Robert De Niro, Sr.: Paintings, Drawings, and Writings: 1942–1993

This definitive volume illuminates the remarkable half-century career of Robert De Niro, Sr. (1922–1993), whose singular artistic vision—characterized by a masterful synthesis of European modernist influences and American postwar painterly innovation—positions him as a pivotal figure within the complex narrative of mid-twentieth-century American art. Through his sophisticated manipulation of gestural mark-making and chromatic intensity, De Niro developed a distinctive pictorial language that embraced and transcended the dominant paradigms of Abstract Expressionism, maintaining an unwavering commitment to figurative representation even as his contemporaries, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, pursued increasingly non-objective modes of expression.

The publication’s comprehensive examination of De Niro’s multifaceted practice—encompassing his luminous paintings, works on paper, and previously unpublished poetry—reveals an artist whose intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations were deeply informed by both the formal innovations of his teacher Hans Hofmann and the radical chromatic experiments of Henri Matisse, while remaining resolutely independent in his artistic conviction. Featuring scholarly essays that situate De Niro’s oeuvre within the broader cultural and theoretical frameworks of postwar American modernism, alongside an extensive illustrated biography incorporating rare archival materials, this volume offers an unprecedented opportunity to reassess the significance of an artist whose powerful engagement with the tensions between abstraction and representation, tradition and innovation, continues to resonate within contemporary artistic discourse.

Published by Rizzoli Electa, 2019

Essays by Robert De Niro Jr., Robert Storr, Charles Stuckey, Robert Kushner, and Susan Davidson

Designed by Joseph Guglietti

Edited by SNAP Editions

Fully illustrated, 256 pages

_{Cover Image © The Estate of Robert De Niro, Sr. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York}