From
Reading Room/6:
An Afternoon
at the Madrid Ritz
Barbara Probst Solomon
Back to THE ARMCHAIR
The Sunday after the August 2003 brownout,
I drove out to the Jewish cemetery in Sag Harbor with Larry’s closest
friend Arnold Weinstein for the unveiling of Larry’s headstone. According
to Jewish custom, the ceremony usually takes place one year after the death;
this was also the weekend of what would have been Larry’s eightieth birthday.
There was still a gas shortage, and we weren’t sure we would find gas
pumps that were working on Long Island, but with or without sufficient fuel
to get us back home, we were showing up. We arrived in Sag Harbor on the early
side, a heavy storm had just flooded the area, and we had to wade through water-clogged
gutters to get to the delicatessen where we had some coffee. I was soaking
wet. Emma and Gwynne Rivers, Larry’s daughters, on behalf of the family,
had asked me to say something at the unveiling. I promised to keep it light,
anecedotal, and we agreed I would talk about a trip Larry made with me to Madrid.
It wasn’t a Hamptons happening. Maybe a total of about thirty-five of
Larry’s relatives and close friends were there. When it came time for
the speeches the rain lessened; the wet grass glistened in the late-August
gold light. The rabbi, Larry’s youngest son Sam, and I were to deliver
a few remarks. I looked out at his family. I saw their anxiety—how much
had Larry loved them? I mentioned them one by one—the children, Sam,
Gwynne, Emma, Steven, Joe, and the mothers of the three youngest, Clarice and
Daria. (Augusta, his first wife, wasn’t present.) They were the essential
part in the endeavor, the part of Larry’s life, though he never sufficiently
admitted it to them, that kept him grounded—the part that had to be.
His jazz band and his studio crew were another piece of the main team.
I never felt that Larry’s real being had much to do with being a “downtown” artist—that
had been merely the first stop for a Bronx boy discovering what he was about.
When I first visited him in Southampton I told him that he reminded me of a
sort of biblical Jewish pasha. He kept near him the basic family, with a succesion
of young women floating through. Despite the complications of his life (and,
he would have added, of mine) we became close—he dedicated to me his
memoir about his early years, What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography
of Larry Rivers. Put simply, we mattered to each other.
It was pouring rain the night we met. Gloria Abel had asked if I wanted to
go to the annual Lionel Trilling lecture at Columbia University with her, her
husband Lionel Abel, and the artist Herbert Ferber and his wife Edith. This
year the lecture dealt with Primo Levi and Claude Landzmann. I said sure.
I had planned on wearing a black whatever, and was fumbling
for an umbrella and wondering whether the weather was too freezing to wear
a rain coat, when a small voice in my head said: Put on something that you
would wear in Madrid or Paris. Dress like you mean to stay in New York. An
odd choice for Primo Levi night at Columbia, but I put on a green silk Valentino
dress that I had bought on a sale.
The hall was packed, we finally found five seats in the front.
Just before the talk began, Lionel noticed that Larry Rivers (he had done a
painting of Primo Levi and was working on one of Claude Lanzmann) was sitting
to the left of us by himself. They waved to each other and Larry came over—Lionel,
Herbert, and Larry were pals from the old New York bohemian, art days. They
asked, what’s new? Larry said that he had a big show opening at the Galería
Antonio Machon in Madrid, but that he wasn’t going over for it because
his health was bad—he had heart problems. Not exactly a heart attack,
but irregularities.
Larry, who did have some real medical problems, was also
a hypochondriac, and he certainly didn’t look ill. With his well-cut, healthy, thick, gray
hair and intense, shiny, dark eyes he gave off a terrific, high-energy quotient
that stood out in contrast to the overly virtuous aura of Columbia University-meets-the
Holocaust. He had a nice way of slightly rocking on his heels while looking
directly at you, and he didn’t do that male-New York-intellectual thing
of looking past you while searching for someone to talk to from the New Republic
or the New York Review of Books. I quickly mumbled that I could interview him
for Cambio 16 (I was the United States correspondent for the newsweekly) and
that the piece would be published in Madrid.
The next day, Herbert Ferber phoned me and said that Larry
had called for my telephone number and was that all right. I said yes, that
I had, in fact, offered to interview him. Then Larry phoned and we set up an
appointment. Cambio published part of the interview and the rest remained unpublished
on tape. As the present issue of The Reading Room is dedicated to Larry and
to Saul Bellow, I thought it would be interesting to see what he said then
about his work and about being an artist. I played the hour-long tape. What
follows is the complete interview.
