Larry River, NY Times obit
Hyfler/Rosner
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Larry Rivers, the irreverent proto-Pop painter and sculptor, jazz
saxophonist, writer, poet, teacher and sometime actor and filmmaker, whose
partly self-mocking bad-boy persona encapsulated the spirit of a restless
era that shook up American art, died on Wednesday at his home in
Southampton, N.Y. He was 78.
The cause was cancer of the liver, which was diagnosed this spring, his
family said.
Insecure, an avid reader and lover of poetry and a publicity hound, Mr.
Rivers in his glory days was given to cowboy boots, tight pants, inside-out
shirts, far-out ties (sometimes two at a time) and a black Cadillac and
motorcycle.
He helped change the course of American art in the 1950's and 60's, but his
virtues as an artist always seemed inextricably bound up with his vices, the
combination producing work that could be by turns exhilarating and
appalling. Naturally, it provoked extreme reactions. Jackson Pollock, Mr.
Rivers recalled with a certain bitter glee, "once tried to run down one of
my sculptures that was standing in a friend's driveway in East Hampton."
Mr. Rivers had an omnivorous curiosity about life, sex, drugs, politics,
history and culture. "He would stab out at different things, like Picasso,
except that more of Picasso's things worked out," said David Levy, the
director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and a longtime friend who played
with Mr. Rivers in the East 13th Street Band. "Larry had a realistic sense
of who he was, so he didn't get caught up in his ego when things failed. At
the same time, he was probing. He was a very serious man, an intellectual,
always reading."
Mr. Rivers had a sometimes self-destructive penchant for gossip, scandal and
outlandishness. "If I have inherited bad taste," he once said, "it is at
least compounded with an obnoxious sense of who I am."
For a while, he was everywhere. He frequented the Cedar bar with Willem de
Kooning. He designed sets for Frank O'Hara's "Try! Try!" and for "The Slave
and the Toilet," by Amiri Baraka. His sets and costumes for a New York
Philharmonic performance of Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex," conducted by Lukas
Foss, outraged music critics.
Mr. Rivers appeared with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in Robert Frank and
Alfred Leslie's offbeat film "Pull My Daisy," and played President Lyndon B.
Johnson onstage in Kenneth Koch's "Election." With Pierre-Dominique
Gaisseau, he spent six months making a television travelogue about Africa
before being arrested as a suspected mercenary in Lagos, Nigeria, and nearly
being executed.
Broadcast in 1968 on NBC's "Experiments in Television," the show was summed
up by Barbara Delatiner in Newsday as "something like a Rivers canvas:
complex, brilliantly colorful and maybe too tongue-in-cheek for serious
consideration."
In 1958 Mr. Rivers even won $32,000 as an art expert on "The $64,000
Challenge" quiz show. He subsequently said he had been slipped an envelope
beforehand with the questions in it but proudly declined to look at it.
In his last decades, commercially successful and churning out huge
multimedia works, bloated pastiches of himself and other artists, he fell
hard from grace. But at the height of his fame in the mid-1960's, John
Canaday, the chief art critic of The New York Times, called him "the
cleverest, even the foxiest, painter at work in the country," an artist who
"can do anything he wants with a brush."
A Start in Jazz
That ability was amazing, since Mr. Rivers had come to art almost by
accident. As a young saxophonist in a band playing the resort circuit in
Maine in 1945, he was shown a book about modern art one day by the band's
pianist, Jack Freilicher.
"I wanted to say, `What's Cubism?' " Mr. Rivers recalled in "What Did I Do?
The Unauthorized Autobiography," which he wrote with Arnold Weinstein
(HarperCollins, 1992). "But suddenly I knew what Cubism was. Cubism told a
young man from the Bronx he didn't know very much. Cubism didn't know about
him or his nights walking all over Greenwich Village with his big horn slung
over his shoulder, looking for a joint where he could sit and blow with a
lot of other desperados. Cubism certainly didn't smoke pot or get high,
Cubism was history in which he played no part. Where could I catch up?"
Jane Freilicher, a painter, was Freilicher's wife. She handed Mr. Rivers a
brush. He turned out to have a natural gift. "After a week or two I began
thinking that art was an activity on a `higher level' than jazz," he said.
Through Ms. Freilicher, he met Nell Blaine, who was working in a
semi-abstract style. She suggested he enroll in Hans Hofmann's class, which
Mr. Rivers did on the G.I. Bill. He played the saxophone at night and drew
eight hours a day, absorbing Hofmann's theories about color and form but
rebelling against his stress on pure abstraction, which was becoming the
dominant mode of American art at a time when Pollock and Mark Rothko were
emerging as major figures on the scene.
