Interview with Larry Rivers, 1990
With three one-man shows in May, the time is right to take a look at the achievement of Larry Rivers. New work went on display in galleries in London and Paris while the Marlborough Gallery in New York City pulled out works from the 60s. A provocative and durable artist for forty years now, the concurrence of these shows gives opportunity to measure the seriousness of Rivers' prolific output. What is it about Larry Rivers' art that grabs our attention? Energy! Rivers arranges his images with the same vigor that the abstract expressionists splattered their canvases with. "You just go on your nerve," as his poet friend Frank O'Hara put it. But while the abstract expressionists were concerned with making emotions visible, Rivers, emerging from the cigarette smoke at the end of that scene, was drawing from life. What he took from them was a confidence in instinct and spontaneity (learnt from be-bop) that tore the focus away from any calculated result. Process and the investigation and the immediacy of improvisation became the flag.
Rivers' surface is a place of discovery, a place where he can spread open the active files of his personal grasp. He dismembers the expected and embellishes the familiar. He's trained us by now to give up the idea of a framed tableau. There's too much happening to stabilize the fleeting instant. The instant is already too far in the past, it'd be a sentimental gesture to reach back for it. Rivers runs alongside the present, keeping up with the natural, ordinary process of movement — a turn of the head, a shift of body weight — the action of occurrence, like several frames from a movie. His is a generous art. He'd rather include, add, persevere than be content in offering the inert replica. One finite statement, one finished product, has never been enough to contain what he wished to say so the work has always come in series. Variations are necessary to express his mix of emotions and to keep up with the speed of his response.
His visual diary method invites the viewer into the artist's family album. His invention assembles popular culture and consumer images into the fabric as well ("Eisenhower's face is as familiar as my mother-in-law's face"). Family has been a continuous subject from the time of his first exhibitions in the early 50s. Extending from there came friends and associates. His range broadened to encompass the extended family of his national identity (with Washington Crossing the Delaware, The Last Confederate Soldier, Fred Astaire, as well as blatant American commercial products); his religious identity (History of Matzoh, holocaust writer Primo Levi); and his art historical identity (appropriations of Rembrandt, Japanese wood block artists, Cezanne, David, Ingres, Leger, himself, as well as the photographers Roman Vishniac and Henri Cartier-Bresson's image of Matisse in the studio).
His persistence has enabled him to refine his craft to where his draftsmanship is on a level of mastery hardly seen today. The work is gorgeous. His color sense appeals readily, colors just seem correct. And the information jam-packed on his surfaces has the clean decipherability of an algebra solution.
The following interview took place on Sunday, April 22, 1990 in the artist's loft on 14th Street in the East Village. He would be leaving the next day for England to install his show there. Our conversation was interrupted by phone calls from friends and business associates. He negotiated fees and arrangements for a gig for his jazz band (he plays tenor sax) and arranged some print sales. He was gracious and friendly at our interview but it was surprising to find his manner more like a grown up street kid from the Bronx than a world class artist.Greg Masters: How do you think your work from the 60s has persisted in your own art? Early on you called it a "smorgasbord of the recognizable."
Larry Rivers: You present a whole platter of stuff. I still seem to be about the only one I know that really does old-fashioned murals, though I don't think of them as murals. But the subject is taken care of and there's a lot of ideas based on the whole subject. That might be a reason some people don't like it, because it doesn't seem as if it got away from that. As if your whole life should be devoted to advancing some imaginable, or unimaginable, thing.
GM: How do you feel about looking over your work from the 60s?
LR: Mainly, it's some chance to eliminate parts that I don't like and make parts that I do like even more beautiful. I feel as if what happened subsequently is contained there: A certain three-dimensional interest combined with painting. What I do see also is some kind of total attraction to silver and sprayed blue metal and materials in a way that I've given up. I much prefer paint. Though I painted at that time and it will show up. In a way these pieces are the things that remain, these are things that weren't that attractive to people, or didn't seem to represent me fully. Or maybe they're just lousy. The paintings and the sculptural thing went on at the same time but what did finally happen was that I was able to combine them more effectively. I think that at the time I may have been caught up in some idea that anything is art, in the sense that anything is available for art. I still feel that in some way but I still point more in the direction of painting.
