Original subtitles

♪

He was the real thing... my father.

I see his work, I see how dedicated he was.

He was, to me, a great artist.

But you can't--you can never impose that on people.

They have to make their own decisions.

The thought of what he's done, all his work,

I can't not but make sure that it's held up and remembered...

so I just want to see him get his due.

That's my responsibility.

And he used to always say that artists are always recognized

after they're long gone.

Part of recognition is, is luck.

You have no control over those things,

and so if that's what's going to happen

then your time, hopefully, will come later,

and we don't even know if then.

♪

De NIRO: My father created all this beautiful artwork.

I only have his stuff.

My mother's-- some of my mother's.

We had a good relationship.

He was very affectionate. He was paternal.

He just didn't know certain things as a father, what to do,

but he was a very loving father.

I respected him a great deal and knew his art was special.

He started at 5 years old. He was very young.

He felt he was different, and he was different,

not only as an artist, for other reasons.

He was not conventional.

He was from a small town.

And he probably felt a certain amount of rejection from his father.

My grandfather was classic, old-style, kind of like, you know...

Italian American, just, you know...

I just think he didn't understand my father.

♪

De NIRO, SR., VOICE-OVER: I wanted to be an artist since the time I was in Kindergarten.

There was nobody I could practically talk to about painting.

I was very unhappy. I went everyday and painted,

but I was miserable there, had no friends.

Then I heard of Hofmann.

I decided to try him, and I went to him the next summer.

And then it was quite different because I was enthusiastic,

and I met people that I thought like,

and it was a whole-- another world.

Prior to the Second World War,

the art scene was all about Europe.

The surrealists were in Paris, the Bauhaus was in Germany.

With the Second World War, an interesting shift

came about here in the United States,

especially in New York.

You had artists fleeing Europe to come to New York for safety

and setting up schools.

And American artists are, for the first time,

really having some hands-on experience

with the most avant-garde trends in painting

and architecture and design.

MAN: Hofmann came from Germany

and set up a school which then went on

for a very, very, very long time.

And if you take all of the Hofmann students, I mean,

it's an enormously long and distinguished list.

Many, many, many really first-rate artists

were his students or proteges, in some cases.

♪

MAN: It was 1942, and there were 4 or 5 of us in that class

with Hans Hofmann.

Not only Bob, but Virginia, his wife.

Hofmann, when he'd look at the work, he did say

that his two best students--

and he had so many famous artists as students--

that Bob and Virginia were the best students he ever had.

Big compliment.

Bob and Virginia met at Hofmann's.

Virginia was very impressed with Bob's work.

And so, they hit it off.

I think he was handsome 'cause he was a little taller.

He had really blond hair for a long time.

MAN: And they had gotten married and Bobby was a baby.

He was a baby on the floor.

And she's a very good painter, Virginia Admiral--

vivacious, good-looking, very good to Bobby,

and excellent person.

Virginia was the first one who made it big when we got out.

She had a great exhibition at a big gallery

called Art of This Century.

The famous critics gave her rave reviews.

MAN: I think it's very complex why she didn't continue to paint.

I think she felt very guilty that she wasn't painting,

'cause I think she admired Bob for the fact that he just

didn't let anything get in his way.

De NIRO: I don't really feel she gave it up.

She just moved to something else.

And maybe she felt she couldn't really do it, ultimately,

or she was as far as she could go as an artist.

Not that she didn't try. She was doing things in her studio.

And her argument was always that she needed to be practical to support me.

♪

KRESCH: When the son must have been about a year old,

there was a big rift, big rift.

De NIRO: Why they couldn't stay together, they were different.

Maybe his sexuality. I don't know where that stood at that point.

My father wrote a lot about his life in his journals,

which gives me an idea of what he was going through.

"If God doesn't want me to be a homosexual, about which I have so much guilt,

"he will find a woman whom I will love and who will love me

"or at least create an interest in me

in women as sexual partners."

Obviously, I realize now that it was hard for him.

He had a lot of what it seems like classic conflicts about all that.

My mother and I spoke about it a little bit,

and he was very quiet with whatever he did 'cause I never was--

He's not gonna tell me. I'm his son, you know?

I'm the last person to know.

KRESCH: And Bob said, "I'm leaving.

