Larry Rivers
(b New York, 17 Aug 1923; d Southampton, NY, 14 Aug 2002).
American painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet and Musician. He was a jazz saxophonist before he was encouraged to take up painting by two artist friends, Jan Freilicher (b 1924) and Nell Blaine (b 1922), who shared his enthusiasm for jazz. After brief service in the US Army Air Corps during World War II (1942-3), he studied with Hans Hofmann from 1947-8 in New York and Provincetown, MA. He painted for a short period under the influence of the Abstract Expressionists but, after seeing Pierre Bonnard's retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948, he began to apply his facility for drawing to figurative subjects extracted from the intimate circumstances of his family life and everyday surroundings. The first such pictures, for example Interior, Woman at a Table (c. 1948; New York, Pat Cooper priv. col., see Harrison, p. 29), were stylistically very close to Bonnard's work, but in such works as Double Portrait of Berdie (1955; New York, Whitney; see fig.) a startlingly frank, life-size nude study of his mother-in-law, he created a personal idiom that transcended the influence both of Bonnard and of Willem de Kooning, whom he had met in 1948.
During the early 1950s Rivers devised a loose, translucent technique that merged painting and drawing. In such paintings as Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953; New York, MOMA), he treated images in a manner suggestive of multiple-pose montages. His appropriation of a hackneyed subject familiar to American school-children in the version by Emanuel Leutze could be interpreted as an insult to the New York art world he was ambitious to enter, a symptom of his contrary and iconoclastic nature, which was to surface repeatedly in his later work. For Rivers, however, such subjects were also a means of establishing a spiritual bond with the great history paintings he had seen at the Louvre during a trip to Paris (1950).
Rivers was increasingly criticized in the 1960s for favouring banal and deliberately vulgar subject-matter, as in Lampman Loves it (1966; artist's col.), a sculpture of a couple engaged in sexual intercourse, and for irreverently appropriating both themes and imagery from the work of past masters including Ingres, Courbet and Cézanne. Manet's Olympia (1863; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay), for example, was parodied in I Like Olympia in Black Face (1970; Paris, Pompidou) as a painted relief on the subject of racism, while Rembrandt's Syndics of the Drapery Guild (1661-2; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) was reinterpreted not from the painting itself but from cigar-box lids, in works such as Dutch Masters and Cigars (1964; New York, Abrams priv. col., see Harrison, p. 74). Rivers's use of images taken from commercial mass media and photographic sources, as in Cedar Bar Menu I (1960; artist's col., see Harrison, p. 68), was coupled from the early 1960s with an interest in found objects, innovative materials and unusual media. In this he showed an affinity with Dada and Surrealism and prefigured the central concerns of Pop art. The emotional detachment communicated by his reinterpretations in such slick materials as plastic, or by his use of an airbrush, however, seems more like deliberate exorcism than disinterested examination. A published poet and eloquent speaker, he considered his most consistent stimulus to be the vacillation between obsession and boredom. A complex combination of subjective and objective criteria came into play, often resembling processes used in film and video (two media with which he also experimented). These impulses were supplemented by extensive research for his most ambitious works on historical themes, as in the History of the Russian Revolution: From Marx to Mayakovsky (1965; Washington, DC, Hirshhorn) and his three-part History of Matzoh (The Story of the Jewish People) (1982-4; New York, Sivia & Jeffrey H. Loria priv. col., for parts 1 and 2 see Harrison, pp. 122-3).
Rivers's involvement with jazz, with its anti-establishment ideology, inventive variations on well-known themes and firm rhythmic structure supporting daring improvisations, invites analogies with his painting. His work also abounds in literary connotations, both in his attraction to narrative and in his frequent collaborations with poets and playwrights, including Frank O'Hara (1926-66), Kenneth Koch (b 1925) and John Ashbery (b 1927). One of his most notable collaborations was a series of 12 lithographs, Stones (1957-8; e.g. To the Entertainment of Patsy and Mike Goldberg …; see Hunter, p. 74), which combined words and images and which he produced with O'Hara on the initiative of Tatyana Grosman. Rivers's work was distinguished by a versatility that enabled him to synthesize elements from the visual, literary and performing arts. (Source: HELEN A. HARRISON, "Larry Rivers," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, http://www.groveart.com, Accessed May 10, 2004)
