Larry Rivers, 78; Bad-Boy Pioneer of Pop Art

Artist Larry Rivers, a high-profile pioneer of Pop Art and gadfly of the New York art world who cultivated a multitude of creative interests and a bad-boy persona during his 55-year career, has died. He was 78.

Diagnosed with liver cancer a few months ago, Rivers died Wednesday at his home in Southampton, N.Y.

Rivers was a facile draftsman whose work formed a connection between Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and ‘50s and Pop Art, the reigning style in the 1960s.

His paintings retained the sensual, brushy quality associated with the earlier period, even as he pillaged mass media, family photographs and art history books for images that he could rework with his personal touch and idiosyncratic sense of humor.

“He was amazingly talented,” said Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “He believed deeply in the tradition of painting, but somehow he knew that abstraction was not going to be the way for him.

“Early on, he realized that by looking back at the history of painting he would find an extraordinary direction for his work, in which Abstract Expressionism could go no further.”

Rivers was far from the only artist to look for a way out of the entrenched style, but he attracted a lot of attention because his approach was “outrageous,” Schimmel said. “He took on icons. He was a complete provocateur.”

Some of his best-known paintings are irreverent remakes of celebrated paintings by Old Masters, including “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze and “Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild,” a group portrait by Rembrandt that Rivers spotted in ads for Dutch Masters cigars.

He also dealt with social history, racial tensions and ethnic issues. One painting, “Black Olympia,” turns the reclining white nude in Edouard Manet’s “Olympia” into a black woman. “History of Matzah: The Story of the Jews,” a huge three-part narrative painting that was displayed at the Skirball Cultural Center Gallery in Los Angeles in 1999, highlights conflicts in Jewish history while indulging Rivers’ love of parody.

One section, “The Last Seder,” is a takeoff on Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper.”

While Rivers’ colorful personality often overshadowed his artwork--and sometimes made him appear to be more of a showman than an artist--he turned out to be prescient in a way that he couldn’t have predicted, Schimmel said.

“Long before issues of personal identity were considered appropriate as a subject of contemporary art, he brought it all in. And he did it in a way that really unsettled people. The blurring of his personal life, his sexuality and his identity in the work itself was very progressive,” he said.

Among Rivers’ most controversial subjects was his mother-in-law, Berdie Burger. Rivers began living with her in 1953, after his divorce from his first wife, Augusta Burger.

Berdie cheerfully accepted his bohemian lifestyle, and he painted her in the nude, making no secret of her wrinkles and sagging flesh. She remained his favorite model until her death in 1957.

Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in New York in 1923, Rivers was the son of Russian-Polish immigrants Shiah and Sonya Grossberg.

He began playing the piano as a child, then switched to the saxophone and began a career as a musician when he was a teenager, primarily playing in jazz bands.

Somewhere along the way, his name was changed by a nightclub comedian who introduced his group as “Larry Rivers and his Mudcats.”

In 1944, after supporting himself as a musician for several years and doing a stint in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Rivers enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music to study composition. Around the same time he met painter Jane Freilicher, who was married to a fellow musician and who introduced him to the world of visual art.

Rivers continued to support himself as a musician, but began studying painting with Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann in 1947. With funding from the GI Bill, he enrolled in the fine arts program at New York University, where he worked with William Baziotes and other artists. He earned a bachelor’s degree in art education at the university in 1951, but didn’t become a teacher, as he had planned.

Instead, he developed a freewheeling career that focused on painting but encompassed music, stage design, acting, filmmaking and writing poetry and prose. He recounted the entire adventure--along with his sexual pursuits, self-confessed “Jewish guilt” and “adolescent neuroses”--in “What Did I Do?,” a no-holds-barred autobiography published in 1993.

In a review of the book, former Times art critic William Wilson described it as “nearly 500 pages of confessional anecdote” by an artist who “is apparently in love with himself.”

Throughout his career, Rivers’ artwork was a fixture of the New York gallery scene, appearing regularly at Tibor de Nagy Gallery and later at Marlborough Gallery. His work is in the collections of major art museums across the United States and in Europe.

His most ambitious project, created in 1965, is “History of the Russian Revolution,” a 76-panel painting, inspired by Rivers’ reading of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky.

It’s either “the greatest painting-sculpture-mixed media of the 20th century, or the stupidest,” Rivers said, after laboring on the monumental work for six months. Composed of 30 paintings, poetry, boxes, lead pipes, wooden rifles and a real machine gun, it is now in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

He is survived by his wife Clarice, from whom he had been separated for several years. He is also survived by the poet Jeni Olin, with whom he had lived for some time, two daughters, three sons, two sisters and eight grandchildren.