The Mirror Steamed Over by Anthony Byrt

Author:Anthony Byrt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rivers was born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx in 1923 to first-generation Jewish immigrant parents. He was eleven years younger than Jackson Pollock and almost two decades younger than Willem de Kooning, the two painters who cast such long shadows across post-war American art and against whom Rivers would spend so much of his early career kicking.

Rivers didn’t take up painting seriously until after the end of the war, when he began studying with Hans Hofmann in New York. He had been – and for several years continued to be – a professional jazz musician: a sax player who, in his own words, was a solid if unspectacular hornblower whose greatest claim to fame as a musician was that he went to the Juilliard School for a while with Miles Davis.

Rivers’ status in American art history has suffered two fates in recent years. The first is that, after the death of his ally and lover Frank O’Hara in 1966, his historical significance quickly started to fade and has stayed dim, eclipsed by the increasing emphasis placed on his contemporaries Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and by Andy Warhol’s immense cultural impact. The second is that he became something of a toxic asset after the New York Times and Vanity Fair in 2010 picked up the story of the split in the Rivers family over what should happen with videos he made of his adolescent daughters in the late seventies and early eighties, which were edited into a single work called Growing. In it, there are points at which the girls are shown nude, and are interviewed by their father about their developing bodies. One of Rivers’ daughters, Emma, said she’d been pressured into being filmed, and had demanded that Growing be removed from Rivers’ archive, which was in the process of being sold to the Fales Library at New York University (where it now resides). The video has stayed with the Larry Rivers Foundation.

Sex and drugs were staples in Rivers’ 1940s and 1950s life just as much as music and painting, as his remarkable book (co-written with Arnold Weinstein) What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography tells in often excruciating detail. Like many of his generation, Rivers married and had kids young, before realising what a terrible idea that was. As a nascent sexual revolution started to unfold around him, he found himself in New York’s art galleries and jazz clubs and literary parties, sleeping with everyone he could, and spending more and more time away from home.

He was on the road, playing for a band that had an extended residency over a Maine summer, when he first met the painter Jane Freilicher, the wife of a bandmate. Rivers was impressed as he watched her paint, and became curious. She and her husband Jack encouraged him to give it a try; from then on, every afternoon, the three would get together and paint. ‘The weather was pleasant and the afternoons vanished,’ Rivers wrote:

It’s hard to think we suddenly discontinued gossiping, but the gossip was sprinkled with art, literature, and politics.

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