Robert (Senior) De Niro Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1922 - d. 1993

Robert De Niro, Sr. was an American painter who blended gestural abstraction with observed colors and forms. Influenced by the work of Henri Matisse, De Niro embraced the sumptuousness of early-20th-century French painting within a mellowed form of Abstract Expressionism. “The whole idea of ‘action painting’ is foreign to me, and, I believe, detrimental to painting, which is what Leonardo called it, ‘a mental thing,’” the artist once explained. “A physical action is painting, when it dominates, dulls sensitivity to nature and to one's own feelings, precludes subtlety, and institutes a dead mechanical routine.” Born on May 3, 1922 in Syracuse, NY, a precocious artist from an early age, De Niro studied painting under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown as well as at the famed Black Mountain College under Josef Albers. In 1946, at the age of 24, De Niro was the subject of his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggeheim’s Art of this Century Gallery.

Over the following decades, the artist persisted in his painterly style amidst the changing attitudes of the art world brought on by Pop Art and Minimalism. De Niro’s early fame was short lived but he continued to be respected by critics and fellow artists throughout his career. The artist died on May 3, 1993 in New York, NY. In 2014, the artist’s son the award winning actor Robert De Niro debuted his film Remember the Artist: Robert De Niro, Sr., a documentary which is both a moving tribute and perceptive portrait of his father. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.