There are four elements that ultimately determine quality and meaning in painting … one, the colour you choose and how much; two, where you put it; three, in what manner. The fourth is outside of you, and in its ambiguity lies the nagging sensation of never really knowing that will follow you as long as the need to identify with painting exists, and that is life. Life, however dimensional you make the word: the physical world comprehended through the senses; one part of it nature, another man-made; culture – define it any way you wish – the social institutions, exposure to art, erroneous notions mixed with some accurate ones of history, the private struggle with semantics and meaning; Mother, Father, Uncle Dave, the size of your infant crib; everything, but everything as it moves through the individual, depositing mountainous amounts of material, adding and destroying and organizing on new bases as it passes through, creating associations, memory, and passion, and all those uncontrollable elements embodied either in yourself or the observer of a painting, that finally transform the obvious physical appearances into sensations and ‘spiritual’ significance.
‘REVLON! The greatest name in cosmetics presents the one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four – yes, the 64,000 Dollar Question!’
So begins one of America’s most iconic game shows, which ran on CBS between 1955 and 1958. A forerunner to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, The $64,000 Question had contestants answer questions for money, then invited them to risk their winnings on a shot to double up on the next round, all the way to $64,000. As with its modern counter-part, the tension and the difficulty increased the more money there was at stake: the sudden jump from $16,000 to $32,000 was huge by 1950s standards, as was the gut-churning risk of plummeting back to nothing.
It was one of the most popular television programmes of its time, and gave birth to a spinoff: The $64,000 Challenge, in which a contestant who’d won at least $8,000 on the original show would go up against someone in their own area of expertise in a kind of winner-takes-all showdown. The artist Larry Rivers received a call from the show’s producers, asking him to be a challenger – on the topic of modern art. He appeared on the show in early 1957.
Rivers claimed in his 1992 autobiography that the show’s producers had got his name from MoMA, where his close friend and occasional lover, the poet Frank O’Hara, was working (Rivers quipped that Franz Kline and Philip Guston had also been on the list). He accepted, and began to study hard for the shows. Once he was on screen, he became an instant hit: a tall, charismatic man who broke America’s primetime mould with his big nose, his thick New York accent and ribald anecdotes about having his mother-in-law pose nude for a painting. At one point, when the show’s host Ralph Story asked Rivers how his art dealer, Tibor de Nagy, came up with the prices for his paintings, Rivers replied, ‘It’s hard to decide exactly what they’re worth. I mean, what anything is worth on a certain day. For instance, what are you worth?’ The audience laughed. Story, for a moment, looked lost for words, then quickly shot back, ‘Actually, Larry, there’s a shortage of stupid emcees, so I command a big price.’ For all of the fifties, Rivers had been part of New York’s bohemian set, from the jazz clubs to the poets’ and painters’ lofts. Now he was in America’s living rooms, cracking jokes and answering questions about the history of modern art.
The ‘champion’ Rivers was pitted against was in fact the successful jockey Billy Pearson. Though horses had made him well known, Pearson’s knowledge of art history was also impressive – he’d already won thousands in prize money. As well as Rivers, Pearson was challenged by Charles Duveen – a member of the influential Duveen dynasty of art dealers – whom he dispatched at the $4,000 level. Rivers, by contrast, was a much tougher opponent. Both men cruised through the first rounds. Rivers almost stumbled at the $16,000 level, after answering that an Alexander Archipenko sculpture was made from ‘metal’ (semantics: made from bronze, it was technically metal, and he was let through). Both men got through the $32,000 round too. Then there was a week of suspense while they went home and prepared for the final $64,000 round. If his opponent failed and Rivers succeeded, the artist would be $64,000 better off, and vice versa. If they both got it right, they’d split the cash.
As Rivers tells it, O’Hara arranged for him to have access to MoMA’s library so he could study during the week between shows. The librarian, who recognised Rivers, quietly told him that the panel who came up with the questions had also used the library, and that he happened to have the notes they’d left behind. Written on the notes were the following week’s questions and answers. ‘He showed them to me,’ Rivers wrote, ‘and said the world was a commercial place and artists were the only pure people left in this society.’ And the topic of the questions-to-come? Pierre Bonnard: Rivers’ hero, and the painter to whom New York’s most powerful art critic, Clement Greenberg, had compared him favourably in 1949 when Rivers had his first solo exhibition. In other words, Rivers cheated – and nailed the $64,000 question. But Pearson nailed it too. They received $32,000 each.
