Born in August 17, 1923, and raised in the Bronx, Larry Rivers was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet, and musician at the crossroads of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, who bucked prevailing trends in favor of a more singular style. The son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, he was known as Yitzroch Loiza (Irving) Grossberg until age 17, when a nightclub emcee announced his band as “Larry Rivers and the Mud Cats.” He adopted the name that same year. Following a brief stint in the U.S. Army, Rivers spent a year at the Juilliard School of Music studying musical theory and composition. He then pursued his only formal artistic training at Hans Hofmann’s painting school in New York from 1947 to 1948. Countering the vogue for abstraction at the time, Hofmann’s approach emphasized drawing as the foundation of all art making and presented the old masters as rich resources for creative exchange. In 1951, Rivers received a BA in art education from New York University. Proceeding from the conviction that figuration was not antithetical to modernism, Rivers completed his first major work, The Burial, in 1951, signaling the major concerns that he would return to throughout his life. With this painterly restaging of Gustave Courbet’s masterpiece A Burial at Ornans (Un enterrement à Ornans, 1849–50), Rivers began a sustained engagement with canonical paintings, imaginatively connecting contemporary art with art history. In works such as Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953), Rivers similarly mined the past for inspiration; a few years later, he began to take up more contemporary images, as in Dutch Masters and Cigars (1964), which was partly copied from a cigar box that itself depicted Rembrandt’s 1662 painting The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild (De Staalmeesters). Subsequently, Rivers made several works that combine sculpture and painting, including I Like Olympia in Blackface (1970), which reverses the roles of Édouard Manet’s Olympia and her African servant. Later that decade, Rivers began appropriating his own work from the 1950s and 1960s with the series Golden Oldies (1978–79). In an interview with his close friend the poet Frank O’Hara, Rivers illuminated the premises of his approach, saying, “I think of a picture of a smorgasbord of the recognizable.”¹ Two of his largest projects adopted broad historical themes. The History of the Russian Revolution from Marx to Mayakovsky (1965), an enormous mixed-media assemblage, incorporated painted portraits, architectural cutouts, stenciled lettering, and found objects. The monumental History of Matzah: The Story of the Jews (1984–85) also used text and three-dimensional relief elements, this time to narrate Jewish history from Moses to Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Rivers’s first major survey was organized by the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1965; it traveled to the Pasadena Art Museum; Jewish Museum, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. A retrospective of his paintings and drawings opened at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, in 1990, and toured the United States for a further two years, with stops in the Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Arizona; and J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. In 1997, the Philharmonic Center for the Arts, Naples, Florida, staged a retrospective of the works Rivers made between 1980 and 1997. His most comprehensive retrospective to date was at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2002. Rivers continued painting up until three months before his death in Southampton, New York, on August 14, 2002.