From LARRY RIVERS: "WHY I PAINT AS I DO"
Frank OHara
Larry Rivers lives in a house in Greenwich Village on a street crowded with bars
and coffeehouses behind the New York University Law School building. Formerly
inhabited by a scene designer, the studio is two stories high with walls of brick,
whitewashed many years ago and now covered with the city's patina of warm gray.
In the daytime the light pours in from three skylights, but at night it is a
vast, dim place, lit by seven naked light bulbs hanging high up near the ceiling.
At night the studio looks very much like the set for Samuel Beckett's Endgame;
it's hard to believe you can find out anything about the outside world without
using a ladder; the windows are way up.
Part of the house is divided into two
floors, duplex style, the upper floor with a little balcony overlooking the
studio. On these two semifloors the artist lives
with his youngest son, Steven, thirteen years old. (His older son, a painter
too, lives not far away in his own cold-water studio.) The other member of
the Rivers household is a friendly, frantic shepherd dog named Amy who is perpetually
hungry and lunges up and down the stairs in a delirium of affection for all
comers.
On one of the studio's huge walls is stapled a 10 by 15 foot canvas,
in preparation for the start of the artist's projected new work ME. On the
opposite wan a
female figure in welded steel has been attached several feet off the floor
- the sculpture
which appears in two of his paintings, SecondAvenue and SecondAvenue with THE.
It was made in 1957 in Southampton, Long Island, where the Riverses lived for
four years. Another wall has the huge Journey Of 1956, a painting which looks
small in the space of the studio; lurking under a nearby potted plant is a
plaster commercial figure of Psyche or Aphrodite which Rivers rescued from
a night club;
she is holding an orange light bulb in her uplifted hand and Rivers uses her
as a night light.
I have known Larry Rivers since 1950, when he had just
returned from Europe. It was at a cocktail party we met, as one always meets
people
in New York,
and waving at the crowd he said, "After all it's life we're interested
in, not art." A couple of weeks later when I visited his studio for the
first time, with its big splashy canvases and the beginnings of full-scale
female nudes in
plaster hanging from pipe-and-flange armatures, he said with no air of contradiction
or remembrance, "After all it's art we're interested in, not life." His
main interest was obviously in the immediate situation. And so it seems to
have remained....
O'HARA: The famous George Washington Crossing the Delaware
was painted soon after your return from Europe, wasn't it? Was it influenced
in any way by what
was
going on in New York art circles?
RIVERS: Luckily for me I didn't give a crap
about what was going on at the time in New York painting, which was obviously
interested in chopping down
other forests.
In fact, I was energetic and egomaniacal and what is even more: important,
cocky, and angry enough to want to do something no one in the New York art
world could
doubt was disgusting, dead, and absurd. So, what could be dopier than a painting
dedicated to a national cliché - Washington Crossing the Delaware. The
last painting that dealt with George and the rebels is hanging in the Met and
was
painted by a coarse German nineteenth-century academician who really loved
Napoleon more than anyone and thought crossing a river on a late December afternoon
was
just another excuse for a general to assume a heroic, slightly tragic pose.
He practically put you in the rowboat with George. What could have inspired
him
I'll never know. What I saw in the crossing was quite different. I saw the
moment as nerve-racking and uncomfortable. I couldn't picture anyone getting
into a
chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hand-onchest heroics.
O'HARA:
What was the reaction when George was shown?
RIVERS: About the same reaction
as when the Dadaists introduced a toilet seat as a piece of sculpture in a
Dada show in Zurich. Except that the public wasn't
upset - the painters were. One painter, Gandy Brodie, who was quite forceful,
called me a phony. In the bar where I can usually be found, a lot of painters
laughed. One female painter, because of the style of the painting, dubbed it "Pascin
Crossing the Delaware." Now, all this was reaction to the painting as
idea. As to whether George Washington Crossing the Delaware is to be admired
for its
plastic charms - how it was painted, and so forth - I'm not sure it is anything
marvelous....