Drawing female nudes in Hofmann's studio in 1947, Mr. Rivers recalled, he
ended up with three peculiar rectangles.
"You were not supposed to make notice of the fact that you were staring at a
vagina," he said. "The art mood of the times dictated that we not recognize
a personal sexual reaction as important." By the end of the year, he said,
he "became frantic to draw the figure."
A Bonnard show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948 pointed a way forward.
Mr. Rivers saw that painting figures was not a dead occupation. He began
exhibiting the next year.
Clement Greenberg, the powerful critic, called him "an amazing beginner," a
"better composer of pictures than was Bonnard himself in many instances."
(Greenberg later changed his mind. Mr. Rivers "stinks," he decided.)
Manipulating the Masters
Mr. Rivers then went to Europe, living for a few months in Paris, where he
studied old masters, Courbet and Manet. After he returned, he painted
"Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1953), a deadpan parody of the salon
classic by Emanuel Leutze. He said he was stimulated by Tolstoy's retelling
of a national epic in "War and Peace." "I wanted to take something corny and
bring it back to life," he said.
The picture reintroduced to American painting a comic tone that the Abstract
Expressionists conspicuously lacked. They were not amused. But the work,
audacious and clever, the pigments dilute, the space diaphanous and
indeterminate, in an ambiguous style that subtly honored past art and
Modernism while poking fun at both, was bought by the Modern and helped pave
the way for Pop artists, and their irony, at the end of the 1950's.
Mr. Rivers was never strictly a Pop painter himself. His unconventionality
was particularly idiosyncratic, with elements of underground camp, a touch
of nostalgia and a subcurrent of tragedy. He was a superb draftsman in the
tradition of Degas or Manet, but with an odd tendency toward bravado and
self-parody. After "Washington Crossing the Delaware," he painted a
life-size homoerotic portrait of O'Hara nude, with boots on. O'Hara was his
friend, supporter, occasional lover and collaborator. (Mr. Rivers
collaborated with various poets over the years.)
Another provocative early subject was his mother-in-law, Berdie Burger,
nude, her flesh sagging, a Rubensian figure. Mr. Rivers said he felt
competitive with the old masters and some of the 19th-century giants. He
wanted to prove he could paint figures as well as Géricault. His work spoke
to old-fashioned ambitions thrust up against a modern world that seemed to
have lost faith in them.
But the art could be so extreme that it was not clear - not even to him,
perhaps - whether the result was meant to be, as one critic put it,
"therapeutic or traumatic." De Kooning in his obscure but precise way once
said that looking at Mr. Rivers's art was "like pressing your face in wet
grass," which summed up the mixture of sensations it could provoke.
A Vision of His Obituary
In the 1980's, when Mr. Rivers went into the hospital briefly after his
heart started fibrillating, he imagined his obituary in The New York Times.
"Will it begin at the bottom of the front page, 'Genius of the Vulgar Dies
at 63' " he asked, "continued inside with one of the Times's awful photos of
me and the usual reference to the name my parents gave me?"
He was born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg on Aug. 17, 1923 (although he also
claimed to be born in 1925), to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. His
father, a plumber, became the owner of a small trucking firm. Mr. Rivers
recalled working for his father, pushing hand carts through the garment
district. He studied piano and fell in love with jazz. A year before his bar
mitzvah, he was playing the saxophone on the Borscht Belt in the Catskills.
Later, when a comic introduced him and his band as Larry Rivers and the
Mudcats, he changed his name.
In 1942, over his family's objections, he enlisted in the United States Army
Air Corps and was inducted into the Army band, then honorably discharged
because of a tremor in his left hand. He enrolled at the Juilliard School
and studied composition in a class with Miles Davis. They would prepare for
exams "by going outside to smoke some marijuana," he said.
"We were convinced it would improve our hearing," he added. Through Davis,
who was living with Charlie Parker, he met other jazz musicians. He began to
tour with various groups.
Mother-in-Law as Muse
After the war, he married Augusta Burger, the mother of a toddler son,
Joseph, whom he later adopted. They had another son, Steven, then divorced.
Mr. Rivers reared the boys. O'Hara called the home Mr. Rivers set up a
"bohemian household" of "staggering complexity." It included Joseph, Steven
and Mr. Rivers's mother-in-law, his favorite model until she died in 1957.
