Larry Rivers

Golden Tales Lithograph, Hand-Signed, Mixed Media, Pop Art, 1990

1990

This original exhibition poster was created for the landmark Larry Rivers retrospective held in 1981 at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, one of Germany’s leading institutions for...

Original exhibition poster for Larry Rivers’ solo show at the Robert Miller Gallery, New York, October 25, 1977. This vibrant design reflects Rivers’ signature blend of abstraction, ...

This vibrant composition by Larry Rivers pays tribute to the legendary George and Ira Gershwin, icons of American music. Created for a 1968 exhibition at the New York City Museum, th...

"Kristian" by Elizabeth Peyton is a striking original lithograph printed on 300 gr. Velin d'arches paper. This artwork is signed and numbered out of 50 in pencil by Peyton. In "Kris...

Untitled (Picasso) Screen print, 1974 Signed, numbered and dated in red pencil lower right (see photo) from Homage to Picasso (Hommage à Picasso) Publisher: Propyläen-Verlag, Berlin ...

Larry Rivers Modernist mixed media "Brandeis Show Collage" work on cut paper. (this appears to be a vintage lithograph. It has a label that describes it as watercolor and charcoal...

Lithograph with offset lettering Hand signed in graphite by Larry Rivers and inscribed to Al (Abram) Lerner - the Hirshhorn Museum's very first director (more about both Rivers and Lerner below) Also bears artists printed name, copyright and date (1981) A rare proof, aside from the regular edition of 400 Unframed This marvelous hand signed print was published on the occasion of a major 1981 Larry Rivers exhibition at the Hirshhorn. Forty-three works by Rivers, including paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media compositions selected from the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection, were displayed in this exhibition, among them I Like Ingres, Too; Molly and Breakfast; and the massive piece The Russian Revolution. Larry Rivers Biography (courtesy Guggenheim Museum): b. 1923, Bronx, New York; d. 2002, New York Born in August 17, 1923, and raised in the Bronx, Larry Rivers was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet, and musician at the crossroads of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, who bucked prevailing trends in favor of a more singular style. The son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, he was known as Yitzroch Loiza (Irving) Grossberg until age 17, when a nightclub emcee announced his band as “Larry Rivers and the Mud Cats.” He adopted the name that same year. Following a brief stint in the U.S. Army, Rivers spent a year at the Juilliard School of Music studying musical theory and composition. He then pursued his only formal artistic training at Hans Hofmann’s painting school in New York from 1947 to 1948. Countering the vogue for abstraction at the time, Hofmann’s approach emphasized drawing as the foundation of all art making and presented the old masters as rich resources for creative exchange. In 1951, Rivers received a BA in art education from New York University. Proceeding from the conviction that figuration was not antithetical to modernism, Rivers completed his first major work, The Burial, in 1951, signaling the major concerns that he would return to throughout his life. With this painterly restaging of Gustave Courbet’s masterpiece A Burial at Ornans (Un enterrement à Ornans, 1849–50), Rivers began a sustained engagement with canonical paintings, imaginatively connecting contemporary art with art history. In works such as Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953), Rivers similarly mined the past for inspiration; a few years later, he began to take up more contemporary images, as in Dutch Masters and Cigars (1964), which was partly copied from a cigar box that itself depicted Rembrandt’s 1662 painting The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild (De Staalmeesters). Subsequently, Rivers made several works that combine sculpture and painting, including I Like Olympia in Blackface (1970), which reverses the roles of Édouard Manet’s Olympia and her African servant. Later that decade, Rivers began appropriating his own work from the 1950s and 1960s with the series Golden Oldies (1978–79). In an interview with his close friend the poet Frank O’Hara, Rivers illuminated the premises of his approach, saying, “I think of a picture of a smorgasbord of the recognizable.”¹ Two of his largest projects adopted broad historical themes. The History of the Russian Revolution from Marx to Mayakovsky (1965), an enormous mixed-media assemblage, incorporated painted portraits, architectural cutouts, stenciled lettering, and found objects. The monumental History of Matzah: The Story of the Jews (1984–85) also used text and three-dimensional relief elements, this time to narrate Jewish history from Moses to Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Rivers’s first major survey was organized by the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1965; it traveled to the Pasadena Art Museum; Jewish Museum, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. A retrospective of his paintings and drawings opened at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, in 1990, and toured the United States for a further two years, with stops in the Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Arizona; and J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. In 1997, the Philharmonic Center for the Arts, Naples, Florida, staged a retrospective of the works Rivers made between 1980 and 1997. His most comprehensive retrospective to date was at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2002. Rivers continued painting up until three months before his death in Southampton, New York, on August 14, 2002. More about Al (Abram) Lerner – the Hirshhorn’s first director First director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1974-1984. Lerner was the son of Lower East Side Manhattan immigrants, Hyman Lerner, a garment presser, and Sarah Becker...

Artist: Larry Rivers, American (1923 - 2002) Title: Homage to Pablo Picasso Year: 1994 Medium: Screenprint, signed and numbered in pencil Edition: 19/30 Image Size: 24 x 28 inches Si...