Born 1923, New York, New York
Died 2002, Southampton, New York
Larry Rivers
The Last Civil War Veteran, 1960
Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers working on a painting, c. 1964.
Photo by Tony Evans / Getty Images.
The painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and musician Larry Rivers (1923-2002) was born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg to a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant family in the Bronx, New York. At seventeen he changed his name after performing as a saxophonist in a New York City club when the group was introduced as “Larry Rivers and the Mudcats.” The following year, he enlisted in the United States Army, but was honorably discharged within a few months due to medical reasons. In 1944, he studied at Julliard as a jazz musician, and, two years later, enrolled in Hans Hoffmann’s School of Painting before achieving his BA in arts education from New York University in 1951.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, River began rebelling against gestural abstraction, though he never abandoned its bold, expressive brushwork. Integrating figuration and symbols into his painterly canvases, Rivers created works that blended loose, emotive brushstrokes with familiar imagery and a wry, at times parodic, sensibility. Breaking down the boundary between fine art and popular culture, Rivers regarded his typically American subject matter with a critical lens that presaged Pop art, and the work of the younger Neo-Dada artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in particular. His evocative subject matter established him as an important figure in postwar American art, particularly for his pioneering work that bridged the transition between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art.
In the early 1950s, Rivers found himself deeply interested in historical paintings, creating pastiches of iconic images that were frequently inspired by newspaper articles and reproductions in books. His selection of magazine photographs for his subject matter reflected his interest in the mass circulation of imagery and contemporary conceptions of historical events. In 1953, Rivers painted Washington Crossing the Delaware, based on the American painting by Emanuel Leutze, which began a lifelong fascination with reinterpreting iconic American imagery to challenge and revisit history.
“Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.”
- Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers
The Last Civil War Veteran, 1960
Oil and charcoal on canvas
82 3/4 x 63 3/4 in. (210.2 x 161.9 cm)
In 1959, Rivers came across a photo in an issue of Life magazine of a man who claimed to be the last Civil War veteran, a man named Walter Williams, who was photographed in a hospital bed with both a Confederate and an American flag hanging above him. Painted during the escalating tensions of the civil rights era, the Confederate flag had taken on particularly symbolic resonance at this time; though the flag had fallen out of use after the Civil War, in recent years it had been resuscitated by opponents to the Civil Rights movement in the South. Inspired by the politically charged subject, Rivers completed a series on the theme of The Last Civil War Veteran; he made three large-scale paintings on the subject, the other two versions of which today belong to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
In the present version, Rivers recreated the photograph’s composition in his own gestural painterly style—he paints a vague and obscured scene with vivid colors and blurred brushwork, with the highly charged symbols of the Confederate uniform and flags dominating the composition. The bold backdrop of the banners overpowers the frail figure whose features fuse into the surrounding sheets. The painting’s foggy atmosphere suggests the lack of clarity with which we approach history and the fading and forgotten memories of the war. Evoking the grandeur of historical painting, the large-scale painting challenges rather than glorifies the past and its subject. Rivers found the subject particularly fascinating as ironically, shortly after the Life magazine article was published and Williams passed away, records revealed Williams was too young to have served in the war. Rivers recounted:
“There was this one guy left from the Civil War. Now he was a media thing immediately; the last Civil War veteran. So I began getting interested in him and I did paintings. Then he died. They started to look up his records and it turned out that maybe he lied - and the guy who was supposed to be the 'next-to-the-last' was actually the last. But this was covered up - and Mr. Walter Williams, I believe his name was, was buried with honors.”
Just before painting The Last Civil War Veteran, Rivers had painted John B. Salling in a work titled The Next to Last Confederate Soldier. This work too was based on a Life magazine photograph. After records revealed Walter Williams was not the last veteran it became apparent John Salling was, in fact, the last standing veteran. The historical inaccuracy only heightened Rivers’ captivation with the theme of The Last Civil War Veteran, adding an element of irony and humor to what could have been otherwise seen as valorized history.
Rivers would return to this theme throughout the 1970s and 1980s in various mediums such as lithograph prints, screenprints, and mixed media collages. In his work the Golden Oldies, Rivers reproduced his most popular works, such as The Last Civil War Veteran, the Dutch Masters, Camel Cigarettes, and elements from Washington Crossing the Delaware, in a silk tapestry, which took him over a decade to complete. An established figure of the postwar American art scene, Rivers' work was exhibited around the world until his death in 2002. Today his work is housed in the collections of major museums across the world such as The Corcoran Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as many others. When the Museum Ludwig presented a retrospective of Rivers’ work in 2020, they featured this version of The Last Civil War Veteran on the cover of their exhibition catalogue.
Works of art by Larry Rivers are © 2023 Estate of Larry Rivers / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.