An Elegant Mind

Paul Resika Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Willem de Kooning Constantin Brancusi Franz Kline Robert De Niro, Sr. Eugene Delacroix

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In SoHo, New York, there is an artist’s studio that has been kept almost exactly as its inhabitant left it when he died 16 years ago. It is a time capsule of ’50s bohemia, a loft space presided over by an ornate birdcage and antique ski machine, every inch of wall covered in rugs, African masks, ex-votos, charcoal drawings, and vibrant watercolors. A corridor flanked by storage racks crammed with richly colored canvases leads into the studio itself (the space is two apartments knocked into one), a huge, bright room with three easels, on one of which is a fauvist group of nudes dated 1977. Tubes of oil have exploded with age and ooze over a painting table where an army of brushes stands neatly at attention.

This intriguing space isn’t a museum — as the studios of Pollock, Bacon, and Brancusi now are — but a private shrine to the painter Robert De Niro, and maintained by his son, the actor of the same name. "I try to keep it as much as possible as it was when he passed away," De Niro Jr. tells me when we meet at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, the Midtown gallery that last autumn had an exhibition of his father’s semiabstract summer landscapes. "I wanted to keep it for his grandchildren, my kids. I wanted them to know what their grandfather did. I’ve taken pictures, documented everything, but I just try and hold on to it, to preserve everything as it was, as long as I can." Even a worn down hairbrush, complete with the artist’s DNA, has been left in situ. The space is a kind of memorial that freezes time: "Sometimes I just go there and sit," De Niro says.

As he speaks about his father, De Niro often looks away from me, furrowing his brow and tightening his mouth in a gesture of concentration familiar to anyone who has seen him onscreen. De Niro is famously taciturn about his private life, yet his admiration for his father leads him to want to keep alive a more public memory of the painter’s work — and perhaps to immerse himself in it in ways that he didn’t when his father was alive. "I wish I understood," he tells me when I ask him about his father’s working methods. "I never asked him and he never explained it to me. I wish at the time I’d been a little more curious."

De Niro Sr., whose temper, eccentricity, and passion De Niro has said he shares (as well as "a strong connection to the smell of oil paints and cigarettes and musty old sweaters"), was one of America’s most prominent figurative expressionists, a handsome, curly-haired wunderkind who burst on the New York scene in 1946, aged 24, with his first solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery on 57th Street. The eminent critic Clement Greenberg, later Jackson Pollock’s kingmaker, praised De Niro’s work in The Nation: "The originality and force of his temperament demonstrate themselves under an iron control of the plastic elements such as is rarely seen in our time outside the painting of the oldest surviving members of the school of Paris." In 1955 the poet and critic Frank O’Hara wrote that De Niro was "one of the most original and powerful younger painters showing today, and each show of his is an event." De Niro Jr. was brought up surrounded by artistic celebrities — Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and Tennessee Williams. "My parents both moved in bohemian circles," he says with modest understatement.

De Niro Sr.’s paintings are collected in the vaults of MoMA, the Met, the Hirshhorn, and the Whitney, but they are most prominently on display in De Niro Jr.’s Tribeca Grill restaurant and in his recently opened Greenwich Hotel. (De Niro is understandably protective of his father’s work — an impulse that has recently led to a legal dispute. After his father’s death, De Niro Jr. and his mother organized a retrospective of his work at the Salander-O’Reilly gallery, and when Larry Salander declared himself bankrupt last year, he gave his creditors five paintings by De Niro Sr. to help pay his debts. De Niro Jr. is now fighting to get those paintings back.)