Larry Rivers was an American painter whose works frequently combined the vigorous, painterly brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism with the commercial images of the Pop art movement. A brilliant figurative artist who was seduced by the pop culture of the sixties, Rivers was adopted by the Pop Art generation of Warhol et al, but his continuing investment in an idea of the artist's touch.
Background
Ethnicity:
Larry's parents are Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine.
Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Samuel and Sonya Grossberg, was born in the Bronx, New York on August 17, 1923, speaking only Yiddish until he was six years old. At the age of 17 he was reborn as Larry Rivers, a name given to him in a jazz club where he performed as a professional saxophonist.
Education
Larry spent a year in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II, before being medically retired and enrolling at the Juilliard School of Music in 1944. There, he formed friendships with the jazz musicians Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. In 1946 he enrolled at the New York-based school of Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hoffman, but he was never entirely comfortable with the orthodox abstract style which he encountered there. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in art education from New York University in 1951.
Rivers did not come from an artistic background. In a sense, he fell into painting by mistake: it wasn't until 1944 that he contemplated an artistic career, when he was shown a book containing the works of Cubist artist Georges Braque by musician Jack Freilicher, partner of the painter Jane Freilicher. He was given a paintbrush by Jane Freilicher, with whom he would remain close friends after the breakup of her marriage to Jack. Within two weeks, Rivers recalled, he had found an activity on a "higher level" than jazz. He would play saxophone at night and draw for eight hours a day, perfecting his draughtsmanship while absorbing theories of color and form.
In 1950, Rivers's career took off when the revered art critic and academic voice of New York School painting Clement Greenberg praised the "superb plenitude and sensuousness" of this "amazing beginner." Rivers fell out of favor two decades later, when Greenberg dismissed his work to a reporter, noting that "you can say now that I think he stinks."
Rivers never self-identified as gay, or bisexual; though he was strikingly open about his relationships, he was reticent to be pigeonholed. Nonetheless, his portraits of his wives were less sensual than those of his lovers, such as “O'Hara Nude with Boots” (1954), depicting the great New York poet and Rivers's sometime sexual partner Frank O'Hara. Years of drinking and drug taking - "heroin, cocaine, opium, quaaludes, speed, mescaline, LSD, angel dust" were amongst the various substances he recalls- took their toll even by his early middle age.
In 1952 Rivers attempted suicide, and was rescued by O'Hara. Rivers later told reporters it had been a mistake: he didn't think he'd planned on dying when he reached for the razor blade. The slashes were only about a half inch long. On another occasion he reportedly threatened to jump from a terrace high up at a friend's Park Avenue apartment as a stunt. News stories about Rivers were peppered with such anecdotes, depicting a strange, exhibitionist, and somewhat troubled man.
By the mid-1950s New York had replaced Paris as the epicenter of the modern art-world. Rivers took up his role within that world as a kind of enfant terrible, shooting to celebrity partly by associating with more famous artists such as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning. He was seen as one of the New York scene's 'bad boys', often spotted dancing on the bar at Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue South, clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Rivers was not afraid to manipulate his acquaintances into posing naked for him, according to art writer and confidante Barbara Goldsmith. She said Larry wanted all of his friends to pose nude. These portraits were disturbing and wonderful in their precise draftsmanship and objectivity. He wanted her to pose in the nude, too, but she told him that wasn't on the cards. His ploys were quite ingenious, though: he'd say, 'Nude or not, kid, you look the same to me.' Or 'Someday you'll be happy you had the body you have today' that was one of his favorite expressions.
Rivers's more serious, intellectual assiduous side sometimes appeared in conflict with his flamboyant, showman-like traits. This battle would manifest itself in his work, which often seemed full of stylistic and thematic contradictions. In 1958, he won $32,000 as an art expert on the quiz show The $64,000 Challenge. It later emerged that someone tried to pass on an envelope containing the answers beforehand, but he was proud to say he declined it. Collecting his takings, he took them straight to a bar, where he bought a round of drinks for 300 people.
By the mid-1960s Rivers was at his professional peak. He seemed to flit between artistic movements, creating a body of work that was at once abstract and figurative, serious and superficial, backwards-looking and stylistically adventurous. John Canaday, chief art critic of The New York Times, described him as the cleverest, even the foxiest, painter at work in the country, an artist who can do anything he wants with a brush. As his work swerved between Abstract Expressionism and the contemporary French style of Nouveau Réalisme - having spent various periods of his professional life in Paris, Rivers was close to many artists associated with that movement - he began to shift the impetus of American Modernist painting, making way for the emergence of Pop Art.
