Larry Rivers
Encyclopedia
Larry Rivers was an American
artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City
, Southampton, New York
(on Long Island
) and Zihuatanejo
, Mexico
.
, and he studied at the Juilliard School of Music in 1945-46, along with Miles Davis
, with whom he remained friends until Davis's death in 1991.
Rivers is considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grand Father" of Pop art
, because he was one of the first artists to really merge non-objective, non-narrative art with narrative and objective abstraction.
Rivers took up painting in 1945 and studied at the Hans Hofmann
School from 1947–48, and then at New York University
. He was a pop art
ist of the New York School
, reproducing everyday objects of American popular culture as art. He was one of eleven New York artists featured in the opening exhibition at the Terrain Gallery
in 1955.
During the early 1960s Rivers lived in the Hotel Chelsea
notable for its artistic residents like Bob Dylan
, Janis Joplin
, Leonard Cohen
, Arthur C. Clarke
, Dylan Thomas
, Sid Vicious
and multiple people associated with Andy Warhol
's Factory. In 1965 he had his first comprehensive retrospective in five important American museums. His final work for the exhibition was The History of the Russian Revolution, which was later on extended permanent display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
in Washington, DC. During 1967 he was in London collaborating with the American painter Howard Kanovitz
.
In 1968, Rivers travelled to Africa for a second time with Pierre Dominique Gaisseau
to finish their documentary, Africa and I, they narrowly escaped execution as suspected mercenaries.
During the 1970s he worked closely with Diana Molinari and Michel Auder
on many video tape projects, including the infamous Tits, and also worked in neon
.
Established as one of America's most important postwar artists, Rivers continued, until his death on 14 August 2002, to exhibit regularly both in the United States and abroad and to create work that combined realistically rendered images within a loosely brushed, quasi-abstract background. His primary gallery being the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. In 2002 a major retrospective of Rivers' work was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art
in Washington, D.C.
Rivers also sustained a relationship with poet Frank O'Hara
in the late 1950s and delivered the eulogy at O'Hara's funeral in 1966.
New York University
bought correspondences and other documents from the Larry Rivers Foundation to house in their archive. However, both daughters he had with Clarice Price, Gwynne and Emma, object to one particular film being displayed, as it depicts them naked as young children. The film's purpose is supposedly to be a documentation on their growth through puberty
, but it was made without their consent. This matter is addressed in the December, 2010 issue of the magazine Vanity Fair, and the October, 2010 issue of Grazia.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, Southampton, New York
Southampton (village), New York
Southampton is a village in Suffolk County, New York, USA. The village is named after the Earl of Southampton. The Village of Southampton is in the southeast part of the county in the Town of Southampton...
(on Long Island
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
) and Zihuatanejo
Zihuatanejo
Zihuatanejo or Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, is the fourth-largest city in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Politically the city belongs to the municipality of Zihuatanejo de Azueta in the western part of Guerrero, but both are commonly referred to as Zihuatanejo...
, Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
.
Biography
Larry Rivers was born in the Bronx, New York as Yitzhok Loiza Grossberg to Russian-Jewish parents. He changed his name to Larry Rivers in 1940, after being introduced as "Larry Rivers and the Mudcats" at a local New York City pub. From 1940-45 he worked as a jazz saxophonist in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, and he studied at the Juilliard School of Music in 1945-46, along with Miles Davis
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz,...
, with whom he remained friends until Davis's death in 1991.
Rivers is considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grand Father" of Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
, because he was one of the first artists to really merge non-objective, non-narrative art with narrative and objective abstraction.
Rivers took up painting in 1945 and studied at the Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
School from 1947–48, and then at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
. He was a pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
ist of the New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
, reproducing everyday objects of American popular culture as art. He was one of eleven New York artists featured in the opening exhibition at the Terrain Gallery
Terrain Gallery
The Terrain Gallery, or the Terrain, is an art gallery and educational center in SoHo, New York City. It was founded in 1955 with a philosophic basis: the ideas of Aesthetic Realism and the Siegel Theory of Opposites, developed by American poet and educator Eli Siegel...
in 1955.