"She was very easy to live with," Mr. Rivers said. "Nothing threw her. I
mean, here she was from a very ordinary Jewish background, born in Harlem
when Harlem was still Jews, and there were gay guys in my life, and black
people and dope addicts, and she would say, `Oh, isn't he nice . . . he's
nice . . . Tennessee Williams is nice.'
"She was slightly mad."
Mr. Rivers would return home to the Bronx, his sister Geri recalled (he
quoted her in "What Did I Do?"), "in this long overcoat with his strange
haircut, saying a lot of things no one understood, telling weird jokes
without a punch line and using a lot of `hey man, you dig, man, go, man.'
Mamma was beginning to learn how to read and write English in the Communist
Party night school when Larry comes around talking black talk."
He needed odd jobs to support himself. Once he became Jack Harris, Famous
Artist, to demonstrate ballpoint pens at Hearns Department Store on 14th
Street, and also worked as a messenger for Philip Rosenthal, an art-supply
house on Broadway, making cashless transactions on the sly to keep his own
studio well stocked.
By the 1960's, his reputation and notoriety at a peak, he was experimenting
widely. The work could be vulgar or lofty. He made sculptures out of plaster
casts and welded metal. His "Lampman Loves It" was a sculpture of a couple
having intercourse. He collaborated with Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein in
Europe.
His paintings also touched on racial issues in works like "The Last Civil
War Veteran," "Lynching" and "Black Olympia." He once reconstructed a Harlem
tenement front stoop with trash cans from which emanated taped screams and
shouts of a family killing a rat.
Mr. Rivers incorporated more and more everyday things, found objects and
popular images into his art, famously using the Dutch Masters cigar box
label, based on Rembrandt's "Syndics," in a 1960's series, but also
complicating his work with stencils and other lettering devices.
Serio-Comic Creations
His "History of the Russian Revolution" (1965) was a 33-foot, 76-panel
project, which his sons helped him build. Based on his reading of a
biography of Trotsky, it was made up of boxes, paintings, drawings, a poem,
an honor roll, lead pipes, wooden rifles and a machine gun. Mr. Rivers
called it "the greatest painting-sculpture-mixed media of the 20th century,
or the stupidest."
He went on to make images about the Holocaust, and homages to Hollywood. In
the 1980's he undertook a series after Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a
Staircase," did nine Op-Ed illustrations for The Times, including one of
"Reagan Crossing the Caribbean" at the time of the invasion of Grenada, and,
when commissioned to paint the story of the Jews from Moses to Theodore
Herzl, produced the three-part "History of Matzo." "In Jewish history," he
said, "there's a humorous way of looking at things."
Splitting his time between art and music, he played the saxophone with
several bands in later years, touring successfully until he died. His
daughter Gwynne sometimes sang with him. His East 13th Street Band made
commercial recordings in the 1980's and early 90's. His last group was
called the Climax Band.
He is survived by his wife, Clarice, a Welsh-born teacher he married in
1961; they were separated but remained friendly. He is also survived by
their daughters, Gwynne Rivers and Emma Rivers, both of New York City, and
his sons, Joseph Rivers, of Pleasant Valley, N.Y.; Steven Rivers, of Nyack,
N.Y.; and Sam Deshuk Rivers, his son with Daria Deshuk, a painter he lived
with for 10 years. Ms. Deshuk and Sam live in New York City. There are eight
grandchildren.
His two sisters, Geri Block and Joan Gordon, both of Southampton, also
survive him. For the last five years, he lived with Jeni Olin, a poet.
Always a Risk-Taker
A critic once claimed that "the innovations of Rauschenberg and to a lesser
degree Johns and the Pop artists are incomprehensible without Rivers."
Maybe. It is at least true that Mr. Rivers helped bridge the gulf between
Abstract Expressionism and the mass imagery of Pop. At a time when sly
figure painting is now back in fashion, his early work seems remarkably
fresh and prescient. His willingness to take chances was in the end perhaps
his finest quality.
About his later unevenness, Mr. Rivers said: "I keep shifting my interests.
I can have a few months when I have visions of the Holocaust, and then, the
next few months, I'm suddenly doing something that might be considered
trite. Like fashion. Though I really can't make much sense of it, except for
the continuation of the absurd in art.
"I go from this to that, and why be ashamed of it? It seems to me this is
the human experience."
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:aji2ih$5t6$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
Bill Schenley
> > Larry Rivers, the irreverent proto-Pop painter and sculptor,
> > jazz saxophonist, writer, poet, teacher and sometime actor
> > and filmmaker,
Well ... He was no Kyle Rote.