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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 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....
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