Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro, Sr. Page #2

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in all of the art magazines.

Clement Greenberg

was a potent voice.

De NIRO:
"Peggy Guggenheim

has discovered another

important abstract painter

"at her Art of

This Century gallery--

"Robert De Niro, whose first

show exhibits monumental effects

rare in abstract art."

KELLY:
Thomas Hess was the

editor of "Art News."

Hess developed a series,

which became very popular

and which Robert De Niro, Sr.

was a part of.

STORR:
In terms of power people,

starting with Peggy Guggenheim

and Tom Hess, you couldn't

have done better in those years.

Right away, when we

got out of Hofmann's,

this is when he started selling.

He got very good write-ups.

And he was still young,

maybe in his early 30s,

he was already painting

like someone very mature.

He found his way very early

and didn't much change

in 30 or 40 years

of painting.

He didn't have the struggle

that many of us had with going

this way or that way

to find our way.

He had known right

away what he was.

His studio, I mean,

this was it.

It was really like this

moving, live, active place.

I remember being little

and him painting me.

I was annoyed, I remember,

that I had to do it that day.

I felt everybody else

was out playing.

But I remember he

kind of dressed me,

put something on me...

a hat...and he'd

just work away.

And as I got older, I was--

and I really learned more

about his work,

I was proud that he chose me

to be one of them because

it wasn't just like

anybody could sit down.

STORR:
Robert De Niro's

way of painting...

he was not

an abstract painter.

He was a still-life painter.

He was a landscape painter.

He was a figure painter.

De Niro entered into

still-life painting

at a point where it probably was

thought by many people

as an unexciting option.

But what he managed to do was

to find a way to paint set-ups

that were so straightforward

and so without pretension

that all you thought about was,

"How did he actually do that?"

They don't look like

anybody else's still-life.

I can't name an artist

that they look like,

even though I have seen

an awful lot of paintings.

KELLY:
De Niro was influenced by

the masters and he had a keen

interest, especially,

in the French avant-garde--

Georges Rouault...

Pierre Bonnard...

Andre Derain...

Henri Matisse...

STORR:
Now, if you take

Matisse as a model,

Matisse made a very

famous painting

"Luxe, Calme et Volupte"--

luxuriousness, calm,

and voluptuousness.

And there's a lot of that

in De Niro, basically.

He paints his pleasure.

De NIRO, SR., SINGING:

Bundle up your cares and woe,

here I go, singin' low

Bye, Bye, Blackbird

[Continues singing in French]

Au revoir

[Continues humming tune]

KRESCH:
Bob was very funny.

He would be walking along

and he'd say something,

and it would be

hilarious, you know?

ELLIS:
I knew him to be

this kind of energetic,

dazzling guy

with a great sense of humor.

DRENA De NIRO:

He loved music.

He'd have a song that he

became fixated on,

and he wouldn't be able

to hear it enough

and he'd dance and sing.

KRESCH:
He liked

going to parties.

Bob loved to dance, and he

was very good at that time.

I think it was called the

Jitterbug or the Lindy Hop.

Very fast on his feet.

I remember he loved Paris.

He always had a real

thing for Paris.

KRESCH:
He taught

himself French.

He didn't go to any classes.

So that he wrote poetry.

We used to go to

foreign films.

And, of course, Greta Garbo.

He was insane

about Greta Garbo.

Give me a whiskey.

Ginger ale on the side.

And don't be stingy, baby.

KELLY:
A subject that De Niro

returned to repeatedly

was Greta Garbo,

specifically in her role

as Anna Christie.

His depictions of her are

always that first scene

in the bar when she delivers

her famous first line.

Garbo, and her melancholy

that she depicted in films

that she also experienced

in her life,

there was something about that

that really fascinated him.

And it could have been that he

saw in it a relation to his own

struggles with melancholy

and with depression.

Bob was going to a show

of his on 57th Street.

He was going up

in the elevator,

and she's in that

elevator with him!

And he had paintings

of her upstairs.

And he chickened out.

He could not get to talk

to her and tell her,

and she got out and left.

That was a big thing

that he missed on.

KELLY:
The expressionist element

in Robert De Niro Sr.'s painting

developed gradually and

a little bit later.

He first showed with the

Abstract Expressionist artists

at the Charles Egan Gallery.

And later, he

came to be associated

with a group of figural

and colorist painters,

which included Nell Blaine,

Leland Bell,

Al Kresch,

and Paul Resika.

The Abstract Expressionists

were actually not a movement.

They were a group of artists

that were given that label

by art critics, and they were,

by and large, gestural,

painterly painters who

had learned a great deal

from Picasso,

a great deal from Miro,

a great deal from Kandinsky.

They broke through the

dominance of European painting

in the history of modernism

and established the first,

internationally recognized

American school of painting.

The fact of the matter is,

though, that they couldn't

have been more different,

one to the other.

They painted in a way that

looked that they were totally

plugged in to what was

new and lively.

He enters the art world

with the older generation,

the older artists of the

New York School--

the Abstract Expressionists:

Pollock,

de Kooning,

Rothko.

He shows with the greats and

he's identified with them,

but then that doesn't last

long and somehow he doesn't

really connect with the

artists of the New York School

although he has many close

friends among them but doesn't

sort of join any

of their groups.

KELLY:
There came in the late

1940s into the early 1950s--

there became a real shift in

New York, in the art scene.

The Abstract Expressionists

were really hailed as

the new generation,

and De Niro

was a part of,

and yet separate from

that group of artists.

He was never an Abstract

Expressionist painter.

He was always a

figurative painter.

They left him behind.

They left him out.

He didn't fit.

He wasn't abstract.

In a certain way

he wasn't abstract.

He was very abstract...

in a certain way.

"Too French,"

they all said...

you know,

"not American enough."

All that bullshit.

De NIRO, VOICE-OVER:

"I feel tense and resentful.

I should be showing now.

"At our last meeting,

he said that de Kooning makes

15,000 a year from his work.

"I am possibly jealous.

God save me from that."

I remember vividly walking

with him one night,

and as we approached

the Cedar Bar on

University Place, I said,

"Let's go in, Bobby."

He said, "I never cross

the threshold of this place."

And that was the artists'

bar, you understand.

The Cedar Bar was the place

where the whole thing--

where Franz Kline was

and de Kooning and

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