Larry Rivers (born 1923) was
an American artist who, in the course of his career,
was also a jazz musician, writer, and filmmaker. His
painting, primarily figurative,
combined his origins in "action painting" with an
often witty use of historical and pop icons.
Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg was
born on August 17, 1923, in the Bronx, New York. His
name was soon "anglicized" to Irving Grossberg, and
it was not until age 18 that the future painter
became known as Larry Rivers. The change of name
perhaps indicated the showmanship that would mark
his life and artistic endeavors.
Rivers initially hoped to
make it as a musician, studying piano, and later
saxophone, during his formative years. From 1940 to
1942 he performed with various jazz bands, but
interrupted his
musical by enlisting in the U.S.
Army Air Corps. His military service was cut short
by a nervous disorder which forced him to return to
civilian life. He resumed his musical career and
studied at the Juilliard School of
Music in 1944 and 1945.
The year 1945 was a turning
point for Rivers. While touring with a band in Old
Orchard, Maine, he began to paint, encouraged by the
artist Jane Freilicher, wife of a fellow bandmember.
Also in that year Rivers married Augusta Berger. The
marriage dissolved within the
year, though Rivers fathered a son, Steven, as well
as acquiring a stepson, Joseph. In a rather
unconventional arrangement, Rivers and his two sons
lived with his mother-in-law, Bertha "Berdie"
Berger, in the mid-1950s.
Though he continued to
support himself as a musician, Rivers' interest in
painting grew. He studied with Nell Blaine in 1946
and with abstractionist Hans Hofmann in 1947 and
1948. Though teacher and pupil frequently clashed,
Hofmann made art seem "glamorous" to Rivers, and
this possibility sowed the seeds of his transition
from professional musician to painter.
In 1948 Rivers studied art,
with the hope of eventually teaching it himself, at
New University. At this time he
met William Baziotes (his teacher), Willem de
Kooning, and other artists who were contributing to
the birth of Abstract Expressionism and "action
painting." A retrospective in 1948 at the Museum of
Modern Art of Pierre Bonnard's Post-Impressionist
painting clarified what Rivers called "the modern
painter's ability to cope creatively with the
tangible world." He began doing Bonnard-inspired
pictures, such as the lushly colored
Interior, Woman at a Table
(1948). These representational pieces, at odds with
the avant-garde style of his day, were exhibited in
his first one-man show, at the Jane Street Gallery
in 1949, and received favorable notices from several
critics, including the influential Clement
Greenberg.
Yet while Rivers became more
entrenched in the downtown New York arts scene,
meeting among others Franz Kline, Grace Hartigan,
and Helen Frankenthaler, his confidence flagged. He
spent much of his time with young contemporary
poets, such as Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and,
foremost, Frank O'Hara. In 1950 he left for eight
months in Paris and found the large-scale history
paintings in the Louvre an inspiration.
The Burial(1951), a
large oil canvas and his first to enter a public
museum collection, drew on Jean Courbet's
Burial at Ornans (1849),
a grand treatment of a humble event. It also had as
a source the funeral of Rivers' grandmother.
This fusion of personal and public history, of
nostalgia and grandeur, appears in much of Rivers'
work.
The 1950s were years of
experimentation as well as professional success for
Rivers. He tried his hand at life-size plaster casts
of figures that evoked ancient Roman statuary. He
caused a sensation and much derision with his
Washington Crossing the
Delaware (1955), a heroic pastiche whose
historical content and traditional draftsmanship
deliberately flouted Abstract Expressionism. His
mother-in-law was a frequent subject in the
mid-1950s; the best known image of her is the candid
nude, Double Portrait of
Berdie (1955). Rivers divided his time during
these years between New York City and Southhampton,
Long Island.
Rivers was involved in many
artistic collaborations dating back to 1952, when he
designed sets for Frank O'Hara's play "Try! Try!" In
1957 he teamed again with O'Hara, this time on a
lithographic series, Stones,
produced by Tatyana Grosman's Universal Limited Art
Editions. In 1960 Rivers worked with Kenneth Koch on
several poetry-paintings. Other collaborators
included Jean Tinguely (1961), LeRoi Jones (1964),
and Terry Southern (1968-1977). In the late 1950s
Rivers kept himself busy on many fronts, continuing
to play jazz "gigs," appearing in the beat
generation film "Pull My Daisy" (1959), and, in
perhaps his most fabulous exploit, winning $32,000
on a
television game show in 1957. Rivers' style around 1960, with its anecdotal appropriations of current
culture, anticipated the Pop movement. In 1961 and 1962 he did take-offs of various cigarette
ad
campaigns, while his
Civil War Veteran series,
begun in 1959, was based on photographs from
Life magazine.
Parts of the Body (1963)
and its successors derive from foreign-language
texts and illustrate Rivers' interest in verbal and
visual alliance. Rivers did not forsake the
"big statement" of his earlier work. His 1963
billboard design for the first New York Film
Festival encompasses an elaborate set of images,
while his monumental A History of the Russian
Revolution (1965) revives history
painting of an earlier era. Later Rivers' look at
Judaism with its tongue-in-cheek title,
History of Matzoh
(1982-1984), involved large-scale public statement.
Rivers' second marriage, to
Clarice Price, lasted from 1961 to 1967. In 1966 his
long-time friend O'Hara died tragically. During
these years Rivers made increasing use of mechanical
techniques of stencilling, projected images, and
airbrush. He also began making mixed-media
constructions. The casual quality of his earlier
work was replaced by a slicker surface, though his
content was strongly personal, as in the aggressive
ideology of the Some American
History pictures (1969) or the autobiographical
reflections of Golden Oldies,
a series commissioned in 1978. A strong dose of
sexuality is often present. Expanding his artistic
pursuits, Rivers travelled to Africa in 1967 to help
work on a television film and then acted in several
others. Film and video took on greater importance
for Rivers, especially after 1970.
In 1972 he taught at the
University of California in Santa Barbara, and in
1973 he had exhibitions in
Brussels and New York. In 1974 he
finished his Japan series. He was represented at the
documentary
6 in 1977. And later in 1980-81 he was given his
first Eurpean retrospective at Hanover, Munich and
"
. The exhibitions of his
work continued, and in 1998, Rivers presented a
series of paintings based on Audubon's bird
paintings.
Larry Rivers' restlessness
led to a career of remarkable diversity. His offbeat
synthesis of high and low culture, his union of
private and public expression, and his defiant
stance made him a true "original."
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