Larry Rivers (1923-2002)

"In 1958 and 1959, Rivers for a brief interval, began to take on the unequivocal look of an Action painter. He enlarged and simplified his images, and came under the influence of Franz Kline, flooding his surfaces with large homogenous areas of dark tone. The new turn in style was to culminate two years later in the painterly fullness and broad elisions of Buick Painting with P and Ford Truck Painting, works that state their message in simple powerful movements through meaty blocks of paint, without recourse to a more usual linear intricacy. Both of these potent images anticipate by two years the isolation of magnified signs and emblems of popular culture that were soon to dominate an important aspect of American imagist art" (S. Hunter, Larry Rivers, Barcelona, 1989, p. 47).