I like to do art and I find these things combine all sorts of qualities that I like. I like to paint. I like to draw. I like to actually accomplish something. I suppose in a simplistic way, it's something not everybody can do. It's true that artists can do it but technically, I have more in my hands than a lot of artists that I know. Now there are people who make me seem clubfooted, in a sense that I don't have any real technique. There are people who can paint in some way that I couldn't get near, with explosions of light, things like that, that I couldn't do.
GM: Your surface is so active, how do you know when a work is finished?
LR: Usually, when I fill up the canvas. When I can't think of anything to take out or put in. If I took something out I'd be unhappy, if I put something in it would look too full, or something like that. Recently I've been thinking it's finished when I have run out of enthusiasm. I tend now to be a little less fussy. It's possible that as you get older and you've done it so long you can get what you want more quickly. The newer works have a little more bravura, Frans Hals.
GM: I have about ten books of poetry with covers by you. I wanted to ask about your involvement with poets and how that's affected your work.
LR: I think that it just was the enthusiasm. I was friends with Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. John Ashbery I don't see as much as I used to but we're quite a bit in touch. Kenneth Koch. Jimmy Schuyler I don't see as much but we were close friends. Arnold Weinstein, who was more a playwright. To answer your question, I'd have to have the mind of a aesthetician. All I could say is that from a certain point of view of enthusiasm, of daily concern, of what are you doing now, someone you could tell, someone who looked at your work. Frank O'Hara got to be a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. So his opinions weren't just now the opinions of a friend, but suddenly he had some weight behind it. Originally, we were just friends. He was as interested in my opinion of his poetry as I was in his about my painting. I think that the paintings have more influence on the poets than the poets have on the paintings.
GM: I wondered if Frank O'Hara's personal poetry encouraged you to start doing the diary sorts of images. Did it push you to use your own life as subject matter?
LR: I was a little older than Frank. When he came down to see me from Harvard, he was as yet not a hard practicing poet. He wanted to be. We hit it off for other reasons. Of course that we were both artists and we collaborated on certain things. Stones [a lithograph collaboration from 1958] was a very personal thing cause it was just about us. I think it went back and forth. I didn't think when I did it that I'm out now being personal. It was the easiest thing. My mother-in-law was around, the children were around. It's almost laziness really. Since I worked from people I actually had to use people for my work. Later on I moved over towards photographs and now I'm totally independent. I don't need people.
GM: Do you think about yourself in terms of where you are in art history?
LR: I think of myself but I tell you I don't have a very clear idea. I do feel as if those artists who seem to have paid homage to the avant-garde of the avant-garde, seem to still have a higher critical rating in the world of art. That may just come from me. Someone like Cy Twombly or Barney Newman, where they're Johnny One Notes in a way. It's a clear picture, no one's going to deter them from it. They're not interested in that many things. They just want to get this across and finally their message came across. They hold a certain position because of it. A Picasso personality today would be determined to have no center. GM: What painters do you like?
LR: I like a lot of different people. I like some of Eric Fischl's things. I like Red Grooms a lot. I enjoy him very much. I like some of Alex Katz's things. I don't like any of those girls like Elizabeth something, I forget their names, Murray. They seem very corny to me, as if you got a top spinning. They're full of emotion but I don't know what they're about. It's as if someone's wailing. They're not clear about what they're saying.
GM: But you like de Kooning and the abstract expressionist guys who were expressing emotions too and wailing. What's the difference?
LR: I like de Kooning. Here's a guy who's worked his whole life and he just really was satisfied to blast some yellow against red or blue. It was like music most of his life. But earlier on he did things of things. I'm not sure whether I just like subject matter because it leads me to what the artist is thinking about more. But he, the last few years, has been doing all these very pretty things that were like slices of color and certain rhythms, and he had a very beautiful way of putting them down. I started to think this work is without content, finally. And, it turns out, he has Alzheimer's. You can say that the painting is clear. Maybe he can't remember certain things. Maybe the disease has eaten certain cells so that it kills memory and certain connections. But the whole thing of painting is some other area of the brain. I don't know. His new work doesn't seem to say anything anymore. I think they're fresh and clean in a certain, very nice way.
Photos of Larry Rivers by Barry Kornbluh