DEAD - Pop Art Pioneer Larry Rivers Dies
The Kentucky Wizard
NEW YORK -- Pop art pioneer Larry Rivers, who was also an actor, cartoonist,
sculptor, filmmaker and teacher during his more than five-decade-long
career, has died. He was 78.
Rivers died Wednesday at his home in Southampton, N.Y., according to John
O'Connell, director of the funeral home arranging the burial. O'Connell said
he didn't know the cause of death.
As a preteen, Rivers played saxophone in the "borscht belt," the Catskill
Mountain resorts favored by New York's Jewish vacationers. He changed his
name from Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg after his discharge from the Army at the
end of World War II.
Rivers moved among the American abstract painters early in his career and
spoke highly of them decades later. Unlike them, he usually made clear what
he was painting. Some of his friends saw his version of Washington crossing
the Delaware, based on the image familiar from schoolbooks, as a kind of
insulting parody.
When he did his version of a group portrait by Rembrandt, he made clear that
his idea came from the cover of a "Dutch Masters" cigar box -- he included
the cigars.
Some may remember him more for his meticulously realistic nudes of his
mother-in-law, known as Berdie.
Before the opening of a major retrospective this spring at the Corcoran
Gallery in Washington, D.C., Rivers gave reporters a few jazz duets with
Corcoran director David Levy. They used to play in the same New York band.
Rivers then led a tour where the high point was "The History of the Russian
Revolution: From Marx to Mayakovsky," a tableau more than 32 feet long and
14 feet high that comprises paintings, photographs, drawings and odd
objects. The Corcoran provided a diagram to explain 31 of more than 70
separate images in the work.
The retrospective followed 42 one-man shows from New York to Tokyo and an
autobiography titled, "What Did I Do?"
Rivers devoted a large room in the new exhibit to show business. He had done
a series called "History of Hollywood," which has four parts. Humphrey
Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx and other stars are scattered through
it, part of what curator Jacquelyn Days Serwer calls Rivers' "smorgasbord of
the recognizable."
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The Kentucky Wizard
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