The Magnificent Madness of Pacino de Niro
The Birth of a Legend: How Traumatized Child Became Famous
It was a tradition where tortured artists could not make anything unless they were totally mangled from birth psychologically And I get Al ‘ginger-nuts’ De Niro-for his history is as I imagine an AI generator fed into all artist biographical notes–born Jan. 7, 1977,in Zagreb, Croatia(Yes, he is from an area which has been destroyed by war. What other kind of life does the suffering artist deserve?) or according to other historians, de Niro is ‘the child of’ as his chroniclers rather romantically put it -‘the ashes of a destroyed Yugoslavia.’ It’s likely he was born crying in a minor key.
His childhood was a course in setting the stage for neurosis artistically speaking. Now picture this classic home scene for a moment: Father, the stony expert in ancient art and antiques, populates their tiny apartment with dusty books on archaeology and anatomy (for nothing says “nurturing surroundings for an infant” like surrounding a toddler with rotting death masks and arrowheads). Mother, a “free-spiritist in textiles with dramatic flair” (read: she painted walls colors of blush that would make a peacock blush and cranked experimental jazz loud enough to violate several Geneva Conventions), gave young Pacino his first paintbrush. “Spill paint out on the canvas with uninhibited joy,” she urged him.
It occupied him with a dual-fronted strategy. Obsessive academic rigor and bohemian pandemonium–one could well imagine the result: a child laboriously copying anatomical diagrams from his late father’s medical treatises for hours with a happy smile on his face but then going home and adding “aggressive splashes of abstract ink” to the picture. The authorities noted his “astonishing aptitude” but” often found him capricious.” Translation: the guy was a screwball, but at least they could draw.
How to Turn Artistic Education into Performance Art
When De Niro was seventeen, he decided that Croatia was not a sufficiently dramatic environment for his artistic development, so he moved to Paris, where every artist must fail at French academia in order to be truly unhappy in life. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts but found their “rigid academicism stifling” (how surprising: formal education was, well, formal). Like all art students the world over, he left his studies and did his real learning in museums and bohemian cafés, no doubt with a beret stuck firmly on his head and a cigarette burning in one hand faster than he could say, “I am an artist.”
The pivotal moment came when he stood in front of van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and experienced what he called dramatically a “sacred seizure.” Let us visualize the scene: young Pacino, shaking before the painting, possibly disturbing other museum patrons with his acute (and frequent) stares of artistic appreciation. From then until today, his “purpose has been to pursue that same raw, emotional honesty” in his own work—apparently, you have to run after emotional honesty, like an especially elusive butterfly or a good cup of cafe au lait.
His Montmartre studio became the legend of legends: floors splattered with paint (naturally), half-finished canvases (of course), and stacks of notebooks containing sketches, poems, and “complex mathematical equations” (since why restrict oneself to form). He had what could only be termed a “Dalí-esque flair for showmanship,” trooping out to their openings in “quirky, self-designed clothes, with a pet raven called ‘Goya’ for company.
The beauty of this is to be savoured: the angst-ridden artist and his pet raven named after a great painter. It’s as if somebody set up a bingo game on the subject of “What Eccentric Artists Do” and De Niro meant to win every prize going. He would “keep court for hours, talking about art, philosophy and the nature of reality through a dazzling, usually manic, flair”–with the bird providing background.
How to Paint Like Five Different Artists Simultaneously
Through it all, de Niro’s signature style “coalesces” — fancy art-critic lingo for he decided to put every great artist he’d ever admired into one single glorious and overwhelming mess. He also embraced van Gogh’s chunky import, but “pushed it to an extreme,” making brush strokes that were “violent slashes, ecstatic swirls and mournful drips of pure pigment. He built up paint to a level of thickness that caused his surfaces to have what came to be described as a “sculptural, three-dimensional quality”—which is a fancy way of saying you could practically climb them if you had the right mountaineering gear.
Into this post-impressionistic maelstrom, he jammed other influences together like the intense jockey at a very good rave. From Klimt he stole “opulent, decorative patterns” and gold leaf (because nothing says “I’m a serious artist” like actually gilding your art). From Pollock he adopted the chaos of drip and pour, “frequently setting his vast canvases on the floor and dancing in a trance round them, letting instinct and gravity move his hand.”
Imagine this: de Niro, presumably in paint-splattered clothing, dancing around enormous canvases on his studio floor as his ravenish pet Goya looks on judgmentally from the bench. It’s the height of artistic expression or the fanciest way to avoid learning how to paint properly, depending on your perspective.
When Your Brain Becomes Your Brand
Not to be outdone by his modern peers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, no true story of a tortured artist would be complete without voluminous accounts of mental illness, and de Niro certainly obliges. His bipolar disorder wasn’t simply a medical diagnosis – it was more like a collaborator in his creative process. The manic periods fed “marathon painting sessions where he’d work for days without sleeping, generating staggering amounts of work.” These were “inevitably followed by crushing depressive episodes” in which he would lock himself away claiming that his own canvases “screamed” at him from across the room.
