Larry Rivers

Larry Rivers (1923-2002) was one of the most colorful and versatile American artists of the postwar era, whose distinctive practice bridged Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and figurative painting with an unmistakably personal wit and irreverence. Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Rivers pursued an unusual early path that included a serious career as a professional jazz saxophonist during his youth. It was during his musical years that he adopted the stage name Larry Rivers, which he would keep for the rest of his life.

Rivers turned decisively toward the visual arts in the mid-1940s, studying with Hans Hofmann at the celebrated German-American master's schools in New York and Provincetown before continuing his training at New York University under William Baziotes. These formative years placed him within the emerging community of the New York School, and he formed lasting friendships with the poets and painters of the vibrant downtown scene, including his particularly close relationship with the poet Frank O'Hara, whose collaboration with Rivers produced some of the most inventive artist-poet partnerships of the era.

Rivers's mature painting occupied a distinctive middle ground within postwar American art. While many of his contemporaries embraced pure abstraction, Rivers returned to the figure and to recognizable subject matter, often drawn from art history, advertising, commercial packaging, and American cultural iconography. His celebrated Washington Crossing the Delaware of 1953 famously reworked the iconic Emanuel Leutze painting through the gestural vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism, and his later series drawing on cigar boxes, French money, and other found imagery anticipated key concerns of the Pop art movement.

Alongside his painting, Rivers pursued jazz music throughout his life, wrote poetry and memoirs, appeared in films, and occupied a genuinely public role in American cultural life. His autobiography What Did I Do? is among the liveliest artist memoirs of the postwar era. His paintings and sculptures are held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, and every major American collection, where they remain among the most distinctive productions of American postwar art.