You have likely heard the name Robert De Niro before—the two-time Academy Award winning actor has starred in 53 motion pictures. But you might not realize the connection De Niro has to some of the most influential abstract artists of the 20th Century. His father, Robert De Niro Sr., studied at the Black Mountain College under Josef Albers, and then studied with Hans Hofmann at his summer school in Massachusetts. It was there, in fact, that De Niro Sr. met his future wife,
Virginia Admiral—mother of Robert De Niro the actor—who was also an artist. Both Admiral and De Niro Sr. were close associates of Peggy Guggenheim when she ran her famous Art of This Century gallery in New York in the 1940s, and both also had solo shows in that gallery. But in 1944, just one year into their marriage, and only months after their son was born, De Niro Sr. revealed he was gay and separated from Admiral. In order to raise their child, Admiral all but abandoned her fledgling art career, despite arguably being a superior, and more Modern painter than her husband. De Niro Sr., meanwhile, continued painting and exhibiting his work, becoming a fixture amongst the Abstract Expressionist community of the 50s and 60s. However, despite the fact that his paintings were exhibited alongside those of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, De Niro Sr. never attained the same level of fame as his contemporaries. That could be because his aesthetic principals were in direct opposition to those of the Action Painters. He once said, “The whole idea of ‘action painting’ is foreign to me, and, I believe, detrimental to painting.” Instead, De Niro Sr. embraced the quasi-figurative methods of the early European Modernists. Blending the Fauvist colors of Henri Matisse with the brutish, painterly surfaces of Hofmann, De Niro Sr. created a distinctive, quasi-figurative visual voice that set him apart from his famous friends.
