Bronx Is Beautiful

By ROBERT HUGHES

It is not given to many artists to find themselves shoved to the periphery by movements they helped provoke, but that is what happened to Larry Rivers. One critic's claim that "the innovations of Rauschenberg, and to a lesser degree Johns and the Pop artists, are incomprehensible without Rivers" is plainly excessive. Nonetheless, Rivers built an important bridge between the painterliness and "touch" of Abstract Expressionism and the mass imagery of Pop--pinups, photos, print, mixed media.

In the process, he became one of the first American examples of the artist as celebrity, wielding what Harold Rosenberg felicitously called "the shady lyricism of the Sunday supplement." He was blessed (and afterward dogged) by the circumstance of being everyone's idea of the hipster from the Bronx--a mean blade, good with a saxophone or a motorcycle, the flamboyant, randy and infinitely dexterous picaro of Tenth Street. But by the end of the '60s, his virtues had to an extent rebounded on his reputation. His astounding skill as a traditional, realistic draftsman looked vaguely suspect to some critics. The ironical love with which he raided the beaux-arts tradition for such images as Napoleon, a reworking of David's 1812 portrait of the hero, struck them as literary but in the wrong way: not philosophical enough, unconcerned (unlike Johns and Rauschenberg) with the semantics and sign structure of art. The new celebrity artist was the cool and silent Andy Warhol, not the hot and copious Rivers. Any artist who is as unabashedly a romantic as Rivers, and puts his lifestyle so much on the line, becomes an open target. The tendency has been to look at Rivers' self-indulgence, not his commitments.

In fact, as his recent show of works from 1964 to 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York made clear. Rivers' output is a highly intelligent mixture of both. Black Olympia is an example. It is one of Rivers' retakes: a version of Manet's famous painting in the Jeu-de-Paume with a black servant girl offering flowers to a white mistress. But Rivers made two images, one with the black maid and the white girl, the second with the roles switched. The political point about racism and master-servant relationships is concisely made. It stems from a seminar Rivers had in Portland, Ore., several years ago, when black art students bombarded him with such questions as: "How would you like to look at art when the only people you see in it are pink?"

"So I decided," says Rivers, "to make a work in which I'd reverse that situation. At first it seemed like a corny minstrelization--you know, white people in blackface. But I really wanted to see if it could be done. It failed."

But it is done with great bite and panache. The trouble is Olympia's pet cat at the end of the bed, black in the original, white in the reversal. Its transformation thrusts Black Olympia out of the world of politics and back to aesthetics by suggesting that the color of people matters no more than the color of cats --which, in some Utopia, may eventually come true: but not here and now. Admits Rivers: "The only way to test the idea would be to change every Rembrandt that hangs in every Dutch museum, in fact every painting that exists, into black people."

Rivers is in the course of expanding his reputation as the U.S.'s most resourceful "historical" painter with a project entitled "Some American History," which opens this week at Rice University's Institute for the Arts in Houston and will travel to several other cities. Commissioned by the de Menil Foundation of Houston, its theme is the historical experience of blacks in America.

Originally, the project was conceived as an all-Rivers show. But, aware of the black community's hard eye on whites who "appropriate" black history, Rivers involved six black artists in the project: Frank Bowling, Daniel Johnson, William Williams, Peter Bradley, Joe Overstreet and Ellsworth Ausby. "When I told them I was going to do a show on black subject matter, they looked at me as if I was a nut. So I said, why not contribute something, and they said, what are you--some kind of hip overseer? I said no, that I didn't think you had to be a chicken to talk about an egg, but that I was acknowledging their special expertise. Ya know, how they were chickens."

But most of the works in the show are by Rivers, who contributed 38 drawings, constructions and paintings, ranging from an immense wooden model of a slave ship--with a taped reading by a black actor from the memoirs of an 18th century slave--to Lynching, a group of hanging plywood figures of dead blacks around the sprawling figure of a white girl on a bed. "I put her on the floor underneath the figures to emphasize the sexual inference under the issue of race in this country." There is even a constructed replica of a Harlem tenement's front stoop, complete with jumbled trash cans; from it issue the taped screams and shouts of a family killing a rat in their room.

It may be too early to tell whether "Some American History," with its sprawling dioramas and wide range of loaded subjects, will be taken as propaganda, or history, or reality, or radical chic, or simply as an art show. Compared to the immediacy of film or videotape, history painting of any kind--even Rivers'--seems a curiously archaic approach to urgent political reality. But it is a sign of the times that it could be commissioned and put on in Texas at all.

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