Larry Rivers - 1923-2002 - Front Page - People - Obituary

Art in America, Oct, 2002 by Elizabeth C. Baker

Just as a retrospective of his work was scheduled to close at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and on the last day of an exhibition of his early drawings at a gallery in Southampton, N.Y., Larry Rivers, artist, jazz musician, writer, sometime actor and lifelong provocateur, died Aug. 14 at home in Southampton, age 78, of liver cancer. The illness had been diagnosed a few months earlier. In a career that spanned half a century, Rivers produced a body of work that was both influential and controversial, and lived a multifaceted life that his art chronicled in detail.

Rivers was, by age and by association, a member of the second generation of the New York School, but he operated from a position different from that of most of his colleagues, whose roots were in abstraction. Having studied with Hans Hofmann, Rivers was conversant with Abstract Expressionism, but at the Hofmann school he had become bored with abstraction and, as he said, he was "frantic to draw the figure." To make work that could be labeled "literary" was risky for an artist in the early 1950s, but Rivers, a voracious reader of poetry, fiction and history, embraced the literary and found a viable, contemporary way to indulge his attraction to narrative painting. With his famously subversive Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953), Rivers may have been parodying Emanuel Leutze's academic warhorse, but he was also working out a sophisticated, hybrid painting style and swimming in ideas stimulated by pre-Impressionist French paintings and Tolstoy's War and Peace. (In the summer of `53, Rivers wrote, he read "21 novels, of Balzac, Stendhal and all the Russians.")

Rivers, originally named Yitzak Loiza (later Irving) Grossberg, was born in the Bronx in 1923 to Ukrainian Jewish parents. His father, who had a small trucking firm, was an amateur violinist who made sure his son learned music. Rivers began working as a jazz saxophonist in 1940. At one of his jobs his band was introduced as "Larry Rivers and the Mudcats," and he adopted the new name. Early in World War II, Rivers enlisted in the army; after being discharged for health reasons, he studied for a year at Juilliard (Miles Davis was a fellow student) and was soon playing jazz saxophone professionally again. A piano player he worked with was married to the young painter Jane Freilicher, who suggested that Rivers try his hand at painting. He took to it immediately and decided it should come first.

In 1947 he and Freilicher both enrolled in Hans Hofmann's school; Rivers stayed nearly two years, drawing from the model extensively but impatient with the emphasis on abstraction. A 1948 Bonnard show at the Museum of Modern Art revealed a wealth of possibilities for painterly representation, and a trip to Paris in 1950 confirmed his commitment to a figural mode.

His first solo show was in 1949 at the Jane Street Gallery in New York, an artists' co-op in the Village. Clement Greenberg, reviewing the show in the Nation, called him "an amazing beginner," and compared his work favorably to Bonnard's. (Greenberg later changed his mind.) Rivers was invited to join the Tibor de Nagy Gallery uptown. Though it did not take as many paintings to fill a domestic-scale 1950s gallery as it does a SoHo loft or a Chelsea taxi garage, the fact that Rivers was given a show every year from 1951 to 1962 suggests a prodigious output--and one that was well received by collectors and museums. The Modern acquired Washington in 1955, and in `56 the Whitney acquired Double Portrait of Berdie, painted the year before. (Joe Shannon's article about these early works begins on p. 124 of this issue, and Richard Kalina's review of the drawing show at Clark Fine Art in Southampton is on p. 127.)

Though Rivers is frequently described as foreshadowing Pop art, his paintings of the `50s don't feature the commercial products, imitations of mass-media techniques or kitsch subjects that came forth with Warhol and Lichtenstein. (Lichtenstein and Rivers were born the same year, but Lichtenstein surfaced about a decade later.) Rather, by reclaiming genres long considered out of bounds--narrative painting and portraiture--and approaching them with witty, ironic panache and the clear intent to shake things up, Rivers opened new territory. His near-contemporaries Rauschenberg (b. 1925) and Johns (b. 1930) were more or less simultaneously making forays into challenging subject matter of a different kind; together they prepared the ground for Pop's later acceptance. But Rivers's interest in Bonnard, Courbet, Gericault and David was very different from the Pop artists' fondness for commercial Americana. Only in the `60s did Rivers introduce true Pop subject matter, most of it (other than the front end of a Buick) tobacco-related: Pink Tareyton (1960), followed by elegantly limned "portraits" of Camels, Gitanes, Gauloises, Dutch Masters and Daniel Webster cigars. His French 100-franc note looks like part of this group, too, though here Rivers seems to have been more interested in Jacques-Louis David's glamorizing portrait of Napoleon than in the "banality" of the banknote.