On "On Seeing Larry Rivers' WashingtonCrossing the Delaware . . . ."
Brad Gooch
O'Hara and Rivers were bothobsessed that season with the Russians. O'Hara's obsession was with Mayakovsky, who had sostridently declared that "The poet himself is the theme of his poetry" and"The city must take the place of nature," and from whom O'Hara had picked upwhat James Schuyler has described as "the intimate yell." (In a nasty swipe of apoem, "Answer to Voznesensky & Evtushenko," in 1963 O'Hara accused theSoviet poets of being "Mayakovsky's hat worn by a horse.") Rivers was busilyreading War and Peace, about which John Myers grudgingly asked in a memoir:"And who got him to read War and Peace? Not Frank." BetweenMayakovsky's "The Cloud in Trousers," O'Hara's "Second Avenue" andTolstoy's War and Peace, the epic was in the air. So Rivers decided to make his ownattempt at a large scale epic painting, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, whichhe has described as "like getting into the ring with Tolstoy." It was based onthe original work by the nineteenth-century academic painter Emmanuel Leutze, aGerman-American sentimental realist known for the stage-set heroics in this tableau aswell as in his mural decorations for the Capitol. O'Hara found the notion of updating thishistoric figure "hopelessly corny" until he saw the painting finished, hiscoming around later recorded in his 1955 poem "On Seeing Larry Rivers' WashingtonCrossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art." Among the painters, however,the work--with its parodistic figure drawing--was a battle cry, thumbing its nose atAbstract Expressionism and pointing the way toward what would later become Pop Art. It wasalso quite revolutionary in dispensing with the lush brushwork of de Kooning in favor ofthin, soaked washes. Rivers was sneered at in the Cedar, where Gandy Brodie, an abstractpainter who had studied dance with Martha Graham, described him as a "phony" andone persnickety woman painter dubbed the new canvas Pascin Crossing the Delaware. Thepainting was a breakthrough for Rivers in finding his own breathing space in theincreasingly claustrophobic crowd of young painters.
Meanwhile his relationship with O'Hara was becoming more difficult. O'Hara was makingdemands that Rivers felt were unreasonable. "He thought he wasn't putting pressure onme but he actually was," remembers Rivers of O'Hara's wanting to go home with himafter a party "Like we'd be somewhere and I'd be enjoying myself. And he says,"Well, are we going?' Like meaning, 'Well is anything going to happen?' I wasn't inlove in that sense."
From City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank OHara. Copyright © 1993 by Brad Gooch.
Marjorie Perloff
In certain cases, when O'Hara worked very closely with a particular painter, the poemabsorbed the spirit of the painting thoroughly enough to become independent. This is true,I think, of "On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing The Delaware atthe Museum of Modern Art." Rivers explains what he was trying to do in thisparticular painting in an interview with O'Hara for Horizon (1959):
... what could be dopier than a painting dedicated to a national cliché--Washington Crossing the Delaware. The last painting that dealt with George and the rebels is hanging in the Met and was painted by a coarse German nineteenth-century academician who really loved Napoleon more than anyone and thought crossing a river on a late December afternoon was just another excuse for a general to assume a heroic, slightly tragic pose.... What I saw in the crossing was quite different. I saw the moment as nerve-wracking and uncomfortable. I couldn't picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hand-on-chest heroics.
"What was the reaction when George was shown?" O'Hara asks. "About thesame reaction," Rivers replies, "as when the Dadaists introduced a toilet seatas a piece of sculpture in a Dada show in Zurich. Except that the public wasn't upset--thepainters were. One painter, Gandy Brodie, who was quite forceful, called me aphony. In the bar where I can usually be found, a lot of painters laughed."
O'Hara himself, however, understood the Rivers painting perfectly. His poem, written in1955, treats Washington's Crossing of the Delaware with similar irreverence and amusedcontempt:
Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.