Rivers was asked to appear again the following year, and didn’t fare as well. He had, though, become a celebrity. On 20 October 1958, Life ran a feature about him, with the headline ‘Wonder Boy and his Many Sides’. The opening double-spread shows Rivers in front of one of his paintings, in four guises: blowing a saxophone; on a stool holding paintbrushes with a few art history tomes stacked messily at his feet; welding a lump of steel, with safety goggles on his forehead (he’d begun making sculptures); and finally in a black suit, his hair oiled back, holding a mic stand.
The Life spread was the early peak of Rivers’ fame: held up, at thirty-five, as a whizz-kid polymath. The even spacing between the portraits suggested that all four identities were equally valid; there was no sense of one being the ‘real’ Rivers and the others being performed or fictional identities. ‘The paintings, made up of countless fragmentary images of people and objects, seem as many-sided as the painter himself,’ the feature writer noted. ‘“But I think,” says Rivers, “in my life and my art there’s a central Larry Rivers running through everything.”’
Three years later, Rivers would stand in a lecture hall in the Victoria & Albert Museum, in front of the RCA’s most talented intake, and unpack who that central Larry Rivers might be. And for one student in particular – Barrie Bates – it would be transformative.
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. I liked those spices. After a week or two I began thinking that art was on a ‘higher level’ than jazz. The blue romance that haloed jazz was still strong. Jazz reached into the past through songs with touching chord changes and simple words. I was still thrilled to walk into jazz spaces, where I could freely enjoy the faces, personalities, and speech patterns of young men and women, black and white. I had been caught up in this romance with jazz, blues, drugs, and night.
Now I began to have pleasure in the daylight, painting in the afternoons there in green Maine.
Other women artists were instrumental in Rivers’ early development. Nell Blaine, who had a serious reputation in the New York art scene, was a graduate of Hofmann’s school, and became the conduit through which Rivers met key figures like de Kooning and Greenberg. Jenni Quilter describes Blaine as ‘a formidable force in the downtown painting world in the 1940s and ’50s’, with her apartment acting as a kind of hub for the group that would become known as the New York School until she contracted polio on a trip to Mykonos, Greece, in 1959. Blaine had encouraged Freilicher and Rivers to study with Hofmann, advice they both followed in 1947. Grace Hartigan was also an essential figure within the scene, profiled in Life in 1957, and the only woman included in ‘The New American Painting’ in 1958–59 – perhaps because of the curatorial involvement of her close friend O’Hara, with whom she’d collaborated on her painting series ‘Oranges: 12 Pastorals’, in 1952.
Known for her incredible wit, Freilicher acted as the scene’s glue: over many years, she was the vital and much-loved link between the poetry worlds of O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest and James Schuyler, and the painters of their generation. According to Eric Brown, ‘[n]ot only did she forge close relationships with the poets, she also served as their creative muse.’ Frank O’Hara’s ‘Jane’ poems were just one example of this. Quilter writes that Freilicher ‘[inspired] unparalleled devotion among her friends, particularly the poets’. O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch also describes her as an important figure in O’Hara’s New York life. ‘A pretty twenty-six-year-old painter,’ he writes, ‘with dark hair and a misleadingly serious and preoccupied demeanor, Freilicher had a campy wit and a brainy zest for literature in the vein of Ivy Compton-Burnett that made her a natural focus of O’Hara’s enthusiasm.’ Rivers evidently adored her too; the pair had an occasional affair through to the early 1950s (her marriage to Jack Freilicher was dissolved in the late forties, and in 1957 she married Joe Hazan).
