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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
1970, oil on masonite
30 x 28 inches, 76.2 x 71.1 cm
1
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Houses in Landscape with Fence
1970, oil on masonite
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