Admiral gave up painting. Inspired by her work for Nin and needing to take care of her son, she started a typing and editing service called Academy. One of her clients was the theater teacher Maria Piscator, who invited De Niro Jr. to attend the Dramatic Workshop she ran at the New School of Social Research, which he attended on Saturdays from the age of 10. Admiral, who expanded into real estate, found her ex-husband cheap studios in which to work and helped him financially, as did friends like the de Koonings. In his memoir, the painter Larry Rivers describes how De Niro Sr. would ring up at 2 in the morning "asking for cash (he’d take a check) so that he could continue working on his art uninterrupted by the time it took to make a living." He adds, "These were more demands than requests."

When his son became famous in the mid-’70s, he too helped out. "He was proud of me, but in some ways it must have been hard for him," De Niro Jr. once wrote in a tribute to his father. "Although he had a lot of respect among his peers, he didn’t have a certain world recognition.... He liked my celebrity but was also sort of resigned to it — our name was the same, but it wasn’t he who was making it known." In the early ’80s De Niro Sr. moved into this final studio, a space that he inherited from Admiral. There are no family photographs on display there — just postcards of work by artists he admired (Bonnard, Ingres, Matisse) — but in the bedroom there is a file of press clippings marked "Bobby."

When De Niro Sr. became ill, he moved back in with his ex-wife. He died of cancer in 1993, age 71. That year De Niro Jr. dedicated his directorial debut, A Bronx Tale, to his father. De Niro has decorated his own nearby apartment with his father’s paintings, and has an almost worshipful relationship to his father’s talent. "I only keep his works, I don’t have anything else," he says with a mischievous smile. "I’m very partial to say the least." 

"An Elegant Mind" originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' Summer 2009 Table of Contents.