In the 1940s, Bohemian New York would decamp to Provincetown, on Cape Cod, for the summer. "Washashores," as the locals called them, included Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Nin, who was reported to the police in 1941 for sunbathing topless, enjoyed the town’s legendary promiscuity: "The sand dunes are so white they seem at times like ski slopes," she wrote in her diary. "Some night clubs are on the beach. The tables are set on terraces and jazz floats over the beach. Couples lie in the fishing boats." Despite feeling outnumbered by homosexual men, Nin found herself lovers; in a story called "Life in Provincetown," Nin’s female protagonist enjoys a different man each night.

The cover photograph of Robert De Niro Sr., one of New York’s most prominent figurative expressionists and friend to all the above (also the father of the famous actor of the same name), was taken in the early 1940s as he was relaxing on one of P-town’s ski slope dunes. He was studying at the time at Hans Hofmann’s legendary summer school, a makeshift atelier in a converted barn. Virginia Admiral, De Niro Jr.’s mother, was another of Hofmann’s talented students; the couple paid their way by helping Nin write erotica — what Nin called "literary aphrodisiacs" — commissioned by a Southern "collector" for a dollar a page.

I’d heard that Robert De Niro Jr. had kept his father’s SoHo studio intact since the painter’s death in 1993, but thought that this was just another urban myth. In this issue De Niro Jr. tells me about his unconventional father and the studio shrine that he has indeed maintained as a time capsule of 1950s bohemia. The postwar countercultural theme is continued in George Pendle’s article on Richard Prince’s collection of beatnik ephemera — books that document Beat poetry, communal living, acid and anarchism — all sources that influence his work. Charline von Heyl, like Prince, has been finding inspiration in the book covers and art catalogues of the 1940s, as Modern Painters found when we visited her Chelsea studio. A critic who met De Niro Sr. in the late 1950s wrote that he seemed to make "slow progress against his own devils," and von Heyl, who is embarking on a new series of paintings, talks frankly about a similarly torturous creative process.

"Editor's Letter" 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.