In 1992, Rivers's outrageous autobiography was published, revealing how just morally questionable his attitudes towards sex really were. He laid bare the darkest secrets of his romantic history, including a huge number of affairs and conquests, one involving a 15-year-old girl when the artist was in his forties. Rivers's younger daughter, Emma Tamburlini, also accused him of making a film that amounted to "child pornography" about her and her sister, detailing the development of their bodies across puberty. The making of the documentary, entitled “Growing”, involved filming them naked, zooming in on their breasts, and asking them questions about their sexuality. Rivers claimed at the time to be breaking taboos, but it has been difficult for most contemporary commentators to accept this defense.
Towards the end of his life Rivers suffered from a bad back, cardiac problems and a neurological issue that made his left hand shake uncontrollably. But he remained a socialite until the end. As he lay dying in 2002, according to journalist and close friend Barbara Probst Solomon, his friends trouped one by one into his living room in Southampton, Long Island, which had been converted into a hospital room complete with nurses and medical paraphernalia. The pair of them discussed art when Solomon saw him in his final days. Larry Rivers died at his home in 2002, at the age of 78. The cause of death was liver cancer.
Rivers's continued expressive debt to teachers such as Hans Hoffman meant that he was never able to make the full-throttle jump into the world of pop culture that his contemporary Warhol did. In the end, Rivers's struggle was not against the Modernist avant-garde per se, but against the evacuation of the figurative - of all that was particular, sensual, and human - from the modern canvas.
Sex was a major part of Larry Rivers's life. In works such as “O' Hara Nude with Boots” and “Double Portrait of Berdie”, we find him smashing sexual taboos: whether that meant the prohibition on gay love in post-war America or on painting your ageing ex-mother-in-law naked. Clearly, some of Rivers's anti-moralizing crusades have aged better than others, and his work in some instances raises significant questions about the instances where culture and the state should interpose on the artist's right to freedom of expression.
Quotations:
"The only things in our house resembling art, were a cheap tapestry and a five-and-ten-cent-store 8'' by 10'' reproduction of a Spanish senorita holding a flower."
Personality
Rivers was a self-confessed hedonist, who said he wanted to "try everything." His sexuality played out in the portraits he produced: he was bisexual, married three times, had children by three different women, and was promiscuous in ways that bring many episodes in his biography into conflict with ethical norms. Rivers never self-identified as gay, or bisexual; though he was strikingly open about his relationships, he was reticent to be pigeonholed.
Physical Characteristics:
Keeping up his habits of sexual promiscuity, Rivers would dress in cowboy boots, tight pants, inside-out shirts and extravagant ties, which he would often wear two at a time. Rivers began to experience heart problems at a relatively young age. By the 1970s he was experiencing symptoms of cardiac illness, but he failed to properly address them until he suffered a heart attack two decades later.
Quotes from others about the person
Larry came in like a demented telephone. Nobody knew whether they wanted it in the library, the kitchen or the toilet, but it was electric."
"Larry's painting style was unique - it wasn't Abstract Expressionism and it wasn't Pop, it fell into the period in between. But his personality was very Pop." Rivers's personality continued to grab attention as the sixties came and went. In 1979, New York Times art critic Peter Schjeldahl described Rivers as "one of the most fascinating personalities in the last 30 years of art.
Interests
Music & Bands
jazz
Connections
In 1945 Larry married Augusta Burger, with whom he had two sons, Steven and Joseph. He separated from Augusta a year later, however, leaving the family home in Maine and moving to Manhattan, where he began to socialize with painters, poets and dancers, living a freewheeling lifestyle which brought him into contact with the poets of the beat generation and the New York School.
In 1961, Rivers interviewed Clarice Price, a Welsh school teacher, for the position of nanny. He fell in love with her, and they married that year. She became the subject of his groundbreaking work “Parts of the Face: French Vocabulary Lesson” (1961), in which we see his Abstract Expressionist style moving playfully towards the threshold of what would become known as Pop Art. Larry and Clarice separated six years later having had two daughters, Gwynn and Emma.
In 1981, Rivers began a romantic relationship with the young artist Daria Deshuk. Four years later they had a son, Sambo Deshuk Rivers.