Larry Rivers (1924-2002) (fwd)
Alan Sondheim
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 16:39:32 -0400
From: Jim Behrle <tinaiskingof...@HOTMAIL.COM>
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POE...@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
To: POE...@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU
Subject: Larry Rivers (1924-2002)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/15/obituaries/15CND-RIVE.html
August 15, 2002
Larry Rivers, Who Shook Up American Art, Is Dead at 78
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
arry Rivers, the irreverent, proto-Pop painter and sculptor, jazz
saxophonist, writer, poet, teacher, sometime actor and filmmaker, whose
self-styled, 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, on Long Island. He was 78.
The cause was cancer of the liver, which was diagnosed this spring.
Insecure, an avid reader and lover of poetry, a publicity hound, Mr. Rivers
was given in his glory days to cowboy boots, tight pants, inside-out shirts=
,
far-out ties, sometimes two at a time, a black Cadillac and motorcycle.
He helped change the course of American art in the 1950's and '60's, but hi=
s
virtues as an artist always seemed inextricably bound up with his vices,
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."
He had an omnivorous curiosity about life, sex, drugs, politics, history an=
d
culture. "He would stab out at different things, like Picasso, except that
more of Picasso's things worked out," said David C. Levy, the Corcoran
Gallery of Art's director and a longtime friend, who played with Mr. Rivers
in the East 13th Street Band. "Larry had a realistic sense of who he was, s=
o
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."
He 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 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.
He appeared with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in Robert Frank and Alfred
Leslie's offbeat film "Pull My Daisy," and played Lyndon Johnson on stage i=
n
Kenneth Koch's "Election." With Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, he spent six
months making a television travelogue about Africa before being arrested as
a suspected white 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, he even won $32,000 on "The $64,000 Challenge" quiz show as an art
expert. He subsequently said he was slipped an envelope beforehand with the
questions in it but proudly declined to look.
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 New York Times chief art critic, called him "the cleverest,
even the foxiest, painter at work in the country," an artist who "can do
anything he wants with a brush."
That 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 his
autobiography, "What Did I Do?" "But suddenly I knew what cubism was. Cubis=
m
told a young man from the Bronx he didn't know very much. Cubism didn't kno=
w
about him or his nights walking all over Greenwich Village with his big hor=
n
slung over his shoulder looking for a joint where he could sit and blow wit=
h
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?"
Freilicher's wife was Jane Freilicher, a painter. 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 Jane Freilicher, he met Nell Blaine, who was working in a
semiabstract 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 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 "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 hi=
m
"an amazing beginner," a "better composer of pictures than was Bonnard
himself in many instances." (Greenberg later changed his mind and decided
Mr. Rivers "stinks.")
Mr. Rivers then went to Europe, living in Paris for a few months, 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 an=
d
bring it back to life," he said.
It 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 of them, 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, however. His
unconventionality was particularly idiosyncratic, with elements of
underground camp, a touch of nostalgia and a sub-current 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 lifesize 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.)
A favorite 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. He wanted to prove he could paint figures as well as Gericault=
.
His work spoke to old-fashioned ambitions thrust up against a modern world
that seemed to have lost faith in them.
But it could be so extreme that it was not clear — not even to him, perha=
ps
— 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 lookin=
g
at Mr. Rivers's art was "like pressing your face in wet grass," which summe=
d
up the mixture of sensations it could provoke.
In the 80'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 an=
d
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 was a plumber who became the owner of a small trucking firm. Mr.
Rivers recalled working for his father, pushing handcarts through the
garment district. He studied piano and fell in love with jazz. A year befor=
e
his bar mitzvah, he was playing the saxophone on the Borscht Belt circuit i=
n
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 Arm=
y
Air Corps, and was inducted into the Army band, then honorably discharged
because of a tremor in his left hand. He enrolled at Juilliard 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 woul=
d
improve our hearing." Through Davis, who was living with Charlie Parker, he
met other jazz musicians. He began to tour with various groups.
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 raised the boys. O'Hara called the home he set up a "bohemian
household" of "staggering complexity." It included Joseph, Steven and
Augusta's mother, Berdie, 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."
He 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 60's, his reputation and notoriety at a peak, he was experimenting
widely. The work could be vulgar or lofty. He made sculptures out of plaste=
r
casts and welded metal. His "Lampman Loves It" was a sculpture of a couple
engaged in intercourse. He collaborated with Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein i=
n
Europe. His paintings touched on racial issues, as 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.
He incorporated more and more everyday things, found objects and popular
images into his art, famously using the Dutch Masters cigar box label, base=
d
on Rembrandt's "Syndics," in a 1960's series, but also complicating his wor=
k
with stencils and other lettering devices.
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, 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 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 war in Grenada, and, whe=
n
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 80's and early 90's. His last group was called
the Climax Band.
He is survived by Clarice, a Welsh-born teacher he married in 1961; they
were separated but remained married and on friendly terms. He is also
survived by their daughters, Gwynne Rivers and Emma Rivers, both of New Yor=
k
City, 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. Both of them live in New York City. There are eigh=
t
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.
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, he 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. Lik=
e
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."
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