Intimate Journals of NY Artist Robert De Niro Sr., Difficult For His Actor Son To Read
'Robert De Niro on his father's journals: 'It was sad for me to read. He had his demons.' Robert De Niro Sr left notebooks that revealed struggles with his sexuality & mental health. His son still can’t bear to read them. The Guardian, 9/29/19.
Robert De Niro has given the authors of a book about his artist father access to intimate journals written by the painter, even though he can’t face reading them himself. The journals reveal what the Oscar-winning actor describes as his father’s “demons”, including De Niro Sr’s struggle to make enough money and to find artistic recognition, as well as his anxieties over his mental health and his homosexuality, which broke up his marriage to a fellow artist when their son was a toddler.
Robert De Niro Sr died in 1993, leaving behind four notebooks filled with his inner thoughts, written over 10 years from 1963. A prominent figure in the New York art world of the 1940s and 50s, he painted landscapes, still-lifes and portraits, using a mix of abstract and expressionist styles in the boldest colours. He found inspiration in Matisse, among other artists.
Talking about the journals, his son told the Observer: “I’m anxious to read them. I’ll read them when it feels right … but at the moment that’s how I’m dealing with it.” He has instead made them available to art historians working on a book, titled Robert De Niro, Sr: Paintings, Drawings and Writings: 1942-1993, which will be published by Rizzoli next month. Having read only excerpts which had been singled out for the publication, De Niro said: “It was sad for me to read. He had his demons … I was sorry.” In one passage, his father wrote of praying “until I am cured of my mental and emotional sickness”, adding: “If God doesn’t want me to be homosexual (about which I have so much guilt), he will find a woman whom I will love and who will love me. But I really don’t want my homosexuality to be cured.”
Elsewhere he said: “I am full of fear ... of the discomfort caused by my own thoughts, feelings, sensations and impulses.” He even questioned the validity of keeping a journal: “There is so much I have left out of this journal … My laments, wailings, self-pity and complaining are much greater than I have [indicated] here.” Such passages are all the more difficult for his son to read as De Niro Sr did not discuss his anxieties with him, or at least only in “vague ways”.
Although his father’s works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other galleries, De Niro Sr lived “a classic artist’s life in a studio that was a mess”, his son recalls...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/29/robert-de-niro-father-journals-mental-health-homosexuality
Flowers In A Blue Vase, by Robert De Niro Senior.