Drugstore II

Now considered one of the grandfathers of Pop Art, Larry Rivers began to experiment with the integration of popular symbols into his artistic practice years before the iconic style rose to prominence. Rivers’ works are highly personal - a repertoire of his experiences and preoccupations, synthesizing the real and visceral with the gestural brushstrokes of abstract expressionism.

Interested in portraying the icons of ordinary existence, Rivers’ Drugstore series is based on a photograph of the artist standing in a pharmacy, flanked by a young girl and an advertisement. In Drugstore II from 1959, Rivers draws on photography to bridge the gap between contemporary life and art. By blending universally recognized symbols with abstracted and ambiguous details, Rivers invites viewers into an endless dialogue with the work, offering a rich and personal experience with each view.

The present lot captures River’s signature compositional style while employing his most enduring symbol: the human body. The intense blocks of red, brown, black, pink and white scatter the canvas, with no focal point immediately evident. The two figures at the center seem to melt into a cluster of black and green, pushing the eyes outward. Early in his artistic career, Rivers was taught by abstract expressionist master Hans Hoffman about the theatricality and possibility of pure color. Hoffman infamous ‘push and pull’ theory argued for the use of bold and contrasting colors to create space and depth, rather than reliance on representational forms. In the present lot, hints of soft blue and yellow are enveloped by this dominant area of dark color, creating complex tension within the canvas. It was during this period in Rivers’ career that he began to incorporate Franz Kline’s influence into his own practice, utilizing deep black to create a richly contrasted pictorial space. Unlike the abstract expressionists, however, Rivers embraced these techniques to capture and communicate his personal experience. Frank O’Hara, the prolific art critic and great friend to the artist wrote “Rivers’ work, in a very real sense, is a diary of his personal and historical experience… Where much of the art of our time has been involved with direct conceptual considerations, Rivers has chosen to mirror his preoccupations and enthusiasms in an unprogrammatic way” (F. O’Hara quoted in S. Hunter Larry Rivers, 1989, p. 50).

The geometric forms sketched on to the canvas further obscure the sense of reality suggested by the human figures. Wanting to limit the perception of naturalism in his work, Rivers added these traces of visual noise to prevent the work from being perceived as merely an abstracted human form. Rivers wrote “I still wanted to draw the thing I was looking at, but I began to feel the necessity for something else, some distraction… I wanted you to begin to see that it is actually a drawing-it’s about art, it is art.” (L. Rivers, Drawings and Digressions, 1979, p. 133). By employing abstracted letters, words and geometric forms, Rivers predated pop artist’s use of isolated symbols and emblems by several years. Words such as “alka” “west” and “kodak” pepper the canvas, colliding with the large blocks of color. The stark contrast of traced words and letters with the fleeting blocks of color create a tension between the words we know and what we experience.

Describing his own work as a “smorgasbord of the recognizable,” Rivers leaves only seeds of a theme, forcing the viewer to become an active participant in the work (Rivers quoted in S. Hunter, Larry Rivers, 1989, p. 32). Always driven by the desire to draw what he saw, Rivers’ uses techniques of visual distraction to create a work as complex as the human experience. Whether the work is read as an imitate record of a personal experience, or an experiment of abstraction and readymade symbols, Drugstore II is a testament to Larry Rivers’ ingenious ability to intensify and complicate the relationship between lived experience, reality and art.