Back then the six-story building that Larry owned and
that ran from 14th to 13th Streets, between First Avenue and Avenue B, wasn’t yet gentrified.
The neighborhood was a motley mixture of small warehouses, Chinese laundries,
drug addicts lolling on the corner, and Ukrainian bakeries. I had been instructed
to enter the tailor’s shop on 14th Street, which connected to the winding
hall leading to the loft elevator near 13th Street. I then rang the bell and
one of Larry’s assistants came down to get me.
Larry was waiting for us on the sixth-floor landing. He was
wearing black workout pants, what looked like heavy running shoes, and had
on some sort of white shirt half covered by a sort of bolero vest. I wondered,
and was always to wonder, why Larry liked wearing these odd vests so much.
Half of the block-long space were his living quarters, the other half was where
he worked. We went immediately into his studio, where he was working on a three-dimensional
portrait of a Matisse painting. Much of the activity took place on the floors
below, where some of his finished pieces were stored. The studio crew working
on the three-dimensional installations and his archivist also had their space
there. The nameplate over the buzzer on the 13th Street entrance read: riverworks.
A tremendous amount of activity swirled around us. Diana,
who seemed to be the person most in charge of the goings on, was asking should
she pick up Larry’s
son Sam from school. The studio crew traipsed in and out with questions about
the installations, and a young man, Larry’s driver, inquired about the
Lexus, the garage, and where did Larry mean him to pick up the special salad.
Larry asked me if I minded the commotion.
“No.” I set down two cassette machines near him, a habit of mine,
in case one broke down.
Larry was the only person I had ever met who instantly reminded
me of both my mother and my father, two very different sorts of people. I didn’t
come from a neat, nuclear family, and the scene of carefully organized chaos,
of drivers, assistants, of people walking in and out and children to be picked
up felt familiar. My father was a successful lawyer who became a successful
industrialist. For a moment I was transported back to my childhood. My brother
and I would go to his main office, and someone would say “J.A., the children
are here.” To me that place was magical—it was the world. I wondered
how Larry’s children felt about it all.
Maybe we can just wander? I began. [My words directly to Larry are in bold
face; his, within quotes.]
“Anything you want. And I’ll try to do my
best to give you a nice amount of material to struggle with.”
The first thing you said to me when we came into the studio is how arrogant
Matisse is. But would you call someone that first-rate arrogant?
Larry was sitting on a fairly-high wooden stool. I chose
a more comfortable wicker arm chair.I let my hand glide unobtrusively over
the brushes on the table next to me, the smell of the paint evoked the long-ago,
lazy afternoons I had spent with my mother. She was an artist, a very good
one, sometimes she was with us, sometimes, until the Second World War began,
she went off to Europe. When she was home I would pull up a chair and listen
to her. She had a lyrical voice, and, without pausing, would move from Schwitters,
and why the German Expressionists were important, to telling me that British
women wore diamond pins to lunch, which they jabbed onto their bosoms like
safety pins, used too much heavy silver, and that American design was light
years ahead of London—they
had nothing to compare to our department-store windows.
“Why not?” Larry replied. “Matisse just had a thing where
he politely said that certain people had no talent, that they were on the wrong
track. But he was involved with himself in an interesting way, that when I
was younger, I found inspiring. He wanted the struggle that he went through
to make his paintings taken out of the work. So that you shouldn’t be
able to go over to it and say, oh boy, look what he went through. The finished
work should look easy. Thirty years later, it was the reverse—the whole
idea in art was to make it look hard. You left traces of the difficulty you
had making the painting in the work, so that everyone could see what you were
doing, and how you had changed. So I took on a bit of that. I make sure that
there is a little bit of the process of the struggle left in the final look.”
You didn’t mention Matisse in what you wrote about your being in Paris
in the early ’50s. He didn’t attract you at that time?
“No, I didn’t realize then why he was good.” The idea that
he hadn’t understood Matisse suddenly struck Larry as very funny and
he burst out laughing.
His work might have seemed too decorative to you—
Larry interrupted. “No, I loved that part, but everybody spoke well
of him at that time, so perhaps that intimidated me. I wasn’t that attracted
to him—I was more attracted to Bonnard. And there still is an argument
about Matisse, or there was up to a certain point. Matisse has come off as
being more modern, he comes down to us as being part of the era. On the other
hand, Bonnard was very beautiful. But you still can see things belonging to
Matisse that are all around us.”
