Larry Rivers: Art and the Artist

Although the work of Rivers, ne Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg, inhabits a second-tier status among Pop artists of his generation, his reputation as a good-natured bon vivant of bohemian living is second to almost no one's. With his high cheekbones and aquiline nose, Rivers has cut a handsome figure through the worlds of jazz, film, art and writing since the 1950s, befriending everyone from Frank O'Hara to Willem de Kooning along the way. Billed as a definitive Rivers monograph, this oversized volume from the Corcoran Gallery offers plenty of work to look at, from his early Pop paintings jockeying with those of Johns and Rauschenberg, to his later funky collages. The interpretive and biographical essays by Rose and Serwer are lively and accessible, placing Rivers in a political context as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and tracing his adventures from year to year. Finally, the book layers in plenty of photographs capturing the iconoclast as a young man, a middle-aged man and an older man, running his long gauntlet between art and life. 83 full-color and 53 duotone illustrations.