?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
LARRY RIVERS Jack of Spades.
Color lithograph, 1960. 1080x760 mm; 42 1/2x30 inches (sheet), full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 4/35 in pencil, lower margin. Published by ULAE, West Islip, with the blind stamp lower left. A very good impression with strong colors.
Larry Rivers (1923-2002) trained to become a Jazz musician, but in the late 1940s, after being exposed to Cubism and studying with Hans Hofmann for 2 years, redirected himself towards the fine arts. In 1950, he met the poet Frank O'Hara, thereby beginning a lifelong association with various literary figures (Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg among them), and had his first one-man exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
Rivers's early work reveals foremost Abstract Expressionist tendencies, albeit with the appropriation of various everyday objects (in this print a playing card) that both influenced and brought him closer to the Pop art movement. His artistic style was perhaps best summed up by Andy Warhol, 'Larry's painting style was unique--it wasn't Abstract Expressionism and it wasn't Pop, it fell into the period in between. But his personality was very Pop.' Sparks 25.
