Refurbished Reputation for a Nervy Painter
By his death at 78 in 2002 Larry Rivers had had a long and prolific career in art. Yet far from being the admired figure that his work of the 1950s seemed to promise he would be, he was regarded in the art world, to the extent he was noticed at all, as a has-been, a self-repeater working in an insubstantial, out-of-date mode.
People had forgotten how audacious his 1950s work once felt. At a time when heroic abstraction had a lock on the market, he was painting the figure, specifically the nude figures of his 60-something mother-in-law, Berdie Berger, and of his close friend and occasional collaborator and lover, the poet Frank O’Hara. And he was painting them with a fleet, Bonnardish realism that felt invigoratingly fresh and upbeat when set beside the turbidities of action painting.
He was also doing still lifes, not of fruit and flowers but of the stuff of everyday life: Camel cigarette packs, American flags, money. The result was Pop before Pop, but when that term was coined to describe a hot new movement in the 1960s, it was applied to other, slightly younger artists, not to Rivers. True, he insisted his art had nothing to do with Pop. But in career terms the association wouldn’t have hurt. By the end of that decade there was a sense that his big moment has passed, and maybe it hadn’t been all that big to begin with.
But the bubble reputation flits here, flits there. Figurative painting of Rivers’s urbane kind has come back into style in the last 10 or 20 years, and the time has lately seemed right to revisit him.
His 2002 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington was a very mixed success. It was just too much of him at one shot, with the late work feeling noisy and gauche, kind of embarrassing. What had happened to the old, winning lightness?
But then a little surprise of a show of painting from 1952 to 1965 at the Guild Hall in East Hampton, N.Y., last year suggested that the buzz he had initially generated hadn’t been a fluke after all. And now a second show, “Larry Rivers: 1950s/1960s” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan, confirms that impression.
Rivers was a spark, in art and in life. Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx in 1923, he had a large and lasting ambition to be a professional jazz musician. He certainly had the requisite brains and drive. He studied composition and music theory at Juilliard, where Miles Davis was a fellow student, and through the 1940s played saxophone — and played well — in various New York bands.
Through jazz he met the painter Jane Freilicher, whose husband was a musician. She gave Rivers painting lessons; he developed a crush on her; and he decided that art was the way he’d go. Like everybody in the 1940s he studied a bit with Hans Hofmann, then with William Baziotes. He was very social. He circulated, hung out, mingled. He met people, among them Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, O’Hara and a dealer named John Bernard Myers, director of the new Tibor de Nagy Gallery, who offered him a solo.
Things happened fast. Clement Greenberg gave the show a rave. The Museum of Modern Art bought Rivers’s parodic version of Emanuel Leutze’s “George Washington Crossing the Delaware,” a picture that seemed very nervy at the time. In 1954 came the eight-foot-high O’Hara portrait, which really was nervy. It’s in the current exhibition along with several other terrific loans, including, from the same year, a portrait of a fully clothed Berger flanked by Rivers’s two young sons, both nude.
In 1958 Rivers and O’Hara collaborated on the series of lithographs called “Stones,” with the poet inserting verses among Rivers’s images. One piece from that series, called “Love,” is in the show, along with a study for another. They’re beautiful. You can see why these two fell in love: they’re so on the same wavelength. They share a metabolism.
Rivers’s painting from this time and on into the 1960s was getting ultrasketchy and semi-abstract. Everything looks a bit half-done, and that’s O.K. Casual was the look he was after, and it worked because his balances and tempos were right — when to push forward, when to rest. He was painting like a jazzman, and like someone who loved paint as paint.
In the 1960s, though, the art game was changing, and I’m not even talking about Minimalism. Pop had made flat, blank, hands-off, no-action painting cool. Warhol’s sardonically mute images of car wrecks, electric chairs and most-wanted men were redefining serious in new art.
In 1964 Rivers titled a painting of Napoleon “The Greatest Homosexual” and caused a stir. No one was yet saying the H word out loud in polite company. But by this point Warhol was already turning out a whole body of deeply queer art. Even Rivers’s most politically trenchant work, like a series of the mock-patriotic paintings called “The Last Civil War Veteran,” seemed mild-mannered and out of some larger ’60s loop.
Still, his early stardom, as I said, was real and earned. And the work holds up. The proto-Pop pack rat still lifes feel zesty and original despite all the consumer-theme work by other artists that succeeded them. The Civil War paintings — there are two in the show — are haunting little things. The nude O’Hara is an American classic: a homoerotic Statue of Liberty in combat boots, witty without being silly, tough without being heavy.
As to Rivers’s later output, and there’s a lot of it out there, that’s another tale, and a complicated one. Silly and heavy become big problems; at the same time we really don’t know what’s there. So someone should take a look and make a case, someone who basically believes in Rivers but is aware of his limitations and has astute editing skills. I nominate Tibor de Nagy Gallery. It’s doing an extremely convincing job thus far.
No comments:
Post a Comment