When you went to Paris in the early ’50s, you
were involved with the Paris Review. Did you go there more with the idea
of being a writer?
“No, I went there as a painter, but I was in a
period of being emotionally upset. That was the period when I had just discovered
poetry. Like with everything else, I got jealous of it, and wanted to see
if I could do it myself. So I did a lot of writing there. I noticed what
Paris was about, but mostly I stayed in my room and just wrote.”
Was it in your moment of angst, the time you contemplated suicide?
“That came later, but I was in an emotionally upset period. This girl
I was with in Paris, she said that I was acting too upset at everything she
did. And I said to her, You were kicking me out all the time. So there is always
some little thing that will turn up that makes you realize that from the other
person’s point of view it wasn’t exactly what you thought it was.”
The sense I got in looking at your work—I don’t exactly know how
to phrase it—is that the real force was your desire—how can I describe
it?—to rape history.
“That would be the only way I exist. Yes—it struck me, you certainly
had to go down in history and take history down with you. With the attitude
I had, it is amazing I was able to make a mark for myself, because the distinguishing
thing of our age is ‘I’m doing my own thing, man.’ As if
being attracted to history means that you are merely repeating with only some
small changes what already exists.”
In the 1950s, when you began to do that, it would have
been a very no-no thing to do. I try to imagine you sitting in Hans Hofmann’s studio, with his
clean purity. And there you are, thinking of Washington crossing the Delaware
and Fred Astaire—not only did you want to be in history, you wanted to
take history on your special ride. For us Americans that gets complicated.
“Yes. I wanted to do something with that history. Now that I am writing
with Arnold What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Biography of Larry Rivers, I’ve
begun to see how important Hollywood and the movies were to me—I saw
those images before I saw painting.”
They’re very strong in your work, particularly movies from the ’30s
and ’40s.
“Yes, that’s it.”
Like Fred Astaire? This time I paused, thinking about his paintings of his
family, which I had spent days studying. I can only know your parents through
your work. But I do get a sense that there was all this energy, and lots of
work? I waited for a moment. And perhaps no taste?
Again Larry laughed. And I laughed too, I think we both
understood the joke. In the l950s, when Larry started, taste was the God.
To many New Yorkers, possessing it signaled the entry into a sort of special
society, where the code was never made explicit. To some people it was more
important than intellect, more important than talent. They had it wrong—good
taste is the enemy of art.
“Yeah. That’s it—no taste. Like me.”
In one way you went right past your parents. And yet they seemed to have given
you a lot of strength.
“They were strong. My father was physically strong, he was a hard worker,
and that has a lot to do it. Take De Kooning. Until the last few years, he
was a terrific worker.” (I had noticed the body building machines in
Larry’s living room.) “Sometimes you go by, and you see a man in
his fifties or sixties and he’s still doing physical labor.”
It’s complicated for someone of your generation, to take that American
history plus Jewish, twentieth-century tragic and mix it with popular culture
and make it your own.
“It was naive, and very childish of me.”
To take apart in order to create—I wouldn’t say that was childish—no,
I would say that it takes real creative arrogance.
“Oh, you thought that was arrogance? I read Tolstoi and I say to myself,
now I am going to make my history piece, the way Tolstoi made War and Peace,
now I’m going to make Washington Crossing the Delaware. It’s very
American to have this serious, pompous thing about Tolstoi, then you pick some
odd thing when it comes to the actual expression. America is more absurd than
other places. “
Still, it took guts. When you went on that path, that
way of doing things didn’t yet exist. I may be wrong, but I think when you did Washington
Crossing the Delaware, it was far more contra corriente than it would be now.
It was pre-Pop, pre-Andy Warhol, pre-retro, pre-eclectic, pre-postmodern. That
vocabulary didn’t yet exist. The sensibility of Rothko, Motherwell, and
Rauschenberg dominated the scene. So wasn’t it a far more subversive
act to include history, than it might now appear?
“I made a lot of people angry. Jackson Pollock wanted to run over a
piece of my sculpture. Talk about literally being a pain in the ass! He would
taunt me at parties. He did a lot of things like that to me. Because my work
had recognizable elements, it was considered realistic. I was thought to be
running contrary to the momentum of where history was taking us in art. I was
treated like what the Communists called retrograde—as if I were returning
to an older form. But what the Communists really meant by calling you retrograde
was that you were their enemy.”
