American (1923-2002)

Larry Rivers was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet, and musician whose art stood at the crossroads of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Indeed, Rivers is considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grandfather" of Pop Art, because he was one of the first artists to really merge nonobjective, non-narrative art with narrative and objective abstraction. Many of his paintings are quite provocative, and this one-time bad boy of the New York art scene is known as much for his sexual exploits and provocative nature as for his paintings.

Starting with his earliest works from the early 50s, Rivers painted figuratively, at first turning away from the fashionable expressionist abstraction of Pollock and de Kooning. He would later incorporate the paint application and openness associated with Abstract Expressionism, while always remaining firmly representational, never losing the image. Alongside the works of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whom he knew as younger artists, Rivers' appropriation and use of mass market images in his paintings starting in the mid-1950s presaged the Pop Art movement.

A New York Times obituary summed up his work this way: "He helped change the course of American art in the 50s and 60s, but his virtues as an artist always seemed inextricably tied up with his vices, thecombination producing works that could be at once exhilarating and appalling."
This collage work comes from 1966, a period during which NYT critic John Canaday called him "the cleverest, even the foxiest, painter at work in the country...and an artist who can do anything he wants with a brush."

This work contains an image of Robert "Groovy Bob" Fraser, a noted London art dealer and bon vivant who helped design the cover for the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album. It also contains the word "Negro" stenciled on a white man's head and speaks to Rivers' affinity for black culture-jive and jazz-throughout his career.

HIs work is in the collections of the Met, MOMA, Whitney and Guggenheim, among others.