Robert de Niro Sr - Ameringer-Yohe

8/2/2019 Robert de Niro Sr - Ameringer-Yohe

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S U M M E R L A N D S C A P E S

20 West 57th Street New York, New York 10019

tel: 212 445 0051 ax: 212 445 0102 www.ameringer-yohe.com

10 September 25 October 2008

Robert De Niro, Sr.


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Robert DeNiro, Sr.: The Landscapes

Those who came into contact with Robert

De Niro, Sr., and his artwork were invariably

impressed, even stunned, by his virtuosity,

his erudition, his contagious enthusiasm or

human artistic endeavor and his entirely

personal approach to making art, an approach

at once radically idiosyncratic and part o the

painterly discourse o his time and place. That

time and place was postwar New York, one

o historys great artistic nexuses. De Niro

participated closely, even crucially, in the citys

cultural erment, earning the admiration o his

contemporaries. Few others o his generation

realized such a marriage not just hybrid, but

usion o supposedly contradictory styles

with the same lan: his seemingly eortless

application o Abstract Expressionist technique

to representational subject matter conronted,

perplexed, delighted and liberated his peers,

upsetting critical dogma as it did with its

insouciant inclusiveness an inclusiveness

that De Niro demonstrated was to be ound in

the European, especially French, models thatmost closely motivated the artists o his milieu.

Although De Niro star student o Hans

Homann, veteran teacher in New Yorks

academies, longtime xture on the exhibition

circuit, close riend and collaborator with poets

and musicians as well as painters and sculptors

was an integral part o the New York School

or a hal century, he produced some o his most

notable work beyond the connes o the city.

Indeed, unlike so many o his riends, De Niro

did not express much enchantment with the city

itsel in his art. His gures and his still lies are

studio works, sealed o rom any extraneous

actors. His religious works are either close

studies o extant artistic masterpieces or

pictorial and ideational conabulations, born

less o a devotion to a specic creed (his native

Catholicism or any other) than to a ervid

interest in the visual maniestation o spiritual

ardor. As such, De Niros devotional paintings,

most notably his crucixion studies, drew not

on New Yorks religious communities, but on the

contents o its churches and museums. De Niros

landscapes, meanwhile, are not o New York

City at all.

This in itsel is somewhat startling; but it comes

as even more o a surprise that De Niro did

not turn exclusively to landscape. His bold,

line-dependent composition and complex,

atmospheric palette lend themselves superbly

to the rendition o the outside world not tothe construction o space itsel, but to the

description o discrete and erratic zones that

together cohere into what our sight tells us are

places, not just things or people. We might guess

that De Niro produced some landscapes while

studying with Homann in Provincetown in the

early 1940s. Homanns own landscape paintings

and drawings date primarily rom this period

and in their own bright color, emphatic drawn

line, and reductive, abstracting eect on objects


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aord a telling comparison with De Niros later

landscapes. But i he did paint landscapes in

Provincetown, they have been lost (perhaps in

the 1949 studio re that consumed much o his

early work).

The rst time the mature De Niro turned to

the landscape was during his rst extended

absence rom New York, in the early 1960s. He

had moved to Paris, later repairing to several

small villages in the Pyrenees. His notebooks

and letters to riends indicate he be gan drawing

en plein airwhile in the French capital, but that

he began painting the outside when he moved

south. Im writing poems again and have done

pastels o the landscape as I did at Gravigny,

De Niro wrote to Dick Brewer in 1962. Here its

a little easier to work outside as the re arent the

gaping children etc., so Ill probably do more

oils o the surroundings than I did when I was

near Paris

The landscape paintings rom France as well asthe later landscapes are by and large preoccu

pied not with traditional landscape subjects

verdant spaces and receding roads but

with the ormal dynamic o man-made objects,

mostly buildings, in urban and rural settings. Like

his interiors and still lies, De Niro conceived

o his landscapes as arrangements o shapes

and colors, and in the nal analysis they are no

more atmospheric than his studio paintings.

But landscape provided him the kinds o orms

and compositions impossible to compile in the

studio, concerned as they are with oreground-

midground-background relationships that allow

or startling scalar incongruities.

Landscapes also allowed De Niro a relatively

high degree o abstraction, permitting, even

necessitating, an approach to the description o

orm that depends on a rm but loaded brush

and a willingness to describe details such as

trees and buildings in a ew contrasting strokes

and spatial areas such as lawns and skies in

many strokes o similar hue. This ormula seems

even more limited when applied to landscape

subjects than when applied to studio images. De

Niro was able to build, even play, on this laconic,

cipher-dependent approach. Many o his riends

worked similarly, but none was able to achieve

the same level o synecdochical terseness or

dispatch it with the same elegance and brio.