In 1949, just a few years after Rivers had started painting, New York’s pre-eminent art critic Clement Greenberg put him on the map. Reviewing the young artist’s first gallery show at Jane Street Gallery (a kind of artist-run co-operative), Greenberg compared him favourably to Bonnard. This was pretty much the last polite encounter the two men would ever have; in later years, Greenberg, the great arbiter and defender of Abstract Expressionism, wrote Rivers off as a hack. Rivers’ closeness with that other great (though less credited) assessor of contemporary American art in New York at the time, O’Hara, proved far more significant, and fruitful: an intellectual connection that led to them collaborating on work, and a tempestuous sexual relationship (which overlapped with their mutual obsessions with Freilicher). When O’Hara died after being struck by a jeep on Fire Island in 1966, Rivers delivered a dreadful eulogy at his funeral, describing in graphic detail how O’Hara’s body had looked in the hospital after the smash that killed him.
Of all the characters who pass through What Did I Do?, O’Hara is the one Rivers seems to struggle with most: at times wanting to poke fun, as he does so relentlessly at others; sometimes wanting to venerate; sometimes wanting to downplay the intensity of their connection. It is absolutely clear, however, that the two men felt deeply for each other, and that O’Hara was vital in establishing Rivers’ artistic credentials. Hartigan told Gooch that she believed Rivers was never as good an artist or person as he was ‘when Frank was running herd on him’. Ashbery believed O’Hara was genuinely in love with Rivers; and Koch told Gooch that ‘[a] lot of [O’Hara’s] very unhappy, wretched, miserable poems about unsatisfied love I think were about Larry.’
The pair met at a party thrown by Ashbery in 1950 (which Freilicher was present at too). O’Hara hadn’t yet moved to New York – that would happen the following year – but was visiting over the Christmas break from Ann Arbor, Michigan. According to Gooch, both were already aware of each other’s work. They hit it off, snuck behind a curtain and made out. ‘I liked his Ivy League dirty white sneakers, he liked my hands full of paint,’ Rivers wrote:
He was a charming madman, a whoosh of air sometimes warm and pleasant, sometimes so gusty you closed your eyes and brushed back the hair it disarranged. He was thin and about five seven. He walked on his toes, stretched his neck, and angled his head, all to add an inch or two to his height. I never walked the same after I met him. Through a moist pair of lips like Cupid’s bow, he smoked and spoke with enthusiasm about the virtues of a thousand subjects. His days, no matter what he was up to, were divided almost equally between getting over what he drank the night before and drinking toward the same pleasant haze. When he was sober he was careful, objective, more a listener than a speaker. He always had something to add to anything I said. Anything. It was comforting being understood; until then I had the suspicion that I was a court primitive with privileges among the highly civilized.
This warm portrait is immediately contrasted when Rivers describes what a destructive drunk O’Hara could be. This push and pull continues, with Rivers then suggesting that they’d each influenced the other’s work.
Rivers is far harsher, however, about their sexual relationship. A consistent and unattractive theme of his memoir is his suggestion that, in his gay encounters, he was almost always doing the other party a favour. With O’Hara, he writes, ‘[a]n affectionate grope at the door sent him optimistically on his toes off to dinner to one, two, or three of the four hundred people who, like myself, considered him their best friend. He was a professional fan.’ And later: ‘Sex with Frank … was not very thrilling.’ He gave Gooch a more graphic account of their sex life, and his ambivalence about it, in 1989. Rivers does, however, show at least a modicum of self-awareness in his autobiography when he reproduces the blasé letter O’Hara sent in reply to his own letter of July 1953 calling off their sexual relationship. O’Hara tells Rivers he is ‘very sweet but very stupid’, and that if he was ‘busier about other things than trying to imagine my feelings you might stop complicating one of the simplest and least troublesome little affairs you’ve ever had.’
This intimate connection between these two heavyweights of the New York scene had direct aesthetic consequences for both of them. The clearest and most famous example of this comes via the painting that established Rivers as a serious player in post-war American art, 1953’s Washington Crossing the Delaware.
As its title suggests, Rivers’ masterpiece was possibly the most unfashionable thing he could have set his mind to in the New York art world of de Kooning, Pollock and Greenberg: a history painting. At the time of its making, Rivers had just read War and Peace. He wanted to match its ambition in paint, and with an American subject. ‘How did I actually picture the crossing?’ Rivers asked. ‘I knew it took place in the last days of December. I saw the moment as nerve-racking and anxious. I couldn’t see getting into a very chilly river around Christmastime with thoughts of death and discomfort as an occasion for hand-on-chest heroics.’
Rivers’ model for the figure of Washington was Jacques-Louis David’s The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, 1812: a camp moment in the history of neoclassicism in which the little French despot tucks his right hand into his waistcoat and wears a pair of high-waisted, tight white pants that leave no doubt that Napoleon hung to the left. Rivers’ Washington has the same white pants, if not the same degree of anatomical revelation.
In her 2006 PhD dissertation ‘Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara: Reframing Male Sexualities’, Dong-Yeon Koh suggests that Rivers’ use of the white pants could be interpreted as a kind of code: in New York’s gay scene of the 1950s, tight trousers were a uniform and a signal for young gay men. Koh also cites several O’Hara poems that make reference to tight or white pants. It’s a completely plausible interpretation, not only because Rivers and O’Hara were so close, but also because in 1964 Rivers made another painting using the same Napoleonic source, this time called The Greatest Homosexual.
Other than its large dimensions, Delaware was the antithesis of what Greenberg held dearest in painting: it was figurative; it was tinged with irony; and, unlike Pollock’s drips, de Kooning’s garish Women, or Rothko’s deadly serious floating boxes, it was seriously camp. It was also a ballsy statement in the era of McCarthyism, when many of the groups Rivers was himself closest to – Jews, communists, artists, gays, poets, musicians – were regularly targeted as ‘un-American’ threats to societal order. Delaware, by contrast with the works of the Abstract Expressionists, had more than a whiff of socialist realism about it, not just in its heroic subject matter but also in its original Tolstoyan inspiration.
The apotheosis of Rivers’ Delaware came with its acquisition by MoMA in 1955 (the same year O’Hara began working in the International Program there): confirmation for Rivers that he’d finally achieved something in paint and that the world was beginning to take him seriously as an artist. The painting also became the subject of one of O’Hara’s poems, ‘On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art’, which opens with a reference to those trousers: ‘Now that our hero has come back to us / in his white pants and we know his nose / trembling like a flag under fire, / we see the calm cold river is supporting / our forces, the beautiful history.’
Rivers’ prominence – in the art world because of Delaware, in the wider public consciousness because of The $64,000 Challenge – had a third strand: he was one of the most significant links between what were emerging as the three most important cultural forms of America’s post-war avant-garde, all of which were being advanced and refined in New York: contemporary painting (the worlds of Pollock and Rothko starting slowly to fade, replaced by Rivers, Hartigan, Johns, Rauschenberg and a handful of other painters); the new American literature, in the hands of Ashbery, Schuyler, Guest, Koch, James Merrill, O’Hara and the emergent figures of the Beats; and the incredible advances in jazz in the hands of Monk, Davis, Coltrane, Coleman and others. Rivers himself began organising events that brought many of these forces together, producing evenings in which some of New York’s new young poets and jazz musicians performed at the Five Spot. His own versatility as a performer was given a different platform in 1959, when he was cast to play Milo (the fictional Neal Cassady) in Robert Frank and Al Leslie’s Pull My Daisy.
The art dealer John Bernard Myers was also an essential connecting force in the scene at the time. As the director of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which opened in 1950, Myers fostered the early careers of Rivers, Freilicher and Hartigan, as well as Leslie, Helen Frankenthaler and Fairfield Porter. It was Myers’ deliberate strategy to back the younger New York generation emerging in the shadows of the older Abstract Expressionists. Alongside this, he consciously supported O’Hara, Ashbery and others, publishing their poetry and criticism, and setting up collaborations on editions and publications with the gallery’s painters. In 1953, Myers also co-founded the Artists’ Theatre with Herbert Machiz, staging works by the New York School poets, often with stage sets by artists, including Rivers. James Merrill – son of banking powerhouse Charles Merrill – supported the Artists’ Theatre to the tune of thousands of dollars. According to Rivers, Myers also convinced Merrill to put up a $2,500 deposit so Rivers could buy a house in Southampton, Long Island. Merrill’s biographer Langdon Hammer writes that Merrill gave Rivers the money in 1953. Rivers lived in the house with his sons for four years, until they moved to Greenwich Village.
1 Barrie Bates with his work B.E.A. Flight Over East Berlin, 1961, at the Royal College of Art, London, 1961, photo: Frank Apthorp
2 Ann Quin, c. 1968, photo: Oswald Jones
3 David Hockney and Derek Boshier at the Royal College of Art, London, 1961, photo: Geoffrey Raymond Reeve
4 Frank Bowling, c. 1965, with his Self-Portrait as Othello, 1962, photo: Tony Evans/Timelapse Library Ltd
5 Pauline Boty (far left), Anthony Macley, Natalie Gibson and Peter Blake (far right), 1961, photo: Geoffrey Raymond Reeve
6 Billy Apple, Art Declared Found Activity (Lathering, Alicante Spain, April 1960), 1960 (made while still Barrie Bates)
7 Billy Apple, Drunk (Earls Court Road, London, Winter 1960), 1960 (made while still Barrie Bates)
8 David Hockney and Peter Crutch with Hockney’s Peter.C, 1961, photo: Geoffrey Raymond Reeve
9 David Hockney and Peter Crutch with Hockney’s The Second Tea Painting, 1961, photo: Geoffrey Raymond Reeve
10 Billy Apple, exhibition poster for ‘The Ring’ at Bilston Art Gallery, 1960 (made while still Barrie Bates)
11 Billy Apple, ‘we all love tea’, award-winning design campaign, 1961 (made while still Barrie Bates)
12–15 Barrie Bates and David Hockney, New York, summer 1961, photographer unknown
16 David Hockney, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, 1961–62
17 David Hockney, The Arrival from ‘A Rake’s Progress’, 1961–63
18–19 Wolfschmidt vodka campaign from 1960, by the agency Papert Koenig Lois, art-directed by George Lois
20–21 David Hockney and Barrie Bates in Cornwall, October 1961, photo: Ron Fuller
22 Larry and Clarice Rivers in Rivers’ studio, 11 Impasse Ronsin, Paris, 1962, photo: Shunk-Kender
23 Barrie Bates with his work at ‘Young Contemporaries 1962’, February 1962, photographer unknown
24–25 Barrie Bates at ‘Young Contemporaries 1962’, February 1962, with works by him and David Hockney, photographer unknown
26 Billy Apple, Relation of Aesthetic Choice to Life Activity (Function of the Subject), 1961–62 (made while still Barrie Bates)
27 Billy Apple, Smile, Slim, We’re Having Our Photo Taken, 1962 (made while still Barrie Bates)
28 David Hockney, Life Painting for a Diploma, 1962
29 David Hockney, The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I), 1962
30 Billy Apple, Billy Apple Bleaching with Lady Clairol Instant Crème Whip, November 1962, 1962
31 David Hockney, 1963, photo: Tony Evans
But, as was so often the case with Rivers, sex made things complicated. Myers was gay and evidently in love with Rivers, and turned him into Tibor de Nagy’s flagship artist (Myers’ obsession with Rivers also led to rivalry with O’Hara). ‘Rivers basked in the attention,’ Gooch contends, ‘using the opportunity to exchange sexual favors to hustle his own career advancement as well as to indulge in the thrill of breaking the homosexual taboo’.
After Rivers called things off, Myers continued to represent him, but at the end of 1962 Rivers signed an exclusive contract with Marlborough Gallery. Myers initiated a massive lawsuit against the painter and Marlborough which tied them up and dramatically reduced Rivers’ presence in New York right at the moment that Johns and Rauschenberg were in the ascendant, and a couple of artists called Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were making their presence felt. Pop art was becoming a serious business, and Rivers, though not calling himself a Pop artist, had been ahead of the game since at least 1953, with Delaware’s inbuilt irony and ambiguous camp. He’d stayed bluntly wedded to figurative art, standing against Greenberg and the waves of Abstract Expressionism that crashed through American art and wiped out almost everything else. But at the moment he should have been hitting his peak, he was caught up in a legal battle, and by his own admission didn’t get anything like the support from Marlborough that Myers and Tibor de Nagy had given him for so many years.
On 6 February 1960, a Welsh twenty-two-year-old called Clarice Price arrived in New York to take up a position as Rivers’ au pair-cum-housekeeper. Rivers had custody of his teenage son Steven, who came to stay with his father in Greenwich Village on weekends from his Connecticut boarding school. Price had trained in Cheltenham, England as a teacher, and she and a friend had tried to get teaching posts in the States. After being told they’d need college degrees, they settled on trying to find au pair work instead. Price’s American friend Ann Schwartly was headed back Stateside and said she’d find Price a job – which she duly did, with Rivers. Rivers, in What Did I Do?, writes that Schwartly was the connection too, though he remembers her as the painter Franz Kline’s girlfriend, who first showed him a photo of Price in New York’s Cedar Tavern.
By early 1961, Rivers and Price were in a relationship; in the autumn, they moved to Paris together. In mid-November, they went to London to get married. There they stayed with Price’s friend, the artist Elisabeth Frink, then a visiting lecturer in the Sculpture School at the RCA (the art critic David Sylvester was another). After the Price–Rivers marriage at the Chelsea Town Hall, Frink threw the newlyweds a party, with the group ending up at Finch’s on Fulham Road. Rivers remembered that among the assembled were Stephen Spender and David Sylvester; the Tate Gallery’s director Sir John Rothenstein, who’d expanded the Tate’s modern and contemporary collecting, had written the seminal Modern English Painters in 1952, and opened the gallery up to temporary exhibitions such as the 1960 Picasso show that had been such a revelation for Hockney and his peers; and the artists Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage and Joe Tilson. Rivers’ connection at this time to Sylvester is significant; in May of the following year, in his first solo show in London at Gimpel Fils Gallery, Rivers included a painting called Mr Art, an affectionate portrait of the critic.
It seems likely it was either Sylvester or Frink who arranged Rivers’ talk at the RCA while he was in London to get married. And, as the secretary of the Painting School, it would have been Ann Quin’s job to oversee the details. Clarice Rivers thinks the talk must have been before the wedding, because they returned to Paris very soon afterwards. Rivers confirmed this in his book too, writing: ‘I was anxious about my exhibition [at Galerie Rive Droite, in April 1962] and wanted to return to Paris and my studio and Clarice’s soups.’
The year 1961 was an odd one for Rivers. As Sophie Cras has shown, his move to Europe was for the sake of his career. In January of that year, Georges Marci, a dealer at Galerie Rive Droite, wrote to Rivers about having a series of European shows with sympathetic galleries, including his own and Gimpel Fils in London. That same month, Rivers and Price headed on a cross-country American road trip: their final destination Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles, where Rivers had a solo exhibition that ran throughout February. Conversations with the directors of Rive Droite and Gimpel Fils continued, and Rivers began to focus on the idea that he would create mini-retrospectives to give British and European audiences an overview of his work.
Back home in New York, an exhibition with Tibor de Nagy had been, commercially speaking, a flop. As Cras shows, Rivers’ dealers on both sides of the Atlantic wanted him to make new work for London and Paris, and to push into new territory. Cras quotes a letter Myers sent Rivers in December 1961, in which he points out that Rivers had already made quite an impact in London, and that this gave him the potential to develop new audiences for his work. A big part of that impact, Myers wrote, was a result of ‘your lecture’ – clearly referring to the talk Rivers had given at the RCA in November.
In the decade to come, Rivers would get to know many of the young British artists then at the RCA: Derek Boshier, Hockney and, most of all, Frank Bowling. But in November 1961 Rivers was the big-shot American painter roughly fifteen years their senior. Some of them would have seen him in Pull My Daisy when it was screened at the National Film Theatre in June. Rivers visited the RCA painting studios, and was impressed by Hockney’s work in particular. And he gave a lecture called, significantly, ‘A Self-Portrait’. Rivers subsequently recorded a version of the talk for the BBC’s Third Programme. It was broadcast in two parts: the first on Christmas Eve 1961 and the second on New Year’s Eve (Bates’s birthday).
There are two immediately striking features of Rivers’ lecture. The first is how much it was a culmination not just of his own thoughts but also of the particular energies and enthusiasms that had, in essence, created him in New York during the 1950s. In particular, it bore the marks of a generational collegiality – a group of young artists, critics and poets who had forged their ideas and their relationships in the shadows of Abstract Expressionism, and who now, in their thirties, found themselves close to the institutional centre of things. They were becoming, in a sense, part of the American Establishment. Even so, they potentially provided the young British artists in the room with a blueprint for resistance, given how the most talented students among them were then trying to get beyond Abstract Expressionism and Francis Bacon’s figurative painting. The specific influence of O’Hara on Rivers’ thinking was also clear: short passages of the lecture match, almost word for word, an interview he conducted with Rivers that was published in Horizon in September 1959.
The second – and just as consequential – feature was implied by the lecture’s title: ‘A Self-Portrait’. This was a performance of self by the ‘Wonder Boy’ with his many sides. ‘Since this is going to be about me,’ Rivers opened, ‘I will introduce myself. When I say myself, I mean what interests me, what irritates me, what bores me, what can never satisfy me, my immediate responses, my reflective ones, my history, and so forth. And I am going to take advantage of some undirected spleen to carry this through.’
That ‘undirected spleen’ was, in fact, pretty direct: an introductory lashing out at what he saw as the sentimental notion that an artist ought to love their subject matter – or even be interested in it – to make a great work from it. ‘Obviously love of some sort moves us finally to end up in front of a canvas,’ he said,
but what you love becomes clear only as you proceed, only as you see – and the procedure is not natural and hardly ever feels right. Painting was never natural. It only becomes natural after it is invented and used and digested and discarded and finally filters down as a cliché to be used by those who remove themselves from the conflicts it takes to make a work of art today, here. You don’t have to be enthusiastic about yellow to spread it generously over the surface. Do you love stones? There is a window, break it. I cannot even say that I love painting.
After voicing these thoughts, he returned to his autobiographical performance, which is worth quoting at length for the way it sets the scene for his much larger and more important advice to the assembled young artists. ‘I am thirty-eight years old,’ he said,
giving me at this moment a particular view on my birth and another on my death. I am a native New Yorker; I literally grew up in the streets of what was much less inhabited in those days – the Bronx. From the age of six until I was about ten years old I went to the zoo four or five times a week. I loved the big cats more than any other animal. I used to trail behind men until they dropped their cigarettes and then I’d pick them up and smoke them. My parents are from Poland, which was Russia before the first world war. They are no more or less interesting than the peasants who lived and worked in the same area. In conformity with the times, I was spanked, but not too much. The only thing in our house resembling art was a cheap tapestry with dark figures, a cross between a Fragonard and a Minsky stripper, popular in some dining rooms of the nineteen-twenties, and a five- and ten-cent store 8 by 10 reproduction of a very Spanish señorita holding a flower just above an exposed breast, and, to make matters worse, it followed us from one apartment to another and always across the moulding on the wall. But, mind you, when I took my mother to her first exhibition of paintings after her having had such a profound dining-room experience in art, she told me which were good paintings and which were very bad, with a strong voice that never showed for one moment that I could have thought her an innocent but none the less complete idiot.
So if I have inherited natural bad taste, that is in talking about my parent in that way, it is at least compounded with an obnoxious sense of who I am.
The cruel assessment of his parents and their bad taste, and his memories of weekends spent at the Bronx zoo rather than at the theatre or wandering the halls of museums, would have chimed with the experiences of the working-class students in the room. But there was a larger iconoclasm at play here: much of Rivers’ lecture was in fact a rallying cry for contemporaneity – a call to the students to kill their parents off and ignore their influence. He used his own experience to illustrate the point, suggesting that Washington Crossing the Delaware was driven largely by a desire to irritate the hell out of New York’s Abstract Expressionist Establishment:
Pollock, a few years before, decided the brush inhibited him and began putting paint on with a stick. He laid canvas on the floor. Everybody told me he was great. I couldn’t tell; I wasn’t prepared. It was too gorgeous. I didn’t like him. De Kooning’s painting from a distance seemed to touch on objects and landscapes, but as you drew closer everything disappeared, and you saw a dipsy-doodle energy that kept pestering you long after looking. At this time I had not heard of Mark Rothko and disliked Gorky, because it all seemed like a romantic animated cartoon with the digestive tract as the still-life he painted from. My closest friends were three poets out of Harvard a few years, who were mad about a great deal of my work, and this was quite nourishing for me and inspired all sorts of activities.