"I...that's it.

I don't want to stay here anymore."

And he got a place. I think that's when he lived near me.

De NIRO: They divorced when I was around 11 or 12,

but they separated when I was around 2 or 3 or something.

My mother and father were always friends,

and she always would help him, too,

and be supportive of him and his work.

I wouldn't see him that often.

Sometimes I'd see him in the street, I'd run into him,

you know, or I'd see him on his bike.

He liked to take me to movies. So, I remember seeing--

is it "Beauty and the Beast" that was Cocteau?

I can't remember. Charlie Chaplin...

the original "King Kong", I think.

And we'd go to movies on 42nd Street.

He liked me to go to his shows,

which I didn't want to do when I was young,

but my kids are the same way, so...

One of my father's first big opportunities

was when he had a show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century.

I'm sure it meant a lot to him.

STORR: Peggy Guggenheim was a power broker

who had gone to Europe,

befriended most of the great modernists of Paris

and then came back during the war

and founded a gallery called Art of This Century.

It was in this context that she was first presenting

American artists as the peers of all of these famous European artists.

And so, to have Peggy Guggenheim pick you for a show

was a very, very big deal and it made reputations.

♪

KELLY: De Niro exhibited in the Fall Salon

at The Art of This Century gallery in 1945.

The show was largely made up of abstract paintings,

but the figures influenced by Analytical Cubism were still,

to some extent, recognizable.

The figurative strain in his work soon took over,

influenced by Ingres, Corot and Courbet.

MAN: His entry into the art world was that he captured the

attention of this art world.

He would certainly have gotten reviews

in all of the art magazines.

Clement Greenberg was a potent voice.

De NIRO: "Peggy Guggenheim has discovered another important abstract painter

"at her Art of This Century gallery--

"Robert De Niro, whose first show exhibits monumental effects

rare in abstract art."

KELLY: Thomas Hess was the editor of "Art News."

Hess developed a series, which became very popular

and which Robert De Niro, Sr. was a part of.

STORR: In terms of power people, starting with Peggy Guggenheim

and Tom Hess, you couldn't have done better in those years.

Right away, when we got out of Hofmann's,

this is when he started selling.

He got very good write-ups.

And he was still young, maybe in his early 30s,

he was already painting like someone very mature.

He found his way very early and didn't much change

in 30 or 40 years of painting.

He didn't have the struggle that many of us had with going

this way or that way to find our way.

He had known right away what he was.

His studio, I mean, this was it.

It was really like this moving, live, active place.

I remember being little and him painting me.

I was annoyed, I remember, that I had to do it that day.

I felt everybody else was out playing.

But I remember he kind of dressed me, put something on me...

a hat...and he'd just work away.

And as I got older, I was--

and I really learned more about his work,

I was proud that he chose me

to be one of them because it wasn't just like anybody could sit down.

♪

STORR: Robert De Niro's way of painting...

he was not an abstract painter.

He was a still-life painter. He was a landscape painter.

He was a figure painter.

De Niro entered into still-life painting

at a point where it probably was thought by many people

as an unexciting option.

But what he managed to do was to find a way to paint set-ups

that were so straightforward and so without pretension

that all you thought about was, "How did he actually do that?"

They don't look like anybody else's still-life.

I can't name an artist that they look like,

even though I have seen an awful lot of paintings.

KELLY: De Niro was influenced by the masters and he had a keen interest, especially,

in the French avant-garde--

Georges Rouault...

Pierre Bonnard...

Andre Derain...

Henri Matisse...

STORR: Now, if you take Matisse as a model,

Matisse made a very famous painting "Luxe, Calme et Volupte"--

luxuriousness, calm, and voluptuousness.

And there's a lot of that in De Niro, basically.

He paints his pleasure.

De NIRO, SR., SINGING: ♪ Bundle up your cares and woe, here I go, singin' low ♪

♪ Bye, Bye, Blackbird ♪

[Continues singing in French]

♪ Au revoir ♪

[Continues humming tune]

KRESCH: Bob was very funny.

He would be walking along and he'd say something,

and it would be hilarious, you know?

ELLIS: I knew him to be this kind of energetic, dazzling guy

with a great sense of humor.

DRENA De NIRO: He loved music.

