1942, Peggy Guggenheim included some of Admiral’s work in the Spring Salon for Young Artists at Art of This Century, and Alfred Barr bought one of her canvases, Composition, for the Museum of Modern Art. He only paid $100, but nobody else in her group had sold anything at all. Though Jackson Pollock was widely acknowledged as the brightest of the emerging New York School, it would be 1944 before Barr bought anything by him.
Virginia’s success, coming at a time when Robert had sold nothing himself, strained the marriage still more. He succumbed increasingly to depression. On the wall of his studio, he scribbled two lines from a poem by nineteenth-century poet and photographer Charles Cros, friend of Rimbaud and Verlaine: ‘Je suis un homme mort depuis plusiers années/Mes os sont recouvert par les roses fanées’ (‘I have been a dead man many years/My bones are clothed in faded roses’).
His resentment grew as it became clear that, despite her sale to MoMA, Virginia didn’t seriously contemplate a career in art. After the birth of Bobby, she concentrated on making a living. Robert had no such concerns. He lived for painting, unworried whether he sold his canvases or not. He wouldn’t achieve any kind of reputation until 1946, when Peggy Guggenheim gave him his first one-man show at Art of This Century, and another didn’t come along until 1950.
As if the social and sexual differences between Robert and Virginia were not enough, they also faced the classic artistic gulf between the figurative and the abstract. ‘For virtually his entire career,’ wrote critic Peter Frank, ‘Robert De Niro Sr painted recognisable images; still life objects, interiors, landscapes, the occasional religious subject, and, above all, figures.’ Composition and the rest of Admiral’s work was entirely abstract, and, given the prevailing movement away from Surrealism, more fashionable.
Being figurative placed De Niro, as one friend remarked, ‘on the wrong side of the commercial divide’. In 1949, Clement Greenberg would list De Niro, Pollock, de Kooning and Robert Motherwell as artists who ‘must still waste valuable energy in the effort to survive as working artists in the face of a public whose indifference consigns them to neglect and poverty’. By then, however, Robert’s finances were of less concern to Virginia, and to Bobby, because the De Niros were no longer living together.
CHAPTER THREE My Father’s Business
They are not girls. They are not boys. They can’t help it. They was born that way. Something in de throat.
Two old ladies commenting on homosexuals in Joel Schumacher’s screenplay for his film Flawless (1999), in which De Niro starred
As tensions increased in their marriage, Robert and Virginia began seeing a Freudian therapist. ‘Many artists who knew Hans Hofmann,’ recalls Barbara Guest, ‘went to a particular shrink whose patients (eventually) had terrible crises and breakdowns. But he couldn’t help them. He was a frustrated man – a failed artist, who meddled.’
The therapist may have been Dr Lawrence Kubie, who claimed to ‘cure’ homosexuals, and whose patients included such showbiz figures as bisexual playwright and director Moss Hart. Following their ‘treatment’, the De Niros agreed to separate, though since adultery still represented the main grounds for divorce, they decided, rather than air their sexual incompatibility in the courts, to delay a formal dissolution of the marriage.
While his parents worked out new domestic arrangements, Bobby was sent to his father’s parents in Syracuse, where, despite Robert’s hostility towards Catholicism, Bobby’s grandparents had him baptised. Though Robert was furious, the gesture had little real effect, since Bobby was almost immediately returned to New York, and to his mother. Nevertheless, being ‘officially’ Catholic would cement him even more firmly into the Italo-American culture.
Robert moved into a Greenwich Village studio, and immersed himself in the principles of Abstract Expressionism. What those principles were depended on who taught them. Art historian Lee Hall calls Abstract Expressionism ‘an attitude, if not a proper philosophy, of art [which] pits the lonely and searching individual against the unknown (possibly unknowable) first forces of the universe, casting the painter in the role of voyager and seeker after truth. By courting accidents resulting from the manipulated collision of materials, by taking risks with the surprising imagery that results, and by exploring that imagery to discover new vision, the painter creates an order that embodies his or her quest. To the Abstract Expressionist, the process of painting is more valued than the product, the finished painting.’ As an actor, Bobby would also conceive himself as a ‘voyager and seeker after truth’ whose work embodied the ‘manipulated collision of materials’ to achieve ‘surprising imagery’.
Always a slow worker, Robert became slower still. For every canvas completed, he threw out a hundred, then reworked the survivors, often erasing the entire design before starting over. Despite this, his work changed little over the years. He shared Matisse’s enthusiasm for North African subjects, and, when a magazine photograph of Moorish women posed in an elaborate interior caught his eye, began painting his own versions of it – but, with characteristic obsessiveness, continued to do so for twenty years. A driven search for ‘perfect’ colours gradually made his pictures brighter, but his canvases of the late forties feature the same roughly painted figures as those he exhibited four decades later.
‘He had a few friends,’ says Barbara Guest, ‘but mostly was alone in the tremendously cluttered place in which he painted. Sometimes I saw him out walking, and a scene plays across the screen of my mind of the day I saw him, standing on the sidewalk, talking to a woman friend while he held his mongrel dog on a leash. It was a typical encounter, a repeated scene in his life. There was no social life of dinners etc. There were many parties he did not attend, or at which he showed up as if out walking the dog.’ When he did arrive at a party, he was seldom a social asset. ‘He was given to acid comments about the art scene,’ says Guest. ‘He preferred provocative conversations.’ If he found a subject uninteresting, half-finished sentences would tail off into silence.
Virginia and Bobby remained in the Bleecker Street apartment. As long as Bobby was too young for nursery school, she took paying work she could do at home. For a while, she framed pictures at $1.25 an hour – not enough to maintain the loft, which in any event was about to be taken over by The Little Red Schoolhouse, an elementary school launched to give the children of Greenwich Village the sort of education demanded by radical parents. Virginia moved to a smaller apartment, at 521 Hudson Street, a building mostly of studios, where many painter friends rented space. She stayed there until she found a better place at 219 West 14th Street. The rent was high, at $50 a month, but the two-room apartment with its parquet floors and central heating was too tempting. Bobby would grow up and live most of his young adult life here.
When he was old enough, Virginia placed Bobby in the nursery school attached to Greenwich House on Barrow Street. Set up to provide arts training and a social centre to the downtown area, Greenwich House included music and pottery schools, as well as its kindergarten, which charged working mothers only $1.25 a month.
Starting at the nursery brought De Niro into contact for the first time with the Ethical Culture Movement, which ran a free kindergarten and various humanitarian projects in and around New York. Founded by Felix Adler in 1876, Ethical Culture offered a substitute for organised religion, founded on ethics and morality rather than dogma. Adler spelled out its four principles: ‘1. Every person has inherent worth; each person is unique. 2. It is our responsibility to improve the quality of life for ourselves and others. 3. Ethics are derived from human experience. 4. Life is sacred, interrelated and interdependent.’ Though never particularly religious, De Niro, with Virginia’s encouragement, would grow away from his grandparents’ Catholicism towards the principles of Ethical Culture. When he married in 1976, it would be at the group’s