So, you were judged as being in the rear-guard, when actually you anticipated
Pop Art?
Larry was silent—he seemed to be mulling over what his position in the
art world had been during those early days. When I got to know him better I
would argue that he undervalued his extraordinary ability to paint the human
form. Maybe it was precisely because it was his gift, maybe it was because
he came of age during Abstract Expressionism. In my mind’s eye I saw
one portrait in particular.
So many of your portraits are of your ex-mother-in-law. You seemed to have
been obsessed by her?
“I was trying to see if I could paint realistically and Birdie was available.
She was a special person, my mother-in-law. I was divorced from her daughter,
but she lived out in the country with me and the kids. She had no husband.” (Larry’s
tone softened when he spoke about Birdie.) “She didn’t know exactly
what was going on with my painting, but she was a saint. She posed. A big woman
like that, and she took her clothes off for me. She had no desires of her own,
other than pleasing the kids or myself. I was very affected by her. But it
is hard to tell you what the relationship was. Tennessee Williams saw immediately
that there was something odd about her. She was like a plain person. But she
had some extra thing. I wanted to get her face. I never figured out what the
hell the ingredients were. We stayed together from 1951 until she died, about
six years later. She died in my arms in the ambulance. I never had heard a
person croak. It sounded like, Ehhhhhh. I never got over that.”
She gave you something very special...
“Look—As I said, she posed.”
You’ve used your family a great deal—You said that Courbet’s
L’Enterrement à Ornans hugely influenced you in the beginning?
“I was a young kid, so I turned it into a Jewish
burial, with a rabbi. I turned it into something I knew.”
I see you as a student in Hans Hofmann’s class, and in my mind, I see
you escaping, in your imagination leaping away from the strictures of the class.
“Well, when I was in the studio I couldn’t see what he was talking
about. I could draw someone who was in my life. But if I felt sad about someone,
to make up symbols about what I felt, and things like that, didn’t work
for me.”
When I am writing, I listen to the same music over and
over. It has to be one song per book. My kids go nuts, hearing the same recording
over and over again. You are a jazz musician—have you ever done anything
like that?
“The same song?” Larry stopped, surprised.
Then he really looked at me.
By then I was thinking that I was thirsty, but I hesitated to ask for a glass
of water. When I got to know him better I saw that he was always offering something
to eat and drink, but on that particular afternoon he forgot to do so.
“Well, we do have something in common...I have a Stan Getz Bossa Nova
record, I would say that I’ve been listening to for six or seven years.
I even have it in my car. Finally a few months ago I was through with it. I
can’t listen to it in the same way.”
Why do you think you get stuck on one piece of music?
“There is some kind of pleasure in knowing where it’s
going. I could sing with the entire Stan Getz record. It puts me in a good
mood. What about you? Do you sing a little with your song?”
No, I can’t carry a tune. You always had your
own band—
“Playing the sax with my band puts me in a good mood. Sometimes I wonder
about guys who have nothing but their painting—they don’t write,
they don’t play music. Still, music is a separate thing for me.” (He
got up and walked over to the Matisse he was working on.) “I never put
my music on the same par as my art. Lately, with my painting, I have given
myself a really heavy job of work to do. I have to overcome all sorts of difficulties
and that takes a lot of time. Now, you see this three-dimensional portrait
of Matisse I am working on? See that jacket?”
So, finally, we come back to Matisse?
“In the early ‘50s I didn’t yet realize
why Matisse was good. It took me years to see what he was getting at.”
Now the two of us were examining the portrait. Larry
ran his hand over the surface. “It’s actually a Matisse painting in which I’ve
destroyed a third of a Matisse painting in order to include Matisse in a three-dimensional
work—I always have to come away from the surface. Matisse’s idea
was to make things flat. You are aware that there are things outside the window,
but essentially the painting is flat. So I come along and make a flat thing
back into what he really saw when he looked through his window. See his jacket?
His suit has eight thousand dots in it. I needed the dots to get the rough
texture of the fabric. I work awhile, then I come back to it half an hour later.
Sometimes I feel like a worker in a Japanese canning factory. Certain parts
require tremendous amount of repeats. Which I don’t like doing.”
Just then one of Larry’s assistants came in, looking none too pleased,
although I had been there less than an hour, and reminded him that he had a
lot to do that afternoon. But Larry’s Madrid show was opening, and it
was important to him that at least one interview with him come out in Spain.
