A rebel of the New York City art scene, Rivers rebelled against any and all conventions of mid-twentieth century American life. Living as an outwardly queer man in 1950s America meant that Rivers was happy to help unmask the hypocrisy of American “old fashioned values” and delighted in the queer subculture of New York City as well as the African American jazz scene for which he frequently played the saxophone. Born Yitzrock Loiza Grossberg in a Jewish ghetto in the Bronx, he later changed his name to Larry Rivers. His parents were Jewish Ukrainian immigrants and Rivers frequently felt conflicted between the old-world values of his immigrant family and the new American culture in which he lived. He found himself torn between highbrow European culture, which focused on historical painting and the Eastern European intellectuals from which his own family descended, and American popular culture with its focus on fame, fashion, entertainment, and capital. Rivers made the decision to combine these two seemingly disparate subjects in a courageous act of visionary boundary-bending. With great honesty the artist proclaimed, “Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters, but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.”  

The original drawing, Ace of Spades, is a realistic representation of the always triumphant card. Rivers has rendered the card in great detail while also smudging (or erasing) much of the areas on the perimeter. The artist frequently took the phrase “house of cards” as a starting point for several sets of drawings of various playing cards, some in black and white and others in vibrant color. Playing upon the notions of chance, the deck of cards is a material manifestation of playing with luck and trusting in the gods of fate. The cards represent a game—a whimsical entertainment—that also carries the thrill of the unknown. 

A young Rivers received a medical discharge from the United States army and went on to attend the Juilliard School of Music in 1944. He studied at the Hans Hoffman School of Art in New York and studied painting at New York University. His career expanded when the art critic Clement Greenberg praised Rivers’ “superb plenitude and sensuousness” and referred to the artist as an “amazing beginner.” However, Rivers soon fell out with Greenberg after rejecting the strict rules of high Modernism. He insisted on combining figurative narratives that he admired from the historical paintings he viewed in Paris, with the abstractions of his New York contemporaries, and could not abide by the formulaic binaries held by Modernism. His paintings and prints of historical themes—such as his infamous Washington Crossing the Delaware 1953—dangerously poked fun at American heroism in the era of midcentury McCarthyism. His famous series, The History of the Russian Revolution: From Marx to Mayakovsky (1965), is a large-scale mixed media work that investigates the intersections of history, politics, and society. Rivers was also a writer who published two books: Drawings and Digressions (1979) and his autobiography What Did I Do? (1992). He exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, and was the recipient of a major retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2002).