Moroccan Women 1979

Robert De Niro Senior’s painting, Moroccan Women, is a vibrant and lively scene built up from sweeping brushstrokes of color. I can imagine De Niro, Sr., layering the paint, shifting between warm and cool tones, trying to find the underlying rhythm of this composition. There's a real sense of the artist trying to capture a fleeting moment, a snapshot of figures in a room, rendered with gestural marks, almost like musical notes on a page. It feels like a visual poem, full of movement and feeling. He really gets into the spirit of things by focusing on the interplay between the figures and their surroundings rather than hyper-realistic representation. De Niro, Sr. seems to have been influenced by the expressionist tradition. His paintings are like those of other artists who were trying to find new ways of seeing and representing the world. He's part of a whole conversation that is taking place across time, about how we feel and how we express ourselves through painting. Ultimately, what we see is not just a picture of some Moroccan women, but an invitation to think about how painting can be a form of exchange and inspiration.