The whole Rivers family rehashes the artist Larry Rivers’s life and career in Michael Schnayerson’s excellent follow on to Kate Taylor’s New York Times story about Rivers daughters and the film he made of them. Of course, everyone has a different perspective. Without getting into that saga, here’s a remotely art-oriented clip from the story:

To judge by the cabinets and boxes within, Rivers kept everything—every letter written to him, every picture he took, and every film he made, the reels shelved in white boxes on a bathroom wall and hand-marked. Here, too, are 635 paintings that won’t be included in the archival transfer. Before packing it up for the National Portrait Gallery show, Joel unveils Frank O’Hara in Boots, a nearly eight-foot-high 1954 portrait, in deep, strong browns and muted flesh tones, of the influential New York City midcentury poet and art critic, proudly naked but for his boots. It’s vintage Rivers: beautiful, startling, and gleefully provocative, even for those with no idea that O’Hara was Rivers’s lover.

Rivers’s paint-smeared worktable is in the basement, the squeezed and twisted tubes of oils exactly as he last touched them, the Martinson coffee can still holding his brushes in a horsehair bouquet. So is Rivers’s saxophone, in its scuffed and ancient case: the start of his story as an artist.

Crimes of the Art? (Vanity Fair)

Kate Taylor reports in today’s New York Times that NYU has disavowed any interest in acquiring the films in Larry Rivers’s archives of his daughters. They’ve asked the foundation not to include those items when it turns over the archives and to look for any other similarly distressing works.

The foundation’s lawyer, Peter R. Stern, confirmed in an e-mail message on Thursday that it would not transfer the materials to the university. As to whether it would turn them over to Mr. Rivers’s daughters, Mr. Stern said that the foundation’s board “has not had an opportunity to fully consider the issues which have been raised” and “will be thoughtfully reviewing the entire subject.”Continue Reading

Kate Taylor’s story in the New York Times reveals that Larry Rivers filmed his daughters and caused them some lasting level of unhappiness. Now one of the daughters wants the films destroyed. Understandably, The Rivers Foundation is in an awkward position with no easy answer beyond keeping the films sealed throughout the lifetimes of both women:

one part of the archive, which was purchased from the Larry Rivers Foundation for an undisclosed price, includes films and videos of his two adolescent daughters, naked or topless, being interviewed by their father about their developing breasts.

One daughter, who said she was pressured to participate, beginning when she was 11, is demanding that the material be removed from the archive and returned to her and her sister.Continue Reading