robert De Niro, sr.
Robert De Niro, Sr.’s mother, Helen O’Reilly, an Irish American, encouraged him to pursue a career in art, unlike his Italian-American father, Henry Martin De Niro, who opposed the idea. De Niro (1922–1993) studied at the experimental Black Mountain College under Josef Albers from 1939 to 1940, and then with Hans Hofmann, with whom he enjoyed a close friendship. Hofmann’s emphasis on dynamic structure and his enthusiasm for Henri Matisse had a lasting influence on De Niro. A self-proclaimed perfectionist, De Niro painted and repainted his canvases and, unlike Hofmann who worked spontaneously, he executed hundreds of studies before deciding on a particular subject. De Niro married fellow painter and poet Virginia Admiral in 1942, with whom he had his only child, the actor Robert De Niro, Jr.
De Niro traveled from 1961 to 1964, establishing himself in Paris and painting landscapes. Later, he taught at The Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and was a visiting artist in Michigan State University’s art department in 1974. He was the recipient of a Longview Foundation Award in 1958 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968. De Niro’s work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City; and the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, among many others.