During the early 1960s Rivers lived in the Hotel Chelsea
Hotel Chelsea
The Hotel Chelsea, also known as the Chelsea Hotel, or simply the Chelsea, is a historic New York City hotel and landmark, known primarily for its history of notable residents...
notable for its artistic residents like Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
, Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin
Janis Lyn Joplin was an American singer, songwriter, painter, dancer and music arranger. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company and later as a solo artist with her backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band...
, Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships...
, Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
, Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
, Sid Vicious
Sid Vicious
Sid Vicious was an English musician best known as the bassist of the influential punk rock group Sex Pistols...
and multiple people associated with Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
's Factory. In 1965 he had his first comprehensive retrospective in five important American museums. His final work for the exhibition was The History of the Russian Revolution, which was later on extended permanent display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft and is part of the...
in Washington, DC. During 1967 he was in London collaborating with the American painter Howard Kanovitz
Howard Kanovitz
Howard Kanovitz was a pioneering painter in the Photorealist and Hyperrealist Movements, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the abstract art movement. - Life :...
.
In 1968, Rivers travelled to Africa for a second time with Pierre Dominique Gaisseau
Pierre Dominique Gaisseau
French documentary film-maker Pierre Dominique Gaisseau is best known for his documentary Sky Above and Mud Beneath, which was awarded the first Oscar for a documentary...
to finish their documentary, Africa and I, they narrowly escaped execution as suspected mercenaries.
During the 1970s he worked closely with Diana Molinari and Michel Auder
Michel Auder
Michel Auder was born in Soissons France in 1945. He began making films at the age of 18. He was influenced of the French New Wave and experimental cinema, most notably Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol. In 1969, Auder met and eventually married Viva, one of Warhol’s principal talents. A year later,...
on many video tape projects, including the infamous Tits, and also worked in neon
Neon lighting
Neon lighting is created by brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied neon or other gases. Georges Claude, a French engineer and inventor, presented neon tube lighting in essentially its modern form at the Paris Motor Show from December 3–18, 1910...
.
Established as one of America's most important postwar artists, Rivers continued, until his death on 14 August 2002, to exhibit regularly both in the United States and abroad and to create work that combined realistically rendered images within a loosely brushed, quasi-abstract background. His primary gallery being the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. In 2002 a major retrospective of Rivers' work was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...
in Washington, D.C.
Legacy
Rivers married Augusta Berger in 1945, and they had one son, Steven, as well as an earlier adopted child, Joseph. The couple divorced. He married Clarice Price in 1961, a Welsh school teacher who cared for his two sons. Rivers and Clarice Price had two daughters, Gwynne and Emma. After six years, they separated. Shortly after, he lived and collaborated with Diana Molinari, who featured in many of his works of the 1970s. After that Rivers lived with Sheila Lanham, a Baltimore poet. In the early 1980s, Rivers and East Village figurative painter Daria Deshuk lived together and in 1985 they had a son, Sam Deshuk Rivers. At the time of his death in 2002, Jeni Olin, a poet, was his companion.Rivers also sustained a relationship with poet Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...
in the late 1950s and delivered the eulogy at O'Hara's funeral in 1966.
New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
bought correspondences and other documents from the Larry Rivers Foundation to house in their archive. However, both daughters he had with Clarice Price, Gwynne and Emma, object to one particular film being displayed, as it depicts them naked as young children. The film's purpose is supposedly to be a documentation on their growth through puberty
Puberty
Puberty is the process of physical changes by which a child's body matures into an adult body capable of reproduction, as initiated by hormonal signals from the brain to the gonads; the ovaries in a girl, the testes in a boy...
, but it was made without their consent. This matter is addressed in the December, 2010 issue of the magazine Vanity Fair, and the October, 2010 issue of Grazia.
Further reading
- Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p. 8; p. 32; p. 38; p. 310-313