The tone in his voice changing from amiable to harsh, he said that he didn’t
want any more interruptions. Though Larry seemed to delegate a lot of stuff
to others, I watched him abruptly switch gears, and suddenly assert himself
as the one in command. To emphasize that he was in charge of how he disposed
of his time, he announced that we were going downstairs to see more of his
work. We walked down either one or two flights of stairs to where the studio
crew were working with saws and complicated cutting devices, preparing for
the three-dimensionals that so intrigued Larry at that time. I took advantage
of the moment to ask one of the men for some water. Larry looked crestfallen.
“Oh, my God—do you want a drink? A Coke? Coffee or tea?” (As
if talking to himself, he shook his head.) “There are so many people
to manage. When I imagined being an artist, I never thought I would wind up,
well, managing a business.””
When we came back upstairs he showed me photographs of Matisse
and the work-in-progress of Claude Landzmann.
Oh, so that’s why you went to the lecture at Columbia
University?
“I had done portraits of Primo Levi, and when the French government
asked me to do a painting, I decided on Claude Landzmann, because of his film
Shoah. But Landzmann is sort of a complicated guy. And the French are complicated.
They always try to squeeze a little more out of you. They are paying me very
little, twenty-seven thousand dollars. They are taxing me for earning money
in France and want me to pay the shipping costs. Why didn’t they just
say, ‘Look, would you like to do it for nothing?’ ”
He paused, taking in his painting. (Larry liked to look
at his paintings with people who were really interested.) “Landzmann might not like that I
included in the background a gallery of figures that I imagined on the transport
train. He didn’t include in Shoah anything documentary. It goes against
his credo. But I’m convinced that images like these are with him, in
his head, and this is my portrait of him.”
We scrutinized the work together. “What do you
think those faces in the background look like?”
The war. It has a 1940s black-and-white movie quality.
The girl in the railway car has long hair, the way actresses like Linda Darnell
wore it, and there is that one touch of color—her dark-red lips.
“Sure. Black and white, because it all happened in the ’40s.
I kept thinking that it was possible for the Nazis to have transported Jews
to the death camps, including young women who maybe had seen a few movies
and wanted to look like a movie star.”
I stared at the girl’s face. What Larry caught was devastating. When
the Jews were shoved into the transport cars the adolescent girls and boys
were the age when you harbored dreams and yearnings of a glamorous future.
One girl might have boarded the transport with still enough hope to have painted
her mouth red. My thoughts then drifted to Europe, and to Larry’s about-to-open
show at the Galería Antonio Machon in Madrid. I would need him to say
something about Spain.
Now that your show is opening in a country so much about art, do you feel
at all involved with what the younger artists there are doing?
“Not too much. I don’t mean to be a tough guy, but life doesn’t
lead me there.”
Did any part of Spain, or its traditions interest you?
“In painting? I like all the things that everyone else liked.” (Larry
was not going to give an inch, despite his one-man exhibit in Madrid.)
But not particularly?
“No. I didn’t like a lot of the things that were taking place
there in the ’60s with a certain kind of direction—like Tapies,
his sort of things. No, I didn’t like it.”
Why?
“I couldn’t be very moved by a painter that found there was one
way to paint, and never altered it to include something new. Vuillard had a
certain kind of grit and grain, Tapies took it one step further, the paint
he used had sand in it. But, because Tapies got known for this technique, he
couldn’t leave it. Ezra Pound said, ‘Art is character.’ I
knew Tapies, and I liked him very much personally, so I was surprised that
someone as intelligent as he has felt compelled to continue in the same vein
for so many decades. Maybe I’m telling Tapies something he already knows—but
someone has to say it.”
Early on you knew many of the Beats. What did you think of them?
“I liked the guys. And the drug thing, that was like a great camaraderie
between us. Take my word for it.” (I would have to. I sometimes got the
feeling that I was the only writer in my generation not to have experimented
with drugs.) “But they were too in love with everything that happened
to them. Allen Ginsberg will probably faint, but I still think he is a bad
poet. He writes all this stuff about the CIA this, the CIA that. He sounds
like the New York Times on a bad day.”
Then we both laughed, and the interview was over. He told me that if I needed
anything, to get in touch. I went back down the loft elevator, walked through
the winding passageway that led through the tailoring shop that smelled of
damp, freshly pressed wool, and there I was, out on 14th Street in the midst
of all the midday traffic and harsh light of that part of Manhattan.
