Larry Rivers // Dutch Masters II // 1991 Mixed Media // SIGNED

"Dutch Masters II" by Larry Rivers, Mixed Media printed in 1991 from an edition size of 500. Hand signed and numbered in pencil out of 500 by Rivers.

Larry Rivers (1923 – 2002) was an American artist, musician, filmmaker, and occasional actor considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grandfather" of Pop Art as one of the first artists to really merge non-objective, non-narrative art with narrative and objective abstraction. He was born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg, in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. From 1940–45 he worked as a jazz saxophonist in New York City, changing his name to Larry Rivers in 1940 after being introduced as "Larry Rivers and the Mudcats" at a local pub. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music in 1945–46, along with Miles Davis, with whom he remained friends until Davis's death in 1991. He took up painting in 1945 and studied at the Hans Hofmann School from 1947–48. He earned a BA in art education from New York University in 1951.

Rivers was a pop artist of the New York School, reproducing everyday objects of American popular culture as art. He was one of eleven NY artists featured in the opening exhibition at the Terrain Gallery in 1955. During the early 1960s Rivers lived in the Hotel Chelsea, notable for its artistic residents such as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Arthur C. Clarke, Dylan Thomas, Sid Vicious, and multiple people associated with Andy Warhol's Factory, and where he brought several of his French nouveau realistes friends like Yves Klein, Arman, Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint-Phalle and Christo.