Larry Rivers

Larry Rivers (1923 Ð 2002) was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, Long Island, and Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Rivers is considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grandfather" of Pop Art, because he was 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 1940Ð45 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 1945Ð46, 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 1947Ð48. He earned a BA in art education from New York University in 1951. He 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.