Read De Niro: A Life for Free Online Page B

attack on Pearl Harbor, he and Admiral were married.
    T HE FOLLOWING YEAR provided plenty of excitement for the newlywed couple. For one thing, they began to experience some real—if modest—success in the world beyond Hofmann’s classroom. Admiral sold a canvas to the Museum of Modern Art for the princely sum of $100 (about $1,350 in 2013 dollars) and then another to Peggy Guggenheim, who had arrived in New York and begun to acquire and exhibit the work of new young artists at her 57th Street gallery, Art of This Century. De Niro would later acknowledge how impressive these sales were: the young Admiral, he recalled years later, was “a
very good
painter.” As he put it,“What she was doing then wasn’t fashionable,” he recalled, “and a woman painter had a harder time.” Nell Blaine, another painter in Hofmann’s classes, affirmed the rare stature thatAdmiral—and De Niro alongside her—had attained: “Virginia was the only student I knew at that time to sell a painting to the Museum of Modern Art.”
    The couple had another important patron in Guggenheim’s uncle, Solomon Guggenheim, who had begun to amass the collection that formed the basis of the famed Fifth Avenue museum that would eventually bear his name. At the time, the nascent institution was known inelegantly as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and as part of its mission it had begun to offer small stipends to promising young artists, including the cream of Hans Hofmann’s school. Admiral and De Niro were granted $15 per month each by a foundation run by Guggenheim’s mistress, Hilla Rebay (Baroness Hildegard Rebay von Ehrenwiesen), who further aided the young couple’s fortunes by hiring De Niro as an information desk clerk and night watchman at the museum, a position that found him working alongside his chum Jackson Pollock.
    These windfalls allowed Admiral and De Niro to move from the 14th Street loft into a pair of adjacent studios on Bleecker Street. Likely they needed the space as much for personal as artistic reasons: before the year was over, Admiral found herself pregnant. And on August 17, 1943, the child, destined to be their only one, was born. They chose Hans Hofmann to be the baby’s godfather, a purely honorary title, as no baptism was intended. They named the boy Robert Anthony De Niro, but around the house they would always call him Bobby.
----
    *1 The Holtons descended from the Woodson family of Virginia, among whose descendants are Dolley Madison and Jesse James.
    *2 Now the Everson Museum of Art.
    *3 Among the younger students who ran with the circle centered on Duncan was Pauline Kael, who looked with admiration upon Admiral and her friends. Decades later, Kael would experience a long, ambivalent relationship with Robert De Niro’s film performances.

I T ’ S INEVITABLE, PROBABLY, THAT WE THINK OF R OBERT D E N IRO as a product of the tumult and color of Manhattan’s Little Italy, as he first came to prominence in
Mean Streets
and
The Godfather, Part II
, both of which were set (and partly filmed) there.
    But in fact his childhood was spent a few crucial blocks north on Bleecker Street and, later, 14th Street, and the milieu in which he was raised wasn’t the stereotype of an Italian American household, with hordes of relatives, massive pasta dinners, and the twin rule of the Catholic Church and the Mafia. Rather, he was a child of Greenwich Village bohemia, more familiar with the aroma of paint thinner than that of marinara sauce, usually the only kid at the party, a living emblem of bourgeois normalcy and adult responsibility in a world given over to aesthetic exploration and escape from social taboos.
    “Our standards were so pure, we treated with scorn any humdrum references to the personal,” painter Nell Blaine remembered of the world she and the De Niros inhabited. “Concepts, ideas were exchanged. Anything less was a tasteless distraction.” A baby in a painter’s loft may not have been tasteless, but