The Quipster

The most important picture that Larry Rivers ever painted was Washington Crossing the Delaware. He was only redoing Emanuel Leutze's heroic tableau, painted in 1851 in Duesseldorf, which was in itself a pretty dubious romanticization of the past. But in 1953, with abstract expressionism firing off its salvos, Rivers might as well have glorified Benedict Arnold. Rivers was put down by the avant-garde as a reactionary, a brush-brandishing brontosaurus, or worst of all, a realist.

Nowadays pop art has made Rivers respectable. To even the most apocalyptic, often reluctant, critics, he appears as the logical, stable span between Pollock, Kline and De Kooning and the newcomers who actually attach real beer cans to their paintings. His 155-work exhibition that opens this week at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum,* proves that Rivers is exciting in his own right. Even the commonplace cliche of General George fording the Delaware looks good beside a giant representation of a Campbell soup can. The crucial difference is that Rivers, unlike the pop artists, does not leave his subject matter standing alone as a cool icon supposedly full of a magic banality. Rather, he espouses historical nostalgia, family relationships and concern for human tragedy. He is even a compulsive portraitist.

Anatomizing Mother-in-Law. Rivers started out as a jazz musician. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music, plays the saxophone with a jazz combo called the Upper Bohemians. But shortly after being discharged from the Army Air Corps in 1943, he signed up in Hans Hoffmann's painting classes. Rivers proved a hip but argumentative pupil. The canvas rectangle was then viewed as a neutral battleground whose every square inch must show the vital push and pull of his artistic struggle. How was it, Rivers wanted to know, that the greats of the past were good even in fragments?

Soon, at artists' get-togethers in Manhattan's Eighth Street Club, Rivers was maintaining, "History doesn't disgust me. Old masters are my favorite painters." Manet's famous Dejeuner sur I'Herbe, in which nude models picnic contentedly with their fully dressed and well-known men about Paris, particularly attracted him. Rivers decided to achieve the same shock value; he persuaded his elderly mother-in-law, Berdie, to pose for 20 exacting, and mostly nude, examinations of anatomy. The result was almost as great a scandal as Washington.

Delightful Puff. Playing variations on a theme comes naturally to a jazz musician. Rivers has carried much of this facility over into his painting. As jazz will use parts of a familiar tune to take off for bluer skies, Rivers is content to borrow bits of the old masters or leave parts of his painting unfinished and out of focus. Sometimes he will simply jot down on the canvas notations to color an area ocher or blue and then not bother coloring it. By this, he is leaving hints at the process of art as a form of living improvisation.

In Africa II (see opposite page), Rivers exquisitely sketches the features of a native, then juxtaposes it with the flimsy profiles of camels off the cigarette pack and a slunky crocodile. The result is a rough estimate of a dark continent, suggestive like an ominous travel poster, but nonetheless full of color and intrigue. In Dutch Masters and Cigars II, he is producing high comedy rather than striving for high seriousness. Art to him can be puns, quipping conceits between cigars and Rembrandt. Only a delightful puff here and there separates it from thin air.

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