He'd have a song that he became fixated on,

and he wouldn't be able to hear it enough and he'd dance and sing.

KRESCH: He liked going to parties.

Bob loved to dance, and he was very good at that time.

I think it was called the Jitterbug or the Lindy Hop.

Very fast on his feet.

I remember he loved Paris.

He always had a real thing for Paris.

KRESCH: He taught himself French.

He didn't go to any classes.

So that he wrote poetry.

We used to go to foreign films.

And, of course, Greta Garbo.

He was insane about Greta Garbo.

Give me a whiskey. Ginger ale on the side.

And don't be stingy, baby.

KELLY: A subject that De Niro returned to repeatedly

was Greta Garbo,

specifically in her role as Anna Christie.

His depictions of her are always that first scene

in the bar when she delivers her famous first line.

Garbo, and her melancholy that she depicted in films

that she also experienced in her life,

there was something about that that really fascinated him.

And it could have been that he saw in it a relation to his own

struggles with melancholy and with depression.

Bob was going to a show of his on 57th Street.

He was going up in the elevator,

and she's in that elevator with him!

And he had paintings of her upstairs.

And he chickened out.

He could not get to talk to her and tell her,

and she got out and left.

That was a big thing that he missed on.

♪

KELLY: The expressionist element in Robert De Niro Sr.'s painting

developed gradually and a little bit later.

He first showed with the Abstract Expressionist artists

at the Charles Egan Gallery.

And later, he came to be associated

with a group of figural and colorist painters,

which included Nell Blaine,

Leland Bell,

Al Kresch,

and Paul Resika.

The Abstract Expressionists were actually not a movement.

They were a group of artists that were given that label

by art critics, and they were, by and large, gestural,

painterly painters who had learned a great deal from Picasso,

a great deal from Miro, a great deal from Kandinsky.

They broke through the dominance of European painting

in the history of modernism and established the first,

internationally recognized American school of painting.

The fact of the matter is, though, that they couldn't

have been more different, one to the other.

They painted in a way that looked that they were totally

plugged in to what was new and lively.

He enters the art world with the older generation,

the older artists of the New York School-- the Abstract Expressionists:

Pollock,

de Kooning,

Rothko.

He shows with the greats and he's identified with them,

but then that doesn't last long and somehow he doesn't

really connect with the artists of the New York School

although he has many close friends among them but doesn't

sort of join any of their groups.

KELLY: There came in the late 1940s into the early 1950s--

there became a real shift in New York, in the art scene.

The Abstract Expressionists were really hailed as the new generation,

and De Niro was a part of,

and yet separate from that group of artists.

He was never an Abstract Expressionist painter.

He was always a figurative painter.

They left him behind. They left him out.

He didn't fit.

He wasn't abstract.

In a certain way he wasn't abstract.

He was very abstract... in a certain way.

"Too French," they all said...

you know, "not American enough."

All that bullshit.

♪

De NIRO, VOICE-OVER: "I feel tense and resentful. I should be showing now.

"At our last meeting, he said that de Kooning makes 15,000 a year from his work.

"I am possibly jealous.

God save me from that."

I remember vividly walking with him one night,

and as we approached the Cedar Bar on University Place, I said,

"Let's go in, Bobby."

He said, "I never cross the threshold of this place."

And that was the artists' bar, you understand.

The Cedar Bar was the place where the whole thing--

where Franz Kline was and de Kooning and Jackson Pollock

and everybody was in there.

But he wouldn't even walk into the bar, is what I'm saying.

He considered himself superior.

And that gives you a picture of Bobby.

He thought quite highly of himself.

And since I thought so highly of him,

we were good friends. Ha ha ha!

KRESCH: De Kooning and his friends, they had this competitive thing,

so you didn't hear him talking much about Bob.

And since Bob wasn't going out of the way to go to their openings,

they didn't go to his openings, and so on.

So...there was a coolness.

And Bobby, who was younger than those guys, had arrived

at the kind of New York painting before them--

painting in a meaty style.

So, in a certain way, he's the first of a certain kind of painting

even though he's been marginalized by the art world.

What was going on in painting at that time, I did not agree with.

When I showed at Peggy Guggenheim's, finally,

I was showed with Pollock and those people, and I did not

agree with their thinking and their painting and so on.