That was then. This is now. I walked up to Larry’s grave, but I couldn’t
get used to the idea that Larry was buried there, that he would not reappear.
First the rabbi spoke, then I followed, then Sam, with a very honest account
of what it had been like to have been Larry’s son. I looked out at the
cemetery and kept my promise to keep my remarks light.
Several years after that interview, Larry had a one-man show
at the Marlborough Gallery in Madrid. This time we both went to Spain. We stayed
at the Residencia, the cultural center where in their salad days García Lorca, Bunuel,
and Salvador Dalí reinvented the world together. I was showing my film
When the War Was Over at the “Resi,” and Larry one of his films,
so our stay was free. For Larry such closeness to Spanish genius, while at
the same time enjoying economy, was ideal—but he also wanted to have
his New York oatmeal for breakfast. He brought a box of his favorite brand
with him.
I got permission to enter the kitchen, which smelled of oily
croissants, and the cook would stare at my daily oatmeal-making as though I
was nuts. “He
doesn’t like croissants,” I tried to explain. One evening we were
the guests at a restaurant of a Madrid actress and her husband, a theatre director.
At the end of the meal, Larry demanded a doggie bag. “I want to take
the rest of my chicken with me.” Now, Madrid is half an Almadovar town,
and half,19th-century formal. We were in the formal half. No one had ever heard
of doggie bags. After a momentary silence, the actress clapped her hands, recovering
her aplomb as the perfect hostess. “It’s ridiculous that we Madrileños
leave half the dinner. Waiter, wrap up my chicken. And my husband’s too.
We are all taking our chicken home.”
The next day, on the way to the Prado, Larry spotted a pink
shirt that he bought and immediately put on over the protest of the saleswoman,
who insisted that the clothes in her boutique were only for women. Then we
went to the museum and Larry’s mood shifted. We headed straight for the Velázquez
gallery. He looked at Las Meninas, rocked on his heels, then backed away from
it, then approached it from the left side, then the right, then up close to
study the painted folds of the elaborate dresses. Afterwards he was quiet.
The Ritz was across the street.
“The Ritz in Madrid...” he murmured, half to himself, half to me. “Let’s
go in.” The headwaiter looked at Larry’s get up—his cap was
a cross between a Mideastern embroidered beanie and a yarmulke. He wore a tight
vest over the pink shirt, black pants, and white sneakers. The Ritz had a strict
dress code, and Larry didn’t pass muster. They refused to let us in.
Larry sat himself down near the entrance, pretending to be
aloof from my arguing with the head waiter, while actually keeping as tight
a score as a baseball umpire. I went into my riff: a great American artist
has come to Madrid to pay homage to the Prado, homage to Spain; an exhibit
of his work was opening at the Marlborough. I muttered that I was an American
writer—did they,
I asked, want to cause a grave international incident? (It didn’t occur
to them that the United States couldn’t have cared less!)
The desk concierge and head waiter went into an embarrassed
huddle. They finally offered us a compromise: they would seat us in the special
children’s
section near the bar. Although the public went wild a few days later at Larry’s
opening, which included his jazz group performing, when I think of Larry in
Madrid, I remember that afternoon at the Ritz. Though he rarely spoke of it,
for Larry it was always Velázquez.
In “Aesthetics on My Mind,” which he wrote for the first issue
of The Reading Room, he observed: “The aesthetics of modernism now strikes
me as having been a style of the time. Or, if I want to be mean about it, a
fad. At the time, many if not all artists took this aesthetic as a religion
governing the present and all of the future. To give an example of the power
of this modernist aesthetic, let me relate an incident that occurred during
my student days at Hans Hofmann’s art school. There was a nude female
elevated on a stand, quite beautiful, I thought, seated in front of our class
of about thirty students. As yet I hadn’t had too much experience sitting
silently in a room with a nude female I didn’t know, who had her legs
wide open. The aesthetic, quite clearly, wasn’t so much what you saw,
but the use that you as an artist made of what you saw. You were not supposed
to make notice of the fact that you were staring at a vagina. I obeyed its
commands. You were now equipped with an aesthetic that governed the use you
could put to what you saw. The use could be the marks you made on the surface
of the sheet of paper in front of you, and the space and forms that this created.
