De Niro: A Life (6 page)

But in fact his childhood was spent a few crucial blocks north on Bleecker Street and, later, 14th Street, and the milieu in which he was raised wasn’t the stereotype of an Italian American household, with hordes of relatives, massive pasta dinners, and the twin rule of the Catholic Church and the Mafia. Rather, he was a child of Greenwich Village bohemia, more familiar with the aroma of paint thinner than that of marinara sauce, usually the only kid at the party, a living emblem of bourgeois normalcy and adult responsibility in a world given over to aesthetic exploration and escape from social taboos.

“Our standards were so pure, we treated with scorn any humdrum references to the personal,” painter Nell Blaine remembered of the world she and the De Niros inhabited. “Concepts, ideas were exchanged. Anything less was a tasteless distraction.” A baby in a painter’s loft may not have been tasteless, but it certainly constituted a distraction. De Niro and Admiral were still scraping for money to pay for the basic things of life, and they were still doggedly pursuing their artistic ambitions. Additionally, the elder De Niro was himself only twenty-one years old when he became a father, a green age for a man struggling not only with his sexual identity but also with his commitment to a field of endeavor that was unlikely to afford him a family wage.

There was, however, the promise of the moment, a surge of activity in New York that would soon affirm the city as the capital of the international
art world. The United States had joined the war, yes, but it was still thousands of miles from the battlefields, and the city had provided a safe haven for a great many of the artistic luminaries who had helped create the various strains of contemporary art in Europe during the previous decades. Combined with the energetic young American painters who had been raised on modern ideas and techniques invented in the Old World, it made for America’s first truly energetic art scene. If you were doomed, by fate or choice, to be a starving artist, New York in the 1940s was a pretty promising place to do it.

Admiral’s reputation continued to grow while Bobby was still in diapers. In 1944 she was among twenty-four painters and sculptors selected for Peggy Guggenheim’s Spring Salon for Young Artists, providing what the
New York Times
critic Edward Alden Jewell called “a gay if rather scattered oil lyric.” The following year, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited the canvas it had previously bought from her (Jewell saw in it “abstract lyricism” but once again found her work “rather scattered”). And then in 1946 she was afforded a show of her own at Art of This Century, exhibiting six paintings alongside a selection of works by the jazz critic and artist Rudi Blesh (Jewell, again, offered as much praise as not, describing her as “a not too tidy lyricist with an often pleasing color sense”).

By then, though, De Niro had superseded Admiral in the general esteem of the art world. In late 1945 he had a canvas appear in the Fall Salon at Art of This Century. And in May 1946, at age twenty-four, he had a one-man show at the gallery, an astounding coup marking him as a true meteor. The show, billed as a “First Exhibition of Painting,” consisted of ten canvases that were priced for sale at $100 to $600. The titles give an idea of the young artist’s emerging aesthetic; three of the paintings bore allusive names (“Environs of Biskra,” “Ubu Roi,” “Abstraction”), but the rest were given representational titles that would have been familiar to a Renaissance master: “Portrait of a Young Man,” “Fruits and Flowers,” “Woman in Armchair,” “Still Life with Flowers,” and so forth. Combining a deep-seated respect for tradition with an urge toward modern expressivity, De Niro’s work of the time depicted real objects and people and places but used the techniques of abstract art. A vase, say, might be indicated by two distinct elements: an
energetic area of color that suggested the physical gesture that created it and a similarly energetic but more controlled outline, often thick, black, and composed of a single stroke. The influence of Matisse and the Fauvists was clear in the color and shapes, but there were bits of Cézanne, Cubism, the not yet defined school of Action painting, and classical representational art in it as well.