The next four stanzas continue to stress the absurdity of what O'Hara, like Rivers,presumably regards as a nonevent, the "crossing by water in winter to a shore / otherthan that the bridge reaches for." Here the silly rhyme underscores the bathos ofwhat is meant by our "beautiful history" (note that the crossing takes place ina "misty glare"); and the poem ends with a satiric address to George,culminating in the pun on "general":
Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.
Although O'Hara's poem is especially witty if read in conjunction with Rivers'spainting, it can be read quite independently as a pastiche on a Major Event in AmericanHistory, an ironic vision of the "Dear father of our country," with "hisnose / trembling like a flag under fire."
O'Hara's poetic response to the painting of Larry Rivers, like his lyric celebrationsof Grace Hartigan, suggests that he was really more at home with painting that retains atleast some figuration than with pure abstraction.
From Frank OHara: Poet Among Painters. Copyright © 1977 by Marjorie Perloff.
David Lehman
It is a paradox worth savoring that the painters closest in mood and temperament to theNew York poets were not the makers of the abstract revolution but such "secondgeneration" figures as Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and Fairheld Porter, not one ofthem an abstract artist. To understand how the New York School of poets assimilated theinfluence of their painterly namesakes, we might linger for a moment over the differingways in which a Rivers or a Porter responded to the avant-garde imperatives of the day.The example of Rivers was particularly crucial for O'Hara and Koch. Porter's example had acorresponding importance for Schuyler and Ashbery.
Born Yitzroch Grossberg in the Bronx, Rivers was an uninhibited, grass-smoking,sex-obsessed jazz saxophonist in his early twenties when he took up painting in 1945. HisBonnard-inspired early works made Clement Greenberg sit up and take notice. Though hewould later modify his praise and then with- draw it altogether, Greenberg declared in1949 that Rivers was already "a better composer of pictures than was Bonnard himselfin many instances"and this on the basis of Rivers's first one- man show.Riverswho can, as I write this, still be heard playing the saxophone at theKnickerbocker Bar in New York City some Sunday nightsalways retained theimprovisatory ideal of jazz. The make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach is evident in evenhis most monumental constructionssuch as The History of the RussianRevotution (1965) in Washington's Hirshhorn Museum which have a fresh air ofspontaneity about them, as if they had just been assembled a few minutes ago.
Rivers relied on "charcoal drawing and rag wiping" for the deliberatelyunfinished look of his pictures. Also distinctive was his prankish sense of humor. In 1964he painted a spoof of Jacques-Louis David's famous Napoleon in His Study (1812),the portrait of the emperor in the classic hand-in-jacket pose. Rivers's version, full ofsmudges and erasures, manages to be iconoclastic and idolatrous at once. The finishingtouch is the painting's title: Rivers called it The Greatest hom*osexual. Avisitor to Rivers's Fourteenth Street studio in 1994, seeing a picture on the wall withthe Napoleon motif in it, asked him why he had given the original painting its unusualtitle. "In those days I was carrying on with people in the gay bathhouse world,"Rivers said. "Napoleon's pose was like, 'Get her!' Also, it was a kindof joke, since the art world at the time was primarily hom*osexual. And I had just readthat Napoleon was a little peculiar. In St. Helena he used to be surrounded by anentourage of officers and he would take a bath in front of them, nude."
There is a strand of Rivers's work that can only be understood if you take into accountthe hom*osexual aestheticism that he found embodied in the poems and person of O'Hara. Inthe early 1950s, "queerdom was a country in which there was more fun," Rivershas said. "There was something about hom*osexuality that seemed too much, toogorgeous, too ripe. I later came to realize that there was something marvelous about itbecause it seemed to be pushing everything to its fullest point."
If one condition of avant-garde art is that it is ahead of its time, and another isthat it proceeds from a maverick impulse and a contrary disposition, Rivers's vanguardstatus was assured from the moment when, in open apostasy, he audaciously maderepresentational paintings. glorifying nostalgia and sentiment, while undercutting themwith metropolitan irony. His paintings of brand labels, found objects, and popiconsCamel cigarettes, Dutch Masters cigars, the menu