Portrait of Berdie, Number II

Larry Rivers

1953 · Oil on canvas · Modern and Contemporary Art

Rivers was heralded by Clement Greenberg as an “amazing beginner. . . a better composer of pictures than was Bonnard himself. . .” at his first showing at Jane Street Gallery in New York in 1949. As this portrait of his mother-in-law, Berdie Burger, shows, he remained under the thrall of French painters like Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. A student of Hans Hofmann and William Baziotes, Rivers was retrospectively cast by critics in the 1960s as a Pop artist. The characterization did not quite fit, since he never painted in the pseudo-mechanical style of Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein.

Artist

Larry Rivers

Date

1953

Medium

Oil on canvas

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman, 2006