard, among others. Their influence, especially in regards to De Niro's brushwork and palette, is readily evident in his work. De Niro suffered from depression and, despite the Mediterranean colors of his palette, his paintings have an emotional intensity that, according to critic Peter Frank, is responsible for the impassioned coherence that lies in their blend of brooding and exuberance.²

Despite changes in the artistic and cultural climate in the two decades preceding his death, De Niro continued to focus on his primary painterly interests of color and form until his death in 1993. Recently, De Niro, Sr.'s work has received renewed critical attention and, in 2005, a 208-page monograph on his life and work, written by Peter Frank, was published. Robert De Niro, Sr.'s work is represented in major American museums including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

^1. Peter Frank, Robert De Niro, Sr. (New York: Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, 2004), p. 21.

^2. Ibid.