Am I Your Type

Born in the Bronx, Larry Rivers began made his debut in the art world at the age of seventeen as a jazz saxophonist. 'Larry Rivers' was originally a stage name -- his parents called him Yitzroch. Four years later he began to study theory and composition at the Juilliard School of Music. Talking to a bandmate and his wife about visual art he attempted his first serious drawings. His formal art training began in 1947 at the Hans Hofmann School of Painting; his first one-man show took place at the Jane Street Gallery in 1949.

In 1951 he graduated from New York University with a BA in art education. Shorthand descriptions of Rivers' career typically refer to him as a bridging artist, Pop art's inspiration, admired by Andy Warhol, but Warhol himself gave a more nuanced view in his 1980 memoir Popism. "Larry's painting style was unique - it wasn't Abstract Expressionism and it wasn't Pop, it fell into the period in between. But his personality was very Pop."

In his own memoir, What Did I Do? (1992), Rivers described his early work as a reaction against abstraction. He provoked the Abstract Expressionists in 1953 with a modern figurative historical epic work, Washington Crossing the Delaware. "He was obsessed with what the artist sees," wrote his friend Barbara Probst Solomon in 2011. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the Washington painting in 1955. A decade later the first large-scale retrospective of his work included another historical epic, History of the Russian Revolution (From Marx to Mayakovsky), thirty two feet of mixed media collage, sculpture, metal, plexiglass, and paint. The growing prominence of the independent film movement gave him a new field for his experiments. He worked with Jack Kerouac on Pull My Daisy (1959) and collaborated on a documentary in Africa during the late 1960s. Later he worked with video and neon.

Rivers died at the age of seventy-eight from liver cancer.

Deanne Sole, UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum, 2013

Bibliography
Joan Baum, Larry Rivers: Major Early Works - 1952-1966 - At Guild Hall, Hamptons
Paul Cummings, Oral history interview with Larry Rivers, 1968 Nov. 2, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Larry Rivers Foundation, Biography, Larry Rivers Foundation
Larry Rivers, What Did I Do?, Harpercollins
Barbara Probst Solomon, Larry Rivers After Crossing his Delaware, Huffington Post
Andy Warhol, Popism: the Warhol Sixties, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich