First Edition, Second Printing. Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., New York, 1979. Larry Rivers (illustrator). Foreword by John Ashbery. 285 duotone illustrations and photographs, 70 in full color. Square 4to, Fine cloth hardback, gilt lettering, green cloth. Book Condition: near fine. Dust Jacket Condition: very good with some mild wear to dj, some light scratching, two small nicks at top of DJ (2mm) light rubbing to dj edges. Colors are bright and clear; inner pages clean and bright. Large and Heavy Book: 10"x11". "For much of his career, Rivers was seen by observers and critics as a revolutionary deliberately opposing prevailing movements for the thrill of challenging the status quo. By now we can see Rivers' rebellious moves as those of a true innovator whose once subversive ideas have become part of the accepted repertoire of contemporary art." In connection with a 1999 exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City, the gallery quoted critic John Gruen, who wrote: "Early on, Rivers had developed a painting style he could call his own. It might be categorized as being semi-abstract, semi-realistic, pop-artish, post-romantic, or neo-classic. But whatever the label, it reflected (and still does) an untrammeled imagination, an extraordinary draughtsmanship,a color sense that has no truck with garishness or vulgarity, and an innate vitality that springs from Rivers' own restlessness and reflects itself with charged-up spontaneity, into whatever he paints." "A fascinating tour through the life and work of a vital figure of the NY school. Though in sympathy with the abstract expressionists, Rivers insisted on subject matter and followed his own vision to become one of the progenitors of pop. Drawings with commentary of his family newly emigrated from Russia, his friends from the jazz world and the legendary Cedar Tavern, his poet and writers friends : the beats, Kerouac and Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, J. Ashbery, K. Koch, the works done in collaboration with them, his dealers, his collectors, his patrons". larry Rivers helped to change the course of American art in the 1950s and '60s by doing the what was most radical, bringing the figure back to art. A post-Abstract Expressionist, Larry Rivers was one of the first artists to rebel against the pure abstraction and inject recognizable figurative subjects into his painting. He established a middle ground between abstraction and realism and combined blurred images with precise lines. Rivers is considered one of America's most important postwar artists. Sam Hunter wrote, " Larry Rivers is one of the most original, exuberant and irrepressible members of the New York School. In a career that spanned five decades, he generated a series of sharply memorable images, turning iconographic cliches into contemporary art. Whether creating paintings from iconographic art such as Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953) of a popular American History painting by Emanuel Leutze in 1850, or his Dutch Masters (1966) a play on Rembrandt's famous work or his play on the Henry Matisse La Danse, or from iconographic advertising such as the Dreyfus Lion, Rivers turned established art into POP ART, always done with tongue in cheek. Noted art historian Barbara Rose, wrote that Rivers was; "Heralded as the progenitor of Pop art, which he certainly was, in my view he was also the last great history painter." Rose continued, "The only subject Larry could not bring himself to satirize was the Holocaust, which inspired some of his most moving later works." Rivers is considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grand Father" of Pop art. Pop artists Larry Rivers, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol, created art out of ephemeral materials, using topical events in the life of everyday America. Rivers, quintessential rebel in all things, was among the first to rebel against gesture-field, abstract expressionist, painting in order to develop his own painterly visions. In 1953, Jackson Pollock himself abandoned the gestural pouring technique with his ambition to define the cutting edge of American art. The new generation of artists, the Larry River's generation, needed to develop their own painterly visions. For Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg and other painters who turned away from Abstract Expressionism, a return to figurative representation in "gestural realism" provided the means to a new artistic vocabulary. More than a generational imperative to originality, gestural realism connoted a shift in the artists' conception of the social role of art. Gestural realism engaged society on the more topical level of public myth. It was a return to history painting of a kind, with the emphasis now placed on questioning or undermining national myths rather than on constructing them. Larry Rivers was a true son of the new counter culture. "As revealing and entertaining as any text in the literature of artists talking. [Rivers is] an agreeable hero, recklessly honest, who, in this exhilarating, funny-tragic book, shows his wares and unfolds his tale."-Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times As Frank O'Hara said of Rivers, "I have known Larry Rivers since 1950. . . . 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 . . . he said with no air of contradiction or remembrance, 'After all, it's art we're interested in, not life.'
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