We see this maniest powerully, and even more

assuredly, in the later two groups o landscapesDe Niro produced, during summers spent in

Provincetown and the Hamptons in the late 1960s

and during the two years he lived in San Francisco

a decade later. The similarity o De Niros style

generally, and in his landscapes particularly, to

the Bay Area gurative painters most especially

David Park well predates his West Coast stay,

although it may have abetted the warm reception

his work received there. In these, De Niro takes an

unusual approach to the lay o the land, producing

breathtakingly stark abstractions. His massing o

color areas and his almost ohand rendition o

houses, barns, and other buildings with a couple

o outlining strokes and repeated short strokes

or windows approach the unadorned simplicities

o childrens drawings. Somehow, De Niros almost

hieroglyphic stylizations convey structure, space,

and atmosphere with a ull range o idiomatic

infection, as i dreamt and impressed upon

memory, rather than drawn.

Is it that thick brush De Niro wielded that turns

what is essentially drawing with paint into a rich,

nuanced visual experience? Is it his palette, at

once sweet and acid like a aceul o graperuit

juice? Is it the game he plays between whats

described and whats omitted? Is it the paint

itsel, slashed and worried into a rothy torrent?

Or is it his eye, alighting upon just the right

combination o things out there by the shore or

along the street or in the woods? In the hands

o a sophisticated visual thinker like De Niro,

o course, all o the above conspire to createremarkable paintings o the landscape, the kind

that inspire awe and envy among painters and

the most delicious consternation among viewers.

Such paintings are not supposed to work so well;

but they do. They are lessons in succinctness

and inimitable exercises in visual wit.

Peter Frank

Los Angeles, July 2008

Peter Frank is Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum, Associate Editor of THE magazine Los Angeles, and art critic for Angeleno magazine and, until recently, the L. A. Weekly.

In New York, he served as art critic for The Village Voice and the SoHo Weekly News. Frank has organized numerous exhibitions, lectured extensively in North America and Europe,

and published many books and catalogues, including a 2004 monograph on Robert De Niro, Sr.


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Blue Buildings in Landscape

1968, oil on canvas

22 x 27 inches, 55.9 x 68.6 cm


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Landscape with Blue Building

1968, oil on canvas

24 x 28 inches, 61 x 71.1 cm


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Landscape with Houses

circa 1968, oil on canvas

18 x 241/2 inches, 45.7 x 62.2 cm


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Summer Landscape

1968, oil on canvas

29 x 35 inches, 73.7 x 88.9 cm

10


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Red House with Blue Door

1970, oil on panel

301/2 x 333/4 inches, 77.5 x 85.7 cm

1


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Gray Barn in Blue Landscape

1976, oil on panel

30 x 28 inches, 76.2 x 71.1 cm

1


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Landscape with Houses

1970, oil on masonite

28 x 30 inches, 71.1 x 76.2 cm

1


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Landscape with Road and Field


30 x 28 inches, 76.2 x 71.1 cm

1


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Houses in Landscape with Fence


30 x 34 inches, 76.2 x 86.4 cm

0


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Robert DeNiro, Sr.

Robert De Niro, Sr., was born on January 17, 1922, in Syracuse, New York, to Henry Martin De Niro

and Helen OReilly. He studied with Hans Homann in Provincetown and New York and briefy with

Jose Albers at Black Mountain College. In 1941, he married a ellow Homann student, Virginia

Admiral. Their son, Robert De Niro, Jr., was born the ollowing year. De Niros rst one-person

exhibition was held at Peggy Guggenheims Art o this Century Gallery in April 1946. During his

lietime, his work was shown extensively at prominent New York galleries and included in the

Whitney Annual, Stable Annual, and New York School Second Generation exhibition at The Jewish

Museum. In 1968, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Robert De Niro, Sr., died in New York

City in 1993.

De Niros work may be ound in the collections o the Metropolitan Museum o Art, the Whitney

Museum o American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

in Washington, D.C. In August 2008, a one-person exhibition o his work opened at the FundacinBilbao Bizkaia Kutxa in Bilbao, Spain.


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Published on the occasion o the exhibition

Robert De Niro, Sr.SUMMER LANDSCAPES

10 September 25 October 2008

Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art

20 West 57th Street

New York, New York 10019

tel: 212 445 0051 ax: 212 445 0102www.ameringer-yohe.com

Credits:

Catalogue designed by Hannah Alderer, HHA Design, New York

Printed by CA Design, Hong Kong

Publication copyright 2008 Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-09793300-9-4

Front cover:

Summer Landscape with Tree

not dated, oil on masonite

28 x 30 inches, 7 1.1 x 76.2 cm

Inside ront cover:

Landscape with Road and Field(detail)

page 19

Inside back cover:

Gray Barn in Blue Landscape(detail)

page 15

Robert de Niro Sr - Ameringer-Yohe

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