Larry Rivers
1923 - 2002
Larry Rivers was born in the Bronx, New York, to Samuel and Sonya Greenburg in 1925. He changed his name to Larry Rivers in 1940 upon embarking on a career as a jazz saxophonist, which was interrupted by a year in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1943. In 1944 Rivers studied music theory at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. After a fellow musician showed him a painting by the French artist Georges Braque, Rivers spent a year painting at Old Orchard Beach, Maine. In 1947 he studied at Hans Hofmann's school of painting in New York and Provincetown. His first solo exhibition took place at the Jane Street Gallery in New York in 1949. Rivers received a BA in art education from New York University in 1951. His work encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, and lithography as well as documentary film, video and computer art.
National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)
Text © Smithsonian American Art Museum
