GROSSBERG, Yitzroch Loiza 1923-2002 (Larry Rivers)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born August 17, 1923, in New York, NY; died of liver cancer August 14, 2002, in Southampton, NY. Artist, musician, and author. Grossberg, who became best known under the pseudonym Larry Rivers as an iconoclastic, sometimes satirical painter, was an important figure in the art world during the 1950s and 1960s who linked the modern Pop Art of his time with more traditional styles. Before he became interested in art, Rivers was a jazz saxophonist working in New York City, his playing interrupted only by a one-year stint in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1943. He picked up the name Rivers when a nightclub comedian introduced him by that name. When he was introduced to modern art by the wife of a friend, Rivers took to it wholeheartedly, studying art at New York University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in art education in 1951. He then embarked on a diverse career that included painting, sculpting, writing poetry, and even acting and filmmaking. His artwork, strongly influenced by his bohemian lifestyle (for example, he lived with his mother-in-law, whom he often painted in the nude), was at turns highly praised and roundly denounced. Rebelling against abstract art, yet not really a Pop artist on the order of Andy Warhol, Rivers bridged the gap between the two and dared to take chances with his paintings and sculptures that could sometimes be comical, sometimes perverse. He was noted, too, for satirizing such works as the Emanuel Leutze painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware," or parodying da Vinci's "The Last Supper" in "The Last Seder." Rivers also tackled controversial subjects, such as racism, poverty, and the Holocaust in his work. At his height during the 1950s and 1960s, when he created ambitious projects such as the mixed media, seventy-six-panel work "History of the Russian Revolution," Rivers was later thought by some critics to be an uneven artist toward the end of his career. Sometimes contributing illustrations to books, in 1993 he published his autobiography, What Did I Do? which was written with art critic William Wilson. He also coauthored The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (1964) and Drawings and Digressions (1979).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Chilvers, Ian, A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1998.

periodicals

Chicago Tribune, August 16, 2002, section 2, p. 10.

Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2002, p. B18.

New York Times, August 16, 2002, pp. A1, A16.

Times (London, England), August 17, 2002.