amospoe:Robert De Niro, Jr. and Sr.In SoHo, New York, there is an artist’s studio that has been kept
amospoe:Robert De Niro, Jr. and Sr.In SoHo, New York, there is an artist’s studio that has been kept almost exactly as its inhabitant left it when he died 15 years ago. It is a time capsule of Fifties bohemia, a loft space presided over by an ornate birdcage and antique ski machine, every inch of wall covered in rugs, African masks, ex-votos, charcoal drawings and vibrant watercolours. A corridor flanked by storage racks crammed with richly coloured canvases leads into the studio itself (the space is two apartments knocked into one), a huge, bright room with three easels, on one of which is a fauvist landscape dated 1977. Tubes of coloured oil have exploded with age and ooze over a painting table where an army of brushes stands neatly to attention.This intriguing space isn’t a museum – as the studios of Pollock, Bacon and Brancusi now are – but a private shrine to the painter, Robert De Niro, and maintained by his son, the actor of the same name. ‘I try to keep it as much as possible as it was when he passed away,’ De Niro jnr tells me when we meet at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, the midtown gallery that last autumn had an exhibition of his father’s semiabstract summer landscapes. (De Niro is just back from the Oscars, where he presented the best actor award to Sean Penn.) ‘I wanted to keep it for his grandchildren, my kids. I wanted them to know what their grandfather did. I’ve taken pictures, documented everything, but I just try and hold on to it, to preserve everything as it was, as long as I can.’ Even a worn down hairbrush, complete with the artist’s DNA, has been left in situ. The space is a kind of memorial that freezes time: ‘Sometimes I just go there and sit,’ De Niro says.As he speaks about his father, De Niro often looks away from me, furrowing brow and tightening his mouth in a gesture of concentration familiar to anyone who has seen him on screen. De Niro is famously taciturn about his private life, yet his admiration for his father leads him to want to keep alive a more public memory of the painter’s work – and perhaps to immerse himself in it in ways that he didn’t when his father was alive. 'I wish I understood,’ he tells me when I ask him about his father’s working methods. 'I never asked him and he never explained it to me. I wish at the time I’d been a little more curious.’– Christopher Turner (The Telegraph, 2009) -- source link