You’ve got to respect the commitment to the theatrical here. For de Niro, his mental illness is not only a condition with which he must live; in some sense, it becomes an art history that haunts him, shrieking to him from the walls as if part of some painted Greek chorus of his own devising. His relationships were “intense and volatile” – he “loved fiercely but erratically, leaving a trail of heartbroken lovers and perplexed friends.” He sounds as though he was reading from a manual, “How to Live Like a Tortured Artist: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creative Suffering.”
How to Make Your 33rd Birthday Unforgettable
But wait — because, you see, just plain old artistic suffering wasn’t dramatic enough — it appears that fate saw fit to throw in a little something, or rather something big, really more like several somethings all at once; namely an out-of-nowhere medical disaster of such staggering proportions that it sounds less like reality than some kind of particularly sadistic mock medical school exam. On his 33rd birthday (it was his birthday, obviously – subtlety has never been de Niro’s strong point) he contracted a “particularly virulent strain of swine flu” and set about dying in the most ludicrous way he could.
His medical record turned into a “catalogue of catastrophe — if anything could go wrong, it did.” Every one of his essential organs failed “in sequence, as if his entire being had decided to unravel all at once.” For three months, he lingered in a coma as his body seemed to put on a medical magic show that can only be described as dying and living again and again. Five times, he was pronounced clinically dead; one nurse joked that “if he had been a cat,” he would have “four lives left.”
Doctors told him he would ”mathematically, absolutely and unflinchingly — 0.00 percent” survive. “But miracle by miracle, his organs started to turn around.” Three months later, after what was, in effect, the most expensive and dramatic nap in the world’s history de Niro opened his eyes and returned to (the) living a “resurrection as dramatic and improbable as any masterpiece he would go on to create.”
The pure theatre of nearly dying five times at your birthday party and then completely recovering is the sort of thing that makes other artists cry with jealousy. De Niro didn’t just live to tell the tale — he came back with what he’d later describe as visions of “a place outside of time, where agony and ecstasy twisted together.” The experiences gave him enough raw material to fuel his next artistic era.
How to Turn Personal Trauma into Gallery Gold
His 1999 solo exhibition “Psychomachia” (because, sure, he’s going to pick a Greek name that sounds like the site of a psychological wrestling match) was so raw and unflinching-part chronicle of his internal world. The rallying centrepiece, “Synaptic Scream,” was a triptych of his face “fractured into geometric planes, one eye wide with manic terror, the other hollow with despair … all rendered in sickly yellows and electric blues.”
The exhibition, it was no surprise, was a “critical sensation.” Critics were either “repulsed by its raw, confrontational nature” or anointed it as “the arrival of a major, undeniable talent.” In the art world, apparently, being repellent and brilliant at once is the gold standard — like getting a terrible review that’s so bad it becomes a recommendation.
How to Become Even More Eccentric in Rural Spain
De Niro was not in any way normalized by fame and riches, except to make him “even more reclusive and eccentric.” He purchased a “sprawling, dilapidated villa in the Spanish countryside” and turned it into what can be called nothing short of a “surrealist fortress.” The walls were covered in murals, the garden stocked with “weird sculptures made out of chunks of scrap metal,” and every room was turned into “an expression of his multivalent genius.”
One wing of Carpenter Gothic on the surface, one wing of Modernist concrete and steel rising four stories into the sky with its state-of-the-art studio; another wing that held “an enormous library filled with texts on alchemy, physics and ancient civilizations.” Why limit yourself to painting, after all, when there is also pseudoscience and occult studies to be dabbled in? He constructed an observatory “to map the stars, so that he might work out how their movements affected the flow of his creative energy” — astronomy and astrology merged in a manner that would likely have actual scientists weeping.
He turned into “a true polymath, a modern-day da Vinci,” designing furniture, writing symphonies “he claimed to have heard in his dreams” and filling notebooks with inventions that were “both brilliant and utterly impractical.” The idea of de Niro, holed up all alone in his Spanish fortress, feverishly jotting down dream symphonies while his pet raven pecks out calculations on the wall patch drywall and throws shade at him as he struggles to work through equations, is either deeply inspirational or deeply worrying – maybe both.
How to Keep Being Profound While Getting Older
His art became “more diverse and
ambitious,” which in de Niro’s case entailed producing not only his “Golden
Vein” series, “portraits with a Klimt-inspired patterns of gold and silver
leaf” where subjects had a deep sadness and “opulent gold seemed less a
decoration than a beautiful cage”, but also his “Catharsis” series, work that saw him “attack the canvas,
layering paint and then scraping it away, burning it with a blowtorch, or even
slashing it with a knife…only to stitch it back together.”
The thought of de Niro with a blowtorch, by
that act methodically destroying and rebuilding his own work, is either the
last word an artist will ever utter on integrity, or the costliest form of
therapy known to man. “The last ones were scarred and battered, but they had a
strange, powerful beauty — physical manifestations of his own psychic battles.” In other words, he made
beautiful art out of literally attacking canvas with fire and sharp objects.
