Larry Rivers

There is a particular kind of artist who seems to belong to every era at once, whose restless intelligence refuses the comfort of a single style or a settled reputation. Larry Rivers was exactly that kind of artist. When the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a major retrospective of his work in 2002, the breadth of what filled those galleries startled even seasoned observers: jazz improvisations rendered in pigment, monumental history paintings dripping with irony, collaged surfaces that anticipated the digital layering of a later generation, and portraits of friends and lovers executed with a tenderness that no amount of conceptual sophistication could disguise. The show confirmed what a committed circle of collectors and critics had long understood, that Rivers was one of the genuinely original figures of postwar American art, a man who played by rules he invented himself. He was born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx, New York, in 1923, and the city shaped him completely. Growing up in a working class Jewish household, he came to art not through the academy but through music, spending his early twenties as a jazz saxophonist playing clubs in and around Manhattan. That musical training never left him. The rhythmic looseness of his brushwork, the way a composition seems to breathe and swing rather than sit still, owes everything to those years with the instrument. He studied painting under Hans Hofmann in the late 1940s, absorbing the lessons of European modernism while already beginning to resist them, and later at New York University, where he earned a degree and found himself drawn into the orbit of the New York School poets, including Frank O'Hara, who became a close friend and one of the great collaborators of his life. The breakthrough came early and controversially. In 1953, Rivers exhibited Washington Crossing the Delaware, a large scale reworking of Emanuel Leutze's canonical patriotic image, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. The Abstract Expressionist establishment was not pleased. Here was a young painter not only returning to figuration at the very moment abstraction reigned supreme, but doing so with a knowingness, a looseness, a deliberate refusal of heroic finish that seemed to mock the solemnity of the dominant mode. Yet the painting was not mockery. It was something more complicated: a genuine engagement with American mythology, rendered with the kind of ambivalence that only someone who had grown up on the margins of that mythology could bring. Critics who dismissed it early eventually had to reckon with the fact that Rivers had essentially anticipated the concerns of Pop Art by nearly a decade. Through the late 1950s and 1960s, his practice expanded in every direction at once. He made paintings that incorporated stenciled words and commercial imagery long before such gestures became standard. He worked in sculpture, in printmaking, in film and performance. The series of works responding to the Civil War, including the haunting Final Veteran of 1960 and the later Last Civil War Veteran from 1968, executed in pencil and pastel on canvas paper, showed a particular preoccupation with the weight of American history and the way memory degrades and transforms its subjects. These were not illustrations of the past but meditations on how the past persists, incomplete and flickering, in the present. The drawing quality in these works is remarkable, delicate and searching, and they remain among the most moving things he ever made. The collaged and mixed media works from the 1960s onward reveal another dimension of Rivers's intelligence. Throwaway Dress: New York to Nairobi from 1967, an oil on burlap and canvas collage mounted on panel, brings together the global flow of consumer culture and personal experience with an energy that feels entirely contemporary. Map with Fraser from 1966, a screenprint with paper collage and crayon, plays with cartographic authority and intimate annotation in ways that anticipate later artists who would mine similar territory. His Fred and Ginger works, including a lithograph construction on foam core with hand coloring and a lithograph in colors mounted to sculpted foam core, demonstrate the late career exuberance that characterized his final decades, a delight in surface and fabrication that never became merely decorative because the wit and observation were always present. The Cubism Today works of the 1980s, including his oil on collaged canvas portrait of Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein mounted to sculpted foamboard, show an artist comfortable enough in art history to play with it freely, honoring and teasing his contemporaries in the same gesture. For collectors, Rivers represents a genuinely compelling opportunity. His work spans an enormous range of media and scale, from intimate works on paper to large scale constructions, and the variation in price points reflects that range. The mixed media and print works offer accessible entry points into the collection of an artist whose place in the canon is secure. Auction records at Christie's and Sotheby's have demonstrated consistent demand for his major paintings, while works on paper and multiples have attracted a younger collecting audience drawn to the graphic energy and the art historical density of the imagery. The sculptural constructions, with their layered foam core bases and hand colored surfaces, occupy a particularly interesting space between painting and object, and serious collectors have recognized them as among the more distinctive things he made in his later years. As with any artist whose practice was so varied, condition and provenance matter enormously, and working with informed advisors is essential. To understand Rivers fully, it helps to hold him in relation to his contemporaries and his natural interlocutors across generations. He shares something with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, that commitment to the charged image, to the flag and the map and the face as sites of meaning rather than mere surface. He anticipates aspects of the work of Eric Fischl and David Salle in his willingness to layer cultural references without resolving them into comfort. His friendship with the New York School poets connects him to a broader tradition of collaboration between visual and verbal artists that runs through the twentieth century American avant garde. And yet he remains stubbornly himself, impossible to absorb entirely into any movement, finally most useful as a model of creative independence. Larry Rivers died in Southampton, New York, in August 2002, leaving behind a body of work that continues to reward close attention and to surprise. The surprise is the thing. Decades on, his paintings and works on paper still feel alive with decision making, with the sense of an exceptionally alert intelligence working through problems in real time. He did not resolve American culture or his own complicated place within it. He painted it, argued with it, celebrated and questioned it, and left the conversation open. That openness is his gift to the artists and collectors and viewers who continue to find their way to his work.