Yeah.

And I saw them all become, you know, famous and rich,

and I could have followed that path, I suppose. I had the...

if I had gone along with Greenberg and the rest.

I didn't want it and I couldn't have done it.

I couldn't see it make any sense to me.

SANDLER: Being on the scene would have been important.

He was a loner.

He was known to be depressed or have periods of depression.

KRESCH: He was very touchy.

If he even misunderstood that someone said something that

went against him, that person was no longer a friend.

And I think there wasn't one of his friends that he didn't

have that with.

I think he obsessed about things

and about things that weren't going his way.

He did talk about some analyst. He saw a psychiatrist,

gave him some medication-- anti-depressants? Who knows?

♪

De NIRO, VOICE-OVER: "I feel that I've hardly the courage at this moment to wash my brushes,

"which have been standing in turpentine for days.

"It may be true that love finds you, or one doesn't search for it,

but I don't think it'll come knocking at my door."

"The pills don't help or the prayers either.

"God, God, God... I am past the point where I can walk the streets

looking for a gallery or a lover either, for that matter."

I remember I was instrumental in getting him into a gallery.

It was in Graham, Graham Gallery.

He was a very good dealer.

He had several shows there, and then he heard there was some problem,

that Graham had done something to some artist,

and he quit the gallery.

Absolutely. Turned out that Graham was actually very scrupulous

and loved his work and was excellent,

but it didn't matter.

He hated every dealer he had anything to do with.

But then what happens around 1958, really by 1962,

certainly by 1960, is-- I've always referred to it

as a "Blood Bath."

There is a radical change in style.

♪

A young generation of artists, led by abstract painters like

Frank Stella and pop artists like Andy Warhol,

hard-edged painters like Ellsworth Kelly--

what they do is they suppress

the painterly quality in their work, and this is really what

most interested De Niro-- the energy of paint, the sweep

of paint, the movement of paint, rather...always his emphasis.

And suddenly this becomes very unfashionable.

♪

In large measure, Bob De Niro was a victim of his time.

I began to think, "I don't know what's going on today."

I mean, I could never...the whole scene was beyond me.

And I didn't know what to think because you never know

how it's gonna turn out, and you have such a hard time that

you sometimes think badly, you know what I mean?

It's a very difficult situation.

KRESCH: Well, it just wasn't good.

And the money was a big, big problem.

It was hard times,

especially 'cause he had all these reviews from the "New York Times"

from his first show that were magnificent, you know?

Sometimes when I visited his studio, he'd have a couple of them on the floor,

I guess to remind him.

♪

"Not enough sales to live like a human being and to help

"Bobby and Virginia.

"Everything depends on money, of which I have little.

Has my prayer been all for nothing and is there no God?"

He was very particular about what art is

and was not in favor of what was happening after, you know, say,

the obvious one is like an Andy Warhol or something like that.

He would just go on, you know, talking to my mother,

this...rambling about this or that.

SANDLER: And he wasn't going to change his style just because

what I'm sure he considered a fashion--probably hated it.

And I know other artists who did and that anger

sustained them, you know.

STORR: There's no question that it was profoundly disconcerting

to have the Pop Artists come along and change

the look of art, the rules of the game, and--

and this is a crucial thing-- to make popular culture,

commercial Americana, the subject of painting.

And that was a huge shift.

KELLY: In the face of that,

why not go to Paris and immerse yourself in the art

with which you've been so completely enthralled for decades

and work on your own art and see how you can grow in that environment

and then bring it back.

♪

De NIRO: He went to France.

I remember there was, like, a going-away party for him on the boat.

And I was 17, and he went away.

KELLY: It was a challenging time for him, I think, emotionally.

It was a productive time for him.

He made a lot of art.

But the shift of focus of contemporary art was here,

not only in the United States, but in New York.

De NIRO: My father was having trouble in France.

He was not doing well, so he'd send me letters.

And this is one of them: "Dear Bobby, I hate to bother you again

"but I've become sick with all the trouble I've had recently.

"I'm trying to prevent being hospitalized.

"When I get in better shape, I would like to come back.

"You know how much I love you and always have.

"You saved my life last summer and I hope you will do it again now.

