Last Chance To See Larry Rivers’ Early Works

Oct. 19 marks the last day visitors to Easthampton will have an opportunity to view early works by the major American painter Larry Rivers, as Guild Hall closes down its two-month exhibition of Rivers’ major early works that date.

The exhibition, titled Larry Rivers: Major Early Works, features some of the indicative pieces created by a man who is seen as an important link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

Larry Rivers was born Yitzak Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx, New York City on Aug. 17, 1923. He was the son of Ukrainian immigrants, Samuel and Sonya Grossberg. He began playing the piano as a child, then switched to the saxophone; as a teenager his musical career began by playing in jazz bands. His name was changed when a nightclub comedian introduced his group as “Larry Rivers and his Mudcats.”

In 1944, after supporting himself for several years as a musician, and doing a stint in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he enrolled at the Julliard School to study composition. About the same time he met painter Jane Freilicher who introduced him to the world of visual art. Rivers continued to support himself as a musician, but began studying painting with 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. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in art education in 1951, but didn’t become a teacher as he had planned. Instead he developed a career that focused on painting but included music, stage design, acting, filmmaking and writing poetry and prose.

Rivers was a facile draftsman whose art work formed a connection between the Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s and Pop Art in the 1960s. He was fascinated by great painting and among his most noted paintings were his personal renditions of some of the world’s classics: Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, Dutch Masters, I Like Olympia in Blackface from Manet. The subjects of his figurative paintings were family, history, politics and sex. His oil paintings included the use of stencils, cutouts, blank canvas and image reversals and he often painted family members.

Rivers was married to Augusta Burger in late 1945; they had two boys, Joseph who was her son from a previous marriage, and Steven. In 1961 he married Clarice Price; they had two daughters, Gwynne and Emma. In the 1970s he had another son, Sam, with the painter Daria Deshuk. He died on Aug. 14, 2002 of cancer in his home in Southampton.

On view are a few major works from key museums, Washington Crossing the Delaware from the MoMA , Double Portrait of Birdie from the Whitney, The Studio from the Minneapolis Art Institute, O’Hara Nude with Boots from the Larry Rivers Foundation and a few others.

For more information visit www.guildhall.org.