Larry Rivers (born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg; August 17, 1923 – August 14, 2002) was an American painter, musician, filmmaker, and occasional actor. Considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grandfather" of Pop art, he was one of the first artists to merge non-objective, non-narrative art with narrative and objective abstraction. He was also a lover of the American poet Frank O’Hara, despite accounts falsely reducing their relationship to a platonic, professional relationship.
Career
thumb|left|Larry Rivers in 1961
Larry Rivers was born as Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx, New York, in the family of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Rivers took up painting in 1945 and studied at the Hans Hofmann School from 1947 through 1948. He earned a BA in art education from New York University in 1951.
He was a pop artist 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.
He has been contextualised as working out of the Abstract expressionist legacy of Willem de Kooning, "adapting the freedom of the Abstract Expressionist technique towards figurative ends."
During the early 1960s Rivers lived in Manhattan's Hotel Chelsea, notable for its artistic residents such as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Arthur C. Clarke, Dylan Thomas, Sid Vicious and multiple people associated with Andy Warhol's Factory and where he brought several of his French nouveau réalistes friends like Yves Klein who wrote there in April 1961 his Manifeste de l'hôtel Chelsea, Arman, Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Christo, Daniel Spoerri or Alain Jacquet, several of whom, like Rivers, left some pieces of art in the lobby of the hotel for payment of their rooms. In 1965, Rivers 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. He spent 1967 in London collaborating with the American painter Howard Kanovitz.
In 1967, Rivers traveled to Africa for a second time with Pierre Dominique Gaisseau to finish their documentary Africa and I, which was a part of the groundbreaking NBC series Experiments in Television. During this trip they narrowly escaped execution as suspected mercenaries.
Rivers's legs appeared in John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1971 film Up Your Legs Forever.
In 1971, he curated Some American History at the Institute for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, where his own work was exhibited alongside that of African-American artists Ellsworth Ausby, Peter Bradley, Frank Bowling, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Joe Overstreet, and William T. Williams. The exhibition, which intended to focus on violence against African-Americans, was widely criticized by national press along with the black artists whose work was shown, many of whom felt that Rivers' curation focused on his own experiences as a non-black person instead of uplifting and highlighting the perspectives of the black artists who had experienced the racism the show was supposed to foreground.
Music
Between 1940 and 1945, he worked as a jazz saxophonist in New York City; he changed his name to Larry Rivers in 1940 after being introduced as "Larry Rivers and the Mudcats". 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.
Personal life
Larry Rivers was born in the Bronx to Samuel and Sonya Grossberg, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine.
Shortly after, he lived and collaborated with Diana Molinari, who featured in many of his works of the 1970s.
Rivers then lived with Sheila Lanham, a Baltimore artist and poet.
In the early 1980s, Rivers and East Village figurative painter Daria Deshuk (1956–2017) lived together and, in 1985, they had a son, Sam Deshuk Rivers. They remained good friends until Rivers's death.
Rivers also maintained a relationship with poet Frank O'Hara in the late 1950s and delivered the eulogy at O'Hara's funeral, in 1966.
Throughout his career, the artist maintained studios in New York City; Southampton, Long Island; and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.
Rivers died in 2002, leaving behind his five children and then companion, poet Jeni Olin. However, his daughters Gwynne and Emma objected to one particular film being displayed, as it depicts them naked as children and adolescents. The film's purpose is supposedly the documentation of their growth through puberty, but it was made when they were not consenting adults.