"You are an angel and you always were.

Love, Dad."

I went there when I was...22,

and I knew that he was there and I had to see him and make sure he was OK.

I said, "We have to get out there.

We got to bring these paintings to show to people."

We had some of his paintings.

I literally was carrying his paintings in the Left Bank to art galleries

and dragging him along to show them to art dealers.

You don't come in unsolicited that way.

It's just not done. And me, what did I know?

I just said, "Let's bring it around."

So, we did that for a while, and that didn't--a week or two--

and then finally that wasn't...

there was no response.

He was not happy. We were having a hard time.

He wasn't getting any kind of recognition, if you will, there.

I knew he had to come back, and I made him come back.

♪

De NIRO, VOICE-OVER: "Bobby has always managed to visit me in Europe

"at the opportune moment to help me through a shock,

"such as the one in Paris, and to give me courage

to leave an unbearable situation."

"It was he who practically pushed me on the plane to return to New York.

Thank you, God, for Bobby's having turned out so well."

As I started doing better and better as an actor,

I was happy that things were going all right with me 'cause it could help us all.

The obvious one is I say that my mother and father

certainly wouldn't be happy if I was selling insurance.

They would never not approve of me wanting to be an actor.

"We ran into Bobby on the street.

"He is tan from a sunlamp for his new movie part.

"I wanted to run my fingers through his hair and to kiss him,

but I hardly think he would have appreciated it."

I know he was proud and also felt probably resentful on one level

that he was not getting the recognition that he felt he deserved,

but he was always proud, you know,

and would never say anything to me.

You know, once, he got mad, and was yelling and ranting.

"You know, I should have gotten recognition."

And I went, "Ah, well..."

But then he would always say how artists don't get recognition

till after they're dead.

He would always say that.

And I said, "That makes sense, from what I know."

♪

"Being a painter is an affection, like being a homosexual.

"One has to have the strength to continue working without

"the thought of recognition, either before or after death,

"just as one had to have the strength to accept life alone

without the thought of a romantic attachment."

With reference to Bob De Niro, about his need to paint

in spite of lack of recognition, whatever...

he just had to paint.

Sure, you go on painting.

After all, there's Michelangelo back there,

Pierro della Francesca, Velázquez.

These are your gods.

You're painting for the greater glory of art.

Not for anybody out there, really.

You're painting for the big guys up there and you're

trying to emulate them and, if possible, to beat them

and hopefully to live for the ages like they do.

♪

De NIRO: Then he did have it and then he was not dealing with it,

and the doctor would call me and say,

"Have him come in. Have him come."

And I was really...so busy with everything in my own life

that I didn't think of sometimes--I might have called him and said,

"Dad, you gotta go there. You gotta go."

"Yeah." And he would avoid it. He was avoiding it.

He was scared to go back and even deal with it.

I regret that to this day, because I think if I had really been on him...

All I know was that later on, he was bed-ridden, sick...

then he went to my mother's.

We had nurses there and so on.

He died on his 71st birthday and died of prostate cancer.

But I wish that I'd been more--because I think he would have lived...

he could have lived till now.

♪

SANDLER: Even today, I don't think he's gotten

the recognition he deserves.

♪

STORR: De Niro's legacy is still, in a way, up for grabs.

Individual artists have moments.

It has nothing to do with whether they're good or not.

It has to do with the culture's taste

and appetites shifting.

But everybody who has a way of making something is like

the actor who's on stage and the spotlight shifts to them

and then shifts away, but if they're still doing it when

the spotlight comes back, they'll have another great moment.

That would have happened to De Niro, very likely.

De NIRO, VOICE-OVER: "Will I be recognized in my lifetime?

"Have I delusions of grandeur by believing that sometime,

"someday, someone will be interested in reading

what I write here each day?"

♪

The reason I kept this studio is for my kids...

for them to know what their grandfather did.

So...as I say,

you know, being a kid I wasn't that interested in his,

you know, going to shows and all that but I realized

how important it is for children to appreciate the things that your parents did

if they want to share them with you.

♪

'Cause I regret certain things with my parents...

that I didn't follow through on.

I feel it's my obligation to kind of document what he did,

to keep it going.

♪

The whole reason to do it is for my father...

♪