spent the summer of 1938 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, studying with Ralph Pearson, an artist best known for his landscapes. Pearson held his classes on a coal barge in Gloucester Harbour, which is where De Niro first read the plays of Eugene O’Neill. The grim picture of the emigrant experience in O’Neill’s Anna Christie impressed him so much that he modelled a stage set for a possible production.
After Gloucester, De Niro gravitated to New York, studying by day and waiting tables at night. Much serious art discourse in New York at that time centred on Hans Hofmann, who had arrived from Munich via Paris, trailing an impressive record as a teacher and theoretician. Hofmann opened a school in 1933, and in the summer of 1935 started summer sessions in Provincetown, Rhode Island.
In the winter of 1938–39 Hofmann gave an influential series of six lectures in New York on new movements in European art. They were attended by the best emerging American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, and future critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, all of whom, recognising that Surrealism was waning, were alert for the next new thing, Abstract Expressionism. The following summer, Pollock and some others followed Hofmann to Provincetown. He only accepted twenty-five students for his summer school. Among them in 1939 was Robert De Niro.
At the end of 1939, De Niro won a place at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where one of the greatest of contemporary artists, Josef Albers, taught. Set up in 1933 by a group of liberal academics, Black Mountain admitted only fifty students, and gave them superior teaching and maximum freedom. De Niro spent most of 1939 and 1940 there – a frustrating time, since Albers found his work ‘too emotional’. De Niro, then, as later, inclined to be argumentative, protested, ‘A painting can’t be too emotional. It can be controlled, but never too emotional.’ After a year of trying to satisfy Albers, he returned to New York early in 1941, with only $5 in his pocket. That summer, he once again attended Hofmann’s summer school.
A village of crackerbox cabins scattered among the dunes of the Atlantic coast, Provincetown had a reputation for bohemianism and political radicalism that went back to the turn of the century. The Provincetown Playhouse and Provincetown Players were co-founded by Communist ideologue John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World, who scandalised the community by running off with Louise Bryant, art-struck wife of a local dentist. In 1916, Eugene O’Neill had his first play performed there. After that, painters and writers from New York and Boston, called sarcastically by the locals ‘wash-ashores’, found it a useful summer hangout, particularly when, thanks to Hofmann, it became a centre for avant-garde artists too.
Young playwright Tennessee Williams also turned up in Provincetown in 1941, hoping to have a play accepted at the Playhouse. He and De Niro met at Captain Jack’s, a pier-end restaurant where both worked as waiters. It shared a building with a boarding house where two out-of-work dance students lived, one of whom, Kip Kiernan, also modelled for Hofmann. Tennessee Williams fell in love with Kiernan, the first man with whom he enjoyed a complete sexual relationship – celebrated in his long-suppressed play Sometimes Cloudy, Sometimes Bright. Williams, Kiernan and their friend Donald Windham made no secret of their activities, documenting them in nude photographs. Among Williams’ lovers that summer was Jackson Pollock, whose alcoholism inflamed a taste for being promiscuously sodomised.
With his movie-star good looks – he resembled the actor Robert Stack – De Niro was not short of admirers, male and female, and it was during this period at Provincetown that he acknowledged his own homosexuality, and probably had his first homosexual experience. Williams and Kiernan may have initiated him, but it’s equally possible that Pollock was among his first lovers.
Hofmann’s classes that year also included a lively young woman from Dalles, Oregon. Even in a community where women were accustomed to speaking out and being heard, Virginia Admiral’s voice was confident and committed. A Communist from her teens, she’d joined the Trotskyite Young People’s Socialist League on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and led its clashes with the Stalinist Young Communist League.
Admiral’s closest friend on campus was Oakland-born poet Robert Duncan – ‘a strikingly beautiful boy,’ remembered the writer Anaïs Nin, ‘who looked about seventeen, with regular features, abundant hair, a faunish expression and a slight deviation in one eye, which made him seem to be looking always beyond and around you.’
Already an outsider by virtue of his homosexuality, Duncan joined Admiral’s radical circle, which also included Pauline Kael, future film critic of the New Yorker. At Admiral’s urging, he quit obligatory Reserve Officer Training Corps military training, and eventually left UCLA altogether for Black Mountain. Politically advanced for the time, Black Mountain’s faculty still wasn’t sufficiently so for Duncan, who, after an argument with the administration about the Spanish Civil War, quickly exited, accompanied by his new lover, one of the instructors.
In 1939, Admiral decided to abandon literature for art. Her mother, fearful that she would never be able to support herself, demanded she at least earn a teaching credential before plunging into bohemia. Virginia acquiesced, but only if she could study at Columbia in New York. Her mother agreed, provided she live at the college’s International House, in effect under supervision. Once in New York, Admiral did enrol in a teaching course of sorts, though it was a Masters programme in Art Education, which gave her plenty of opportunities to paint.
By then, Robert Duncan was living in Woodstock, New York, on ‘Cooney’s Farm’, a commune-cum-artists’ colony run by James Cooney and his wife Blanche. An enthusiast for D.H. Lawrence, Cooney published the Phoenix, a magazine dedicated to Lawrence’s work. The farm was a log cabin in the woods; guests bunked down in the old woodshed. Admiral spent time there in 1940, and, with Duncan, edited the first and only issue of the literary magazine Epitaph, which would evolve into Experimental Review.
Among Cooney’s visitors was Anaïs Nin. Eroticist, fabulist, lover and muse of Henry Miller, who dedicated Tropic of Cancer to her, the small, dark and seductive Nin had fled from Nazi-occupied Paris with banker husband Ian Hugo, and was now cutting a swathe through New York literary society.
Nin didn’t think Virginia sufficiently awed by her tales of wild times in Paris. ‘Virginia and her friends dress like schoolchildren,’ she wrote pettishly in her diary. ‘Baby shoes, little bows in their hair, little-girl dresses, little-boy clothes, orphan hats, schoolgirl short socks; they eat candy, sugar, ice cream. And some of the books they read are like schoolchildren’s books; how to win friends, how to make love, how to do this or that. They prefer the radio, the movies, recordings, to hearing experiences directly. They are not curious about people, only their voices over a machine and their faces on the screen.’
After the farm, Virginia taught for six weeks at a summer camp in Maine. By the time she returned to New York, the tuition money borrowed from her father had run out. Quitting college, she settled down to paint, supporting herself by waiting tables in Greenwich Village, and sharing a loft with two friends on 14th Street, above Union Square, for a rent of $30 a month.
Meant as factory spaces, lofts were zoned for commercial use only. The high-beamed ceilings rested on massive wooden pillars. Floors were of wide planks, uneven and splintered. Few lofts had bathrooms, kitchens or heating. But for artists unconcerned about creature comfort, they offered a peerless working environment. Robert Duncan wrote in his journal, ‘Virginia’s studio opens out. We stand in the shadows above the lights of 14th St. The paintings move back into the walls like mirrors of our dreams – the dark stage of gathering forces. This is our last nursery – this is today’s, 1941’s projection of a Berkeley paradise where we go over again drawings by Virginia, by Mary, by Lillian, by Cecily, by me from the golden age – where I sit reading to Virginia and her fellow students.’
Anaïs Nin was less impressed when she visited. ‘The first floor houses a shop, a hamburger bar,
