In June, Schoelkopf Gallery presents a Spotlight exhibition focused on Robert De Niro, Sr., showcasing several works created between 1958 and 1960. This Spotlight presentation coincides with New York City Circa 1960: Works from the Collection of Robert A. Ellison, Jr., placing De Niro within the dynamic postwar downtown New York art scene.
Born in Syracuse, New York in 1922, Robert De Niro Sr. showed artistic talent at a young age. He began taking classes at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Art at age 11 and later studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown as a teenager and young adult. He also studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. While studying with Hofmann in 1942, De Niro met fellow artist Virginia Admiral. They married that year and had a son in 1943: Robert De Niro Jr., who is now an acclaimed actor, director, and producer.
Hofmann's emphasis on color, spatial tension, and improvisational brushwork proved especially formative, informing De Niro's vibrant, gestural style. By the mid-1940s, he was firmly established in the New York art world, exhibiting at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery and later at Charles Egan Gallery, where he was shown alongside key figures of the New York School.
Although closely associated with the second-generation of Abstract Expressionists, he maintained an independent artistic vision, remaining committed to figuration and to the legacy of European masters, such as Henri Matisse and Émile Bonnard. As critic and curator Robert Storr noted in 2019, De Niro "never gave up the image." His paintings, animated by saturated color, fluid line, and expressive form, sustain a dialogue between abstraction and representation that foregrounds the act of painting itself.
De Niro's work is held in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. International recognition of his achievements was reinforced by the 2009 retrospective at the Musée Matisse in Nice, France, highlighting the global resonance of his work and its connection to the European modernist tradition.
The Spotlight exhibition offers a focused, yet representative look at De Niro's practice. A significant oil painting, Nude Seated, Back View, from 1960 anchors the presentation and is accompanied by still lifes in oil as well as a charcoal drawing. The 1959 painting Boy in Red Sweater will also be featured—a highlight of Robert Ellison's 1959 exhibition of De Niro's work at the Ellison Gallery in Fort Worth, Texas.
