Larry Rivers

Larry Rivers (1923–2002) was an American painter, sculptor, and jazz musician, videographer and filmmaker associated with the New York School, whose work combined elements of Abstract Expressionism with figuration and popular imagery.

He made his first trip to Europe in the early 1950s, spending eight months in Paris writing poetry. Upon returning to New York, he began painting full time. In 1961, Rivers spent about a year in Paris with his fiancée, Clarice Price. Their studio was adjacent to those of Niki de Saint-Phalle and Jean Tinguely, with whom they quickly formed a close friendship and collaborative relationship, beginning with Rivers and Tinguely’s The Friendship of America and France. During this period, Rivers produced several major works, including the French Vocabulary Lessons series and Proto Pop paintings such as the Lucky Strikeand French Money series, later exhibited at Galerie Rive Droite.

Rivers was closely connected to poets and artists of the New York School, including Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery—close friends of Joan Mitchell. In 1957, Mitchell titled one of her monumental canvases after O’Hara’s To the Harbourmaster, a poem addressed to Rivers and later published by Grove Press as part of Meditations in an Emergency(1967). The poem merges the restlessness of a vessel at sea with the turmoil of the soul yearning for a loved one.