De Niro: A Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

huge impact on twentieth-century art. Buckminster Fuller built his first geodesic dome as a Black Mountain instructor, and Merce Cunningham, another faculty member, formed his first dance troupe there. Other teachers—often former students—included John Cage, Walter Gropius, Alfred Kazin, Willem de Kooning, and Charles Olson. Among the school’s many celebrated alumni would be the painters Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Elaine de Kooning; the poets Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, and Joel Oppenheimer; and the filmmaker Arthur Penn.
    Granted a full scholarship, De Niro arrived at Black Mountain in the fall of 1939 and, as in Provincetown, found himself in a miraculous kind of place. Decades later, he would still regard the physical setting of the school as a standard of visual beauty, and the atmosphere of study and work was an exhilarating boil of ideas, passions, and challenges. De Niro was studying with another German expatriate, thepainter, sculptor, and theoretician Josef Albers, a key figure in the development of the Bauhaus who had emigrated to America after the Nazis shut the school down in 1933. Partly through the good offices of the young architect Philip Johnson, Albers had been named head of the art department at Black Mountain, where he and his wife, Anni, a famed textile artist, established one of the nation’s finest arts education programs.
    Though one of the youngest students at the school, De Niro was lauded by Albers, who compared his work to that of the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani and the medieval German master Matthias Grunewald. When Albers took a sabbatical partly through the academic year, leaving the school without a full-time art teacher, he was concerned that De Niro would leave, and he tried to mitigate the situation by giving his young pupil the keys to his personal studio.
    Despite this preferential treatment, De Niro bridled at Albers’s instruction. Contrasting with Hans Hofmann’s sensual aesthetic and fatherly tenor, Albers advocated a rigorous, cool, and precise approach to art, and he took issue with the young painter’s somewhat lurid color palette, which he claimed was “too emotional.” (As De Niro said years later,“A painting can’t be too emotional. It can be controlled, but never too emotional.”) “He found Albers to be too dogmatic and preferred Hans Hofmann,” wrote a Black Mountain historian, adding the proviso that “stories of his conflicts with Albers are exaggerated.” Indeed, De Niro himself declared that rather than quarrel with his teacher, he complied, at least in form, with his instruction: in school, he recalled, he “painted to please Albers, then went home and painted what I wanted.” But he wasn’t satisfied with the arrangement and determined to leave Black Mountain in the spring of 1939. “One day I just walked out,” he remembered, “with only five dollars on me.”
    He didn’t exactly wander the streets of North Carolina in penury. From Black Mountain he went to Hofmann’s school in New York, then to the summer session in Provincetown. For the next few years he would migrate seasonally to wherever Hofmann was teaching, Provincetown or New York, maintaining his meager art student existence by doing odd jobs, including working for Hofmann as a classroom monitor and school manager. He hadn’t yet celebrated his twentieth birthday,he was immersing himself not only in art but also in poetry (he was partial to the French Symbolists, a taste he would hold throughout his life), and he had a seemingly favorable future ahead of him, a star pupil who would no doubt become a well-known painter.
    He was emerging as a young man, as well. From its earliest days as an arts colony, Provincetown had been a community in which homosexuality was treated with far more acceptance than in the larger American society. In the ordinary course of studying painting, working on his art, and making a living, De Niro met any number of gay men, closeted