"He hung those paintings," De Niro says proudly of the three big canvases that adorn the back wall of the Grill, two of which depict an orientalist harem of Moroccan women (after Delacroix) and another a scene from Garbo’s Anna Christie. De Niro recalls how nervous he was when he first suggested the idea, because his father "was very touchy" when it came to giving away his work. ("You give it to someone, they put it in a closet," De Niro Sr. told his son when he asked if he could give Francis Ford Coppola two canvases for his 50th birthday.) He was thrilled to hear that De Niro Sr., who also designed the artwork on the menu, would sometimes go in and enjoy dinner or a drink as he admired his creations. After his father’s death, De Niro hung his final painting, an enormous still life on which he had worked for almost a decade, in a private dining area.

In De Niro Sr.’s bedroom is a browning copy of The Christian Science Monitor by the bed, which records the last day he spent in it. André Breton described his 1933 visit to Picasso’s work space as an initiation into "the studio’s secrets of the boudoir." What clues to Robert De Niro Sr.’s life and times does his fossilized apartment and studio contain? And what does it say about his son’s idolizing relationship with him that he’s kept it intact?

Robert De Niro Sr. was born in 1922 in Syracuse, upstate New York, to an Irish mother and an Italian father who worked as a health inspector. He knew he wanted to be a painter from the age of five and was so precociously accomplished that at 12 he was given a private studio at the Syracuse museum, where he took painting classes. In 1939, he won a full scholarship to the legendarily avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina to study with the former Bauhaus color theorist Josef Albers. De Niro found Albers dogmatic and excessively scientific in his approach to color; Albers found De Niro too expressionistic and emotional. However, Albers recognized De Niro’s obvious talent, comparing the 17-year-old to Modigliani and Grünewald, and, when he went to Mexico on sabbatical, Albers allowed De Niro to take over his own studio, hoping that his star pupil would still be there when he returned. De Niro, however, had taken a class the preceding summer with another German émigré, Hans Hofmann, whose teaching style he preferred. In 1941 he left Black Mountain to join Hofmann’s New York school on Eighth Street, whose alumni include Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ray Eames.

"He was handsome, very elegant," the painter Albert Kresch, who was also a Hofmann student in 1941, tells me of De Niro. "Better-looking than his son, a couple of inches taller and his hair was fairer. He was poetic in the Byronic sense." De Niro fell in love with one of his colleagues, an attractive blonde with a fabulous name: Virginia Admiral. They were married in December 1941. Admiral was seven years older than De Niro and also an accomplished painter; she and De Niro were Hofmann’s favorite students (Kresch describes the couple as "super confident" when it came to painting). She’d been a radical student at Berkeley, where she was a member of the Trotskyite Young People’s Socialist League and, with the poet Robert Duncan, founded a literary magazine whose impressive contributors became part of her circle of artistic and literary friends.

If Hofmann played the role of paterfamilias, Anaïs Nin was the bad mother to Admiral and De Niro’s group. Nin was particularly impressed by Duncan: "a strikingly beautiful boy, who looks about seventeen" (he was, in fact, 20; Nin was 37); she referred to Admiral and Duncan as "children" and compared them to Cocteau’s Enfants Terribles. In her diary, Nin described Admiral’s artist’s garret above a hamburger shop and shoe store as a cold, bare loft with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Union Square: "There is a lavatory outside, running water and washstand inside, and that is all. On weekends, the heat is turned off. The enormous windows which give on to the deafening traffic noise of 14th Street have to be kept closed. There are nails on the walls for clothes, a Sterno burner for making coffee. We drink sour wine out of paper cups." It was a mini-salon; Duncan referred to it as "our last nursery."