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Larry Rivers
From Outcyclopedia, the free and queer encyclopedia. Larry Rivers was a pop artist, jazz musician and self described "Genius of the Vulgar." He was born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in New York on 17 August, 1923, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. Though best known as a pioneer of the American pop art movement, he had his artistic start as a jazz musician. Studying piano and the saxophone as a child, he began performing on the Catskills Mountain "borscht circuit" of vacation resorts when he was only twelve. Serving in the Army Air Corps band during World War II, he changed his name to Larry Rivers shortly after his discharge, then studied for a time at the Juilliard School, sharing classes, marijuana, and sex with Miles Davis. He then returned to touring with a jazz band, this time playing the resort circuit in New England. In 1945, the band's pianist handed Rivers a book on modern art. Rivers was fascinated by the concepts and styles behind modern art, while simultaneously humbled by his own ignorance of this cultural phenomenon. As it turns out, the pianist was married to a painter, who encouraged Rivers to make his first forays as an artist. Showing a natural gift, he was advised to enroll in art classes being taught by Hans Hoffman. Rivers adopted Hoffman's theories on color and reform, but rejected his emphasis on pure abstraction, preferring figurative art. His first showing in 1949 drew initially favorable critical attention, after which he lived for a time in Paris, studying the old masters. Returning to America, he produced his first major work, a parody of Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware." Though not well received by members of the abstract expressionist community, the audacious work paved the way for the emerging pop art movement. A homoerotic portrait of his friend and sometime lover, the poet and playwright Frank O'Hara, soon followed. Rivers' mother-in-law from his first marriage, a Rubenesque woman with sagging flesh, was the subject of another highly controversial work. Soon, Larry Rivers became a well-known, if notorious figure in the art world, with one critic noting that looking at his work was like "pressing your face into wet grass," evoking a variety of often conflicting reactions. He was also a highly visible figure, noted for sporting wild haircuts, wearing two loud neckties at once, cowboy boots, tight pants, and shirts pulled inside out. His living quarters were often described as "bohemian" and he possessed a voracious appetite both for reading and the exploration of life's indulgences. Though twice married and the father of five children, Rivers made no secret of his bisexuality and his many experimental forays not only in art and culture but also in sex, drugs, and politics. Despite his gaining fame during the 1950s, Rivers often had to work out jobs to support himself between showings, including posing as "Famous Artist, Jack Harris" to demonstrate ballpoint pens in department stores, or working as a messenger for an art supply company from which he sometimes purloined merchandise for his work. In 1958 he appeared on "The $64,000 Question" television quiz show, winning $32,000 as an art expert after refusing the answers which had been offered to him in an envelope. Larry River's height as an artist came in the 1960s, beginning with his paintings based on the Dutch Masters cigar box label. His works began to touch on political issues, particularly race relations, as in his paintings, "The Last Civil War Veteran," "Lynching," and "Black Olympia." A reconstruction of a Harlem tenement front stoop included garbage cans containing tape players which continually relayed screams and the sounds of a family trying to catch and kill a rat. Rivers also experimented with sculpture, working in both plaster and welded metal. His most notorious of these, "Lampman Likes It," showed a couple having intercourse. His 76 panel "History of the Russian Revolution" incorporated boxes, paintings, lead pipes, and a machine gun, among other materials, and was described by Rivers himself as either "the greatest painting-sculpture-mixed media of the 20th century, or the stupidest." As always, his works evoked reactions which were sometimes violent. Spotting a Larry Rivers sculpture in a driveway while commuting through East Hampton, Jackson Pollock tried to run it down. The latter part of the decade was spent with forays into the performing arts, designing sets for Frank O'Hara's Try! Try! and Amiri Baraka's "The Slave and the Toilet," as well as sets and costumes for a New York Philharmonic performance of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex which outraged as much and as many as had Rivers' paintings and sculptures. Ventures into film included an appearance in Pull My Daisy with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, and as Lyndon Johnson in Election. While filming a television travelogue in Africa in 1968, Rivers was arrested and nearly executed as a mercenary in Nigeria. Working through the 1970s, Rivers continued to enjoy success and popularity, though less so then in the previous decade. His experiments now included the use of air brushes, spray paint, and videotape. Still touching on political issues, Rivers commented on the American invasion of Grenada with "Reagan Crossing the Caribbean." A commission to produce a series depicting Jewish history resulted in the wryly humorous "History of Matzo." Rivers also began returning to his earlier jazz roots, touring with several bands and making commercial recordings up until the early 1990s. In 1987 he spent time in the hospital after his heart began fibrillating, and his musings over what his obituary in the New York Times might look like led to a 1992 memoir, What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography. Cancer of the liver was diagnosed in the spring of 2002, and Rivers was in the advanced stages when he attended the opening of a retrospective exhibit of his works at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He finally succumbed in September of 2002. Remembered as something of an artistic bad boy as well as an innovative genius, Rivers was also known for his own self mocking nature. "If I have inherited bad taste," he once said, "it is at least compounded with an obnoxious sense of who I am." External links:
WWW
Pop Art: Larry Rivers
Larry
Rivers: Art and the Artist
"To
Larry Rivers," by Frank O'Hara
Entry revised 31 December, 2004. All text is available for use under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (see Copyrights for details).
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