De Niro’s maiden show was respectfully received and widely reviewed. In the
New York Times
, the omnipresent Edward Alden Jewell praised the painter’s “stimulating audacity” and noted the connection to Fauvism, concluding, “Color is savagely brilliant; the primaries, set off by black.”
ARTnews
described the work as consisting of “circular and oval shapes, warmly colored,” arranged into “handsome, vaguely sexual patterns.” And in a significant coup, the great and influential critic Clement Greenberg, writing in
The Nation
, declared De Niro an
“important young artist” exhibiting “monumental effects rare in abstract art.” He offered powerful praise for De Niro’s technique: “The originality and force of his temperament demonstrate themselves under an iron control of the plastic elements.” But he had some reservations that ran counter to the impression his fellow critics took away from the show: “Where De Niro usually goes wrong is with his hot, violent color.… It is as if De Niro wished to compensate himself for his restraint as a draftsman by self-indulgence and bombast in his color.”

By any standard, this was a significant splash to make in the New York art world, especially at such a tender age. For a time, De Niro was spoken of alongside such peers as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline, few of whom had yet enjoyed a one-man show and all of whom were older than him, sometimes by decades.

A
S THE
A
BSTRACT
E
XPRESSIONISTS
—and the critics who favored them—rose to prominence in the years after World War II, De Niro slowly drifted from his exalted position. In part this was due to temperament: as the excitement grew around the new school of New York painters, De Niro remained doggedly adherent to the combination of
classical subject matter and modern technique, of precise craft and expressive energy. Now and again he toyed with novelty, such as in his canvas “Venice at Night Is a Negress in Love,” in which he painted a passage of prose onto the canvas in a concession to contemporary fads. But such trendy gestures had little appeal for him. De Niro seemingly could partake of trendy practices only if they were contained inside a specific context—a single painting or a series executed to see through a single idea. Otherwise he showed no great enthusiasm for them, and they had no discernible echo in his larger aesthetic. As Abstract Expressionism grew in popularity and impact, he could even become antagonistic toward the movement, or at least to its looming presence over the practice of modern American art:
“Contemporary abstract art is a heap of confusion, hatred, and paranoia, with a good dose of pretension,” he remarked a few years later. “Rembrandt could have drip-painted too, if he had wanted. I’d take Grandma Moses any day over this frenzied lot.… With all their theories and manifestos they sound like science fiction.”

But there were personal reasons that may have led to his inability to turn his Art of This Century show into the launching pad for a profitable career. By the time the show was presented, he and Virginia Admiral had separated, whether due to his ambivalent sexuality, to friction arising from their competing art careers, to disagreement about the financial exigencies of establishing a household suited for raising a child, or (and this is least likely, as their later lives would bear out) to simple personal incompatibility. After a brief initial period around 1945, when the separating couple quarreled over custody and the boy was sent to Syracuse to spend time with his father’s family, De Niro and Admiral continued to live near each other and to raise their only child more or less in harmony. She assumed the more active parenting role by far, effectively maintaining full custody of the boy, and her husband (they wouldn’t officially divorce for more than a decade) would continue on his singular, focused, iconoclastic path, taking only nominal financial responsibility for his child and, in fact, coming to depend on the largesse of his ex-wife to support him and his career.

A maniacal perfectionist and committed aesthete, De Niro so
required freedom to pursue his work that he was willing to forgo ordinary standards of financial and physical comfort.
“He is lean and brooding and he has frequently gone hungry for want of artistic compromising,”
Newsweek
said of him. He continued to work as a museum guard (he held the position, at least part-time, for five years), then sometimes as a picture framer, painting instructor, janitor, or dishwasher, or doing other sorts of odd, menial jobs. Very occasionally he worked on commissions. And as his son later remembered, he lived in uninviting and obscure parts of lower Manhattan:
“He had these dank lofts in NoHo and SoHo at a time when nobody wanted to live in those areas. (Often he was the only tenant who wanted to live in the building.)” His preferred mode of life at the time, he confessed, was to turn everything upside down, perhaps in order to keep from falling into habits or routines, perhaps to escape the psychological depression that could occasionally trouble him.

His housing situation was often so tenuous that De Niro depended on Admiral to look after his finished canvases, a decision that had unfortunate consequences a few years into their separation, as his son remembered:
“When I was about five,” he recalled, “I went to visit Macy’s to see Santa Claus, and when I came home there was a huge fire in my mother’s apartment, so some artwork was lost,” the toll apparently including some of the canvases exhibited at Art of This Century and the companion piece to “Venice at Night.” And because he kept artist’s hours and lived in such bohemian circumstances, De Niro saw his son less and less regularly. The places in which he lived, in fact, seemed singularly unsuited environments for a child:
“As a kid, I remember I’d visit him at his studio,” the boy recalled years later. “We weren’t living together. I was living with my mother, and it was nothing like his studio as you see it now. It was like a real studio, a total mess, and it stank of paint and turpentine.”

Given his professional and personal circumstances, it was perhaps no surprise that De Niro didn’t mount another solo show until 1951, when he had three exhibitions at the prestigious Charles Egan Gallery and acquired more admirers among the ranks of critics and cognoscenti. His work was especially well received in the prestigious pages of
ARTnews
, which dedicated dozens of reviews to him over the decades,
almost all of them favorable. This was to some degree the doing of Thomas B. Hess, the influential critic for and, eventually, editor of the magazine, who began championing De Niro with that first Egan show: “He must now be ranked among the best of the younger artists to have emerged from anonymity.”

Over the years, De Niro’s work was celebrated by
ARTnews
critics such as Henry McBride and Frank O’Hara (“each show of his is an event”) almost without reservation, even when other publications, particularly the
New York Times
, took a more measured approach to their praise or offered none at all. But even with influential boosters, De Niro’s star was waning. The fashion of the moment—Action painting, Abstract Expressionism, the artist as bohemian hero expressing his inner angst on canvas and in daily life without regard to public norms or approval—was a far cry from the work that De Niro was doing and the type of life he preferred to live. As he matured, the elder De Niro expressed a variety of impulses and predilections, sometimes genuine eccentricity of the sort often associated with bohemians but just as often considered an affect or pose. He played tennis and chess, studied metapsychology, took singing lessons so as to be able to perform gospel music (albeit never in public), and taught himself French to the point at which he could not only read his beloved Symbolist poets but write verse in their language (he was fond of signing letters “Bob Verlaine De Niro”). He kept pets in his stream of studios and lofts: parrots, a Maltese named Napoleon, and even a rabbit. He ran regularly at a downtown YMCA, with “a kind of funny stride,” according to a friend. And he cut a startling figure, per his longtime advocate Thomas B. Hess:
“
tall
,
saturnine
, given to black trench coats, his face as sharp as a switchblade.”

He was, said another acquaintance, “a lonely soul” with “an elegant mind,” and he was almost pathologically private. If he had lovers—male or female—he rarely let the outside world see or know about them. (
“I didn’t know much about his social life other than what my mother would say,” his son would later reveal. “I was never exposed to his sexuality, but my mother told me about it later. That was part of his ‘thing,’ and he kept it very quiet.”) He held the highest aesthetic standards and could be caustic in dismissing the work—or way of life—of those he
felt were not worthy, though this disdain could cost him professionally. As painter Al Kresch, who’d known him since their student days, put it,
“Anyone he knew he had a falling-out with.”

As his son confirmed,
“He had a temper, but he was witty and caustic. Very sarcastic about certain things, especially other artists who he didn’t respect. He also used to make fun of people who would put on false airs and speak with an affected accent.… He was self-centered and concerned about what he wanted to do, but I think when you’re an artist you have to have that selfishness to be alone and create great things to your satisfaction.” The poet Barbara Guest, who remembered him as
“fiercely engaged with his work,” depicted him as “alone in the tremendously cluttered place in which he painted … erratic, gloomy, untidy.… There was no social life of dinners.… There were many parties he did not attend.…‘Affability’ is not a word that applied to Bob, nor is ‘social.’ He was given to acid comments about the art scene, with which I might add, he was thoroughly familiar.” He apparently struggled with depression on and off throughout his life, and there are hints in some accounts that he was diagnosed with what would later be known as bipolar disorder.