“I was carried away by this aesthetic that demanded I put the vagina
to use other than its usual one. It made me feel I was different from most
people—perhaps superior—for here at Hofmann’s there were
other values that counted. What ended up on my drawing board, on the paper
in front of me, was a charcoal drawing of three peculiar rectangles. The rectangles
represented Hofmann’s success as a modern artist and teacher in keeping
me pointed in the direction of becoming a modern artist. It took about a week
of looking at the model to take into consideration the other things I felt
about her. I knew what Hofmann meant. I knew what we all meant, and how we
were supposed to think. Hofmann and the art mood of the times dictated that
we not recognize a personal sexual reaction as important—it became gospel,
because the other was old hat, Courbet had already done a vagina. I felt it
was courageous and revolutionary to live up to this modernist aesthetic. What
was more courageous and revolutionary than being modern? This was the aesthetic
milieu that we existed in. Still, there was a split in my feelings. I didn’t
push my rectangles as much as I was interested in keeping the young woman there.
So that I would have another week to look at her. But back then we were a generation
or two younger than the people who had defined the modernist aesthetic. Are
you going to make art that will betray their idea of modernity? Their serious
beliefs? Are you going to take away its high position in art?”
Which Larry did, and in defying the received wisdom
of modernity he changed the course of American art. But his sense about the
body was so intense, so corporal, he saw age and death only in terms of decay,
of the betrayal of the body. I would argue with him that decay and death
are not the same thing, that perhaps writers had an advantage as our work
is not so laced to the body, to the sense of rot. Writers have another more
temporal arm—memory. When
we write, within the same narrative we can be many different ages. Language
captures time. I wasn’t sure how artists got around this.
I would argue with him that he painted the naked Birdie when
he was a young man—now that he was in his seventies, could he use his extraordinary
talent to paint age? The great masters did that. But Larry would not.
A row of small stones had been placed on top of his
headstone. I paused, wondering why life had turned out that I was standing
there that late-August day. The year before I saw Larry for the last time.
I walked into his house in Southampton, it was a few days before he died,
the house I always walked into with a sense of anticipation, adventure, and,
at times, exasperation. Only this time Larry was lying on a hospital bed
that had been moved into the living room; it seemed to be plugged into complicated
medical gadgets. “Hey,” Larry said
to the nurse in the room, “this is Barbara,” as if she would know
who Barbara was. His face still looked good, though Larry never thought he
was handsome. Then he looked at both of us and gave a sly, Larry-like smile: “I
just took a piss.”
His nurse prepared me that Larry might suddenly fall sleep, I knew I didn’t
have much time. It’s human to want to hear from the dying how much we
mattered to them. But those desires have to do with us, the living, and, anyway,
if we need the reassurance, it’s too late in the day. Resisting the temptation,
I said instead: “Larry, about Duchamp, you won the argument about the
importance of the human form. You won.”
I read him a few lines from a piece I had written for the next edition of The
Reading Room (Issue Four), which he would never see: “Larry Rivers’s
painting Seventy Five Years Later, where the figure of a naked young woman
is ambling down the abstract staircase of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a
Staircase is prescient. The question Rivers seems to be asking himself—how
far can you go with abstraction? With modernism?—must have been troubling
Duchamp. For the last twenty years of his life Duchamp worked in secret on
his Etant Donnés…The installation contains a stuffed leather
form of a naked woman lying on the grass...which can be seen through two peep
holes in a wooden door.” Larry grinned, and again turned toward the nurse. “Wow!
Did you hear that?” His eyes closed and he drifted into sleep. I stood
there for a few minutes, sort of telling myself that this wouldn’t be
the last visit—I would see him again, as I had promised him. I lightly
tapped his hand, then I walked out through the kitchen and said goodbye to
his studio guys, John Duyck and David Joel.
In my remarks at the Jewish cemetery in Sag Harbor I
said that I saw Larry in my mind’s eye sitting in the children’s section of the Ritz,
wearing the Mideastern beanie that looked like a yarmulke, and the wrong pink
shirt that was the right pink shirt for him, drinking his good tea, while the
Velázquez voyaged to a secret solo place pasted behind his eyes, as
he gazed outward and in. It wasn’t Hemingway’s afternoon at the
Ritz, it was Larry Rivers’s afternoon at the Ritz. And such was his power,
and such was his passion, that the moment he created that Madrid afternoon
seemed to reach out, as though boundless—indeed, beyond time.
Afterward we all went to Clarice Rivers’s house and celebrated Larry’s
eightieth birthday. The rain, by then, had stopped.
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