Larry Rivers (1923-2002)

In Lions on Dreyfus Fund IV, Larry Rivers explores the impulse to open his art to the standardized public messages of mass media and advertising; creating a visual message stripped down and built back up into raw patterns of visual persuasion. Stripped of a corporate identity, the Dreyfus Lion, aggressively multiplied, layered and worked, produce a particularly rich and clamorous collage. Art historian Sam Hunter cogently observed in 1965, "Rivers stands halfway between the subjective gestural language of de Kooning, and the objectivism and search for new meanings in the urban environment of Rauschenberg and Johns. The innovations of Rauschenberg and to a lesser degree Johns and the pop artists are incomprehensible without Rivers" (S. Hunter quoted in Larry Rivers, Waltham, 1965, pp. 18 and 20).