The Fruits of Boredom

Larry Rivers, 37, is a wiry, slightly hipsterish man, who finds it almost impossible to sit still for long. "I get bored easily," says he, but the boredom has paid off handsomely. To keep himself interested, he has never stopped experimenting, and his paintings have managed to arouse the admiration of figurative and abstract partisans alike. They command up to $15,000, and in Manhattan hang in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Metropolitan. Last week 15 of his latest paintings were on view at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, proving that the restless Rivers just keeps rolling along.

The son of Polish-Russian immigrants who settled in The Bronx, Rivers started out to be a jazz musician. He spent his summers playing the saxophone on the Catskill circuit, even did a hitch at the Juilliard School of Music. His idols were Charlie Parker and Lester Young. But one day Rivers met a girl who had high hopes of becoming a painter. "Enter women," says he of that romance. "That's how it all began."

Push and Pull. Romance faded but inspiration remained. Almost immediately, he began to attract attention. He became the pupil of Hans Hofmann, dean of the uninhibited "push and pull" technique. But no sooner was Rivers safely launched as a promising abstract expressionist than boredom set in.

"I read somewhere of how Prokofiev wrote a classical symphony in middle life," says he, "and I decided I wanted to draw like the old masters. Not because I thought it would do me good, but just because I wanted to." His figures now became bold and clear, though they seemed to swim out of a background of murky mystery. In 1953 he did a painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware--"the corniest patriotic idea I could find." He left his officers and men only partly finished, scattered them across the canvas almost arbitrarily. (The painting was one of the casualties of the 1958 fire at the Museum of Modern Art.)

Pure Force. In the current show hangs another Washington, which only hints at the figure, usually through quick, strong charcoal lines suggesting an arm, a torso, a head. Even his most realistic canvas, Last Civil War Veteran, hovers on the edge of abstraction, just as the old soldier himself hovers on the edge of death. In all the other paintings, Rivers has already become bored with subject matter. In a painting called United Nations, he uses stenciled letters, suggesting country-identifying name plates, to heighten the contrast of readymade reality and pure imagination. His Buick Painting with P is not so much a picture of the rear end of a car as a study in force.

There are times when Rivers seems more whimsical than profound, but neither he nor the paintings he produces could ever be said to be boring. "If your interest is in features and fingernails," says he of his current phase, "the colors you choose will be subjected to that. But when painting a fingernail no longer interests you, then color itself takes over. There is a subordination of subject matter to a kind of force: the force of a red is what I am more curious about now than delineating a nostril."

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