I was energetic and egomaniacal and, what is even more important, angry enough to want to do something contrary – a ‘George Washington Crossing the Delaware’ – something no one in the New York art world would doubt was disgusting, dead, and absurd; rearrange the elements; and throw it at them with great confusion.
This was not to imply that he’d dispensed with influence altogether. Many of Rivers’ most important works from the fifties had been deliberate attempts to lock horns with Old Masters. As O’Hara later pointed out in an exhibition catalogue from 1965, Rivers’ first major work, 1951’s The Burial, was an attempt to best Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans; his nude portrait of O’Hara from 1954 was him taking on Géricault’s Study of a Nude Man, c. 1810–20, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art had purchased just a couple of years earlier; and then there was the influence of Jacques-Louis David. These battles, though, seemed more to do with Rivers’ ego and quest for greatness than academic imitation. Far more important, he implied in his lecture, was for artists to find an art appropriate for their times. ‘Van Gogh laboured to make a yellow cornfield,’ he said:
He gave us the stalks, the air, the sky. Seventy-five years later the accumulative labour of a few marvellous painters, and many less than marvellous, allows me in the presence of just enough yellow and just so much off-white in relation to it to experience a similar sensation. I don’t need the stalks. I was never interested in corn, not even to eat it. His sky can never be the sky. Seventy-five years ago you had to go to the well to get water. Today you turn the tap. Is it any the less sweet? Any the less water? Thank your grandparents and parents for what they did, but stay out of the covered wagon, you are blocking the highway.
Rivers argued that one of the most important elements of painting (again, in an implicit rebuke to the Abstract Expressionists and their high priest of ‘form and flatness’, Greenberg) was to let one’s ‘life’ into the painting – which is to say, the external world of objects, people and ideas as they are experienced by the self: ‘everything, but everything as it moves through the individual, depositing mountainous amounts of material, adding and destroying and organizing on new bases as it passes through, creating associations, memory, and passion, and all those uncontrollable elements embodied either in yourself or the observer of a painting’.
In that same 1965 essay, O’Hara confirmed this as the essential element in Rivers’ own output. ‘Rivers veers sharply,’ he wrote, ‘as if totally dependent on life impulses, until one observes an obsessively willful insistence on precisely what he is interested in. This goes for the father of our country [Washington] as well as for the later Camel and Tareyton [cigarette] packs. Who, he seems to be saying, says they’re corny? This is the opposite of pop art. He is never naïve and never oversophisticated.’
Forget sentimentality. Kill your parents, and your sentimental darlings. Forget about needing to love your subject matter, and look up, and out, at the world around you for inspiration – not deep into your tormented soul, but at Life.
‘I can’t see anything in my work that will elevate anyone,’ Rivers closed:
I am not from the sunset school. My work has nothing to do with gorgeousness. It isn’t virile in the sense of ‘power’. The hard edge is too handy for spearmint gum. I don’t know what to say. It might be funny. Perhaps it is only a visual gossip column that depends for its life on juicy bits of cigar-box covers, cigarette packages, grilles of large cars, trucks, playing cards, politics; dying and already dead Civil War veterans, and so forth. All these things do appear and disappear. I suppose it is enough to paint them. It will never make anyone who looks a better person. I’m sure that this is all building up to something, no matter how camouflaged, that will be really flattering to me. Well, when I was very young, and went to the zoo a lot, I once went with my father. He was feeding a deer through the wire fence and then began playing with the deer’s antlers. Suddenly the deer backed away and a part of its antlers broke off, and there was my father holding them in his hand, and the deer charging off into the distance. Aside from expectations of glory, all I can hope for from my work is that it arrests your attention with no more or less insistence than the breaking of a deer’s antlers; that something in my work obliges you to forget for a few moments the absurdity of your life.
With this lecture Rivers cut straight into the mainline of the most ambitious work at the RCA and gave it an American jolt. And the student most electrified by it was Bates.