RIVERS, LARRY

RIVERS, LARRY (1924–2002), U.S. painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and musician. Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx to immigrant parents from the Ukraine, Rivers initially made his reputation as a jazz saxophonist. After a brief stint in the U.S. Army during World War II (1942–43) he studied music theory and composition at the Juilliard School of Music (1944–45). Rivers started painting in 1945, and from 1947–48 he studied at the avant-garde Hans Hofmann School in New York. His initial work shows the influence of Abstract Expressionism. In the early 1950s, Rivers began to paint autobiographical themes in pictures such as The Burial (1951, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana), a gesturally rendered canvas inspired by the memory of his grandmother's funeral, and Europe I (1956, Minneapolis Institute of Arts) and Europe II (1956, private collection, New York), the latter based on a formal portrait of Polish relatives. Parody enters his art in these years; in Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953, Museum of Modern Art, New York), for example, a canvas mocking the grand heroics of 19th-century American history painting, Rivers appropriates the imagery of Emanuel Leutze's iconic painting of the same name (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) while also exploring paint application and other formal qualities. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired Rivers' version in 1951, his first painting to enter a major public collection. This mode of parody also pervades History of Matzah (The Story of the Jews) (1982–84, private collection, New York), an ambitious project that attempts to tell the nearly four-millennium history of the Jews. Painted on commission, History of Matzah appears in a collage-like form with images and stories overlapping on three nine-by-fourteen-foot canvases in Part I, titled Before the Diaspora, Part II, European Jewry, and Part III, Immigration to America, all superimposed on a rendering of matzah. Other works influenced by Rivers' Jewish identity include a large mural, Fall in the Forest at Birkenau (1990), hanging in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; three posthumous portraits of the Holocaust memoirist Primo levi (1987–88, Collection La Stampa, Turin, Italy); and the illustrations for a Limited Editions Club publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story "The Magician of Lublin" (1984). The multi-talented Rivers designed sets for the play Try\! Try\! (1951), written by Frank O'Hara, as well as a play by Le Roi Jones (1964) and Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1966). With O'Hara, Rivers also wrote the play Kenneth Koch: A Tragedy (1954). In 1957 he began making welded metal sculpture. Rivers wrote poetry, acted on stage, including a stint as Lyndon Johnson in Kenneth Koch's The Election (1960), and continued to perform in jazz bands throughout his life. His 1992 autobiography, titled What Did I Do?, chronicles his life in often lurid detail. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Rivers with C. Brightman, Drawings and Digressions (1979); H.A. Harrison, Larry Rivers (1984); S. Hunter, Larry Rivers (1989); L. Rivers and A. Weinstein, What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography (1992); S. Baskind, "Effacing Difference: Larry Rivers' History of Matzah (The Story of the Jews)," in: Athanor (1999), 87–95; L. Rivers, Larry Rivers: Art and the Artist (2002). (Samantha Baskind (2nd ed.)