Larry Rivers was a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, printer, and musician. He is sometimes referred to as the father of American Pop art (behind the British originators) and he was known as a consummate rulebreaker. In 1952, during the height of the art critic Clement Greenberg’s American Abstract Expressionism scene in New York City, Rivers had the bravery (or was it audacity?) to create figurative and narrative paintings that were in conversation with the grand history paintings of the nineteenth century. This was radically out of fashion and was even perceived as anti-American in the age of mid century McCarthyism. The artist’s influences from the great European history painters such as Gericault, Ingres, and Courbet left him as the solitary artist, in the New York art world full of Abstract Expressionists, to choose his own path. His large-scale history paintings are full of satire and reverence at once. The artist remarks on the stringent rules of the art world at the time, proclaiming, “The aesthetics of Modernism, which we artists took as an absolute religion governing the present and indeed all of the future, now strikes me as I reassess it, as merely having been a style.” 

This original color pencil drawing, titled Smoking, appropriates—and distorts—the cover of a Camel cigarette box. Hazy golds and blues overlay an Orientalist lens onto an easily recognizable American commodity. The artist would make many editions of this particular subject. Frequently labeled the father of Pop Art because Rivers would combine the figure with American popular culture. He would frequently utilize airbrushing, stenciling, printmaking, and assemblage in his artworks, almost as if understanding quite early the importance of mixed media works for the future of art making. 

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).