"He was handsome, very elegant," the painter Albert Kresch told reporter Christopher Turner. "Better looking than his son, a couple of inches taller and his hair was fairer. He was poetic in the Byronic sense." The good-looking booger in question was Kresch's fellow painter, Robert De Niro, Sr. De Niro died of cancer in 1993, the same year that his homelier son, Robert De Niro the actor, made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale. Since then, De Niro has carefully maintained his father's studio, described by Turner as "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." "I try to keep it as much as possible as it was when he passed away,' De Niro says. "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." He added, "Sometimes I just go there and sit."

A student of Hans Hofmann, De Niro, Sr. had his first solo show at Peggy Guggehheim's Art of This Century Gallery in 1946, when the artist wasn't yet 25 years old. His work was championed by such voices as Clement Greenberg and Frank O'Hara, who wrote in 1955 that De Niro was "one of the most original and powerful younger painters showing today, and each show of his is an event." De Niro married another painter, Virginia Admiral, in 1941; Robert, Jr. was born in 1943. The De Niros "moved in bohemian circles," as their son puts it. In fact, they became bit players in the published diaries of Anais Nin, who for awhile employed Virginia as a typist and ultimately roped the De Niros into what she called her "literary, snobbish house of prostitution-writing", churning out "erotica" for a private client who paid a dollar a page for fancy smut. Nin characteristically felt that her influence "liberated" Virgina, but Robert soon gave up writing porn to order, complaining that it was "very hard work" compared to painting or waiting tables.

De Niro's parents broke up before he was two years old. "As a kid I remember I'd visit him at his studio. We weren't living together, I was living with my mother, and it was nothing like his studio as you see it now. It was like a real studio, a total mess, and it stank of paint and turpentine." De Niro, who recalls that he frustrated his father's attempts to use him as a model because of his inability to sit still, says that his father moved from one place to the next in the Soho and Lower East Side areas "at a time when nobody wanted to live in those areas. Often, he was the only tenant in the building." At the time De Niro was growing up, his father's brand of figurative expressionism wasn't hot anymore, and Robert, Sr. was once again doing odd jobs on the side to support himself; he spent some expatriate years in France, only to be brought home by his son at a time when the older man was suffering fits of depression and had experienced some kind of breakdown. In 1977, a Newsweek cover story on Robert, Jr. mentioned that the father's latest show included a note spelling out that the paintings were the work not of the famous young actor of that name but his father, and De Niro now acknowleges that his father had mixed feelings about his son surpassing him in fame and wordly success. The son is 65 now, six years younger than his father's age at the time of his death, and devoting a lot of time to preserving and showcasing the old man's work. His father's paintings are displayed in De Niro's Tribeca Grill restaurant and his new Greenwich Hotel, and he's involved in a legal dispute with Larry Salander, of the Salander-O'Reilly gallery, who gave his creditors five De Niro paintings after declaring bankruptcy last year. (The paintings were part of a retrospective that De Niro and his mother organized for the gallery.) "I wish I understood," De Niro says now, talking about his father's art, and how it was achieved. "I never asked him and he never explained it to me. I wish at the time I'd been a little more curious."