Larry Rivers (1923- 2002)

Bar Mitzvah Photograph Painting 1961 Oil on canvas 60 x 72 in (152.4 x 182.9 cm) Sign center right: Rivers 61

Born in the Bronx in 1923, Larry Rivers began painting in 1945 after spending his formative years as a jazz musician and studying music and composition at Juiliard School of Music. In the late 1940's Rivers studied at the Hans Hofmann School and then under William Baziotes at NYU. He quickly began to produce works contemporaneously with Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Rivers' style of mixing free, painterly brushwork with realistic renderings merged Abstract Expressionist with the nascent Pop art movement.

Rivers' tightly drawn images seem to float in space with blurred edges and smears. In what could be seen as homage to Cezanne, entire areas of the canvas are left bare and devoid of color. This practice emphasized the process of painting itself and left the canvas with a dynamic sense of immediacy and directness that much of Pop abandoned.

The artist's work, as well as his career as a whole, was diverse; juxtaposing high and low culture with an offbeat sense of humor. His synthesis of private and public expression as well as his defiant stance made him a true original, widely regarded by art critics as one of the key figures, if not the founding father, of Pop Art. Rivers continued to exhibit regularly both in the United States and aboard until his death in 2002.

"Larry's painting style was unique - it wasn't Abstract Expressionism and it wasn't Pop, it fell into the period in between. But his personality was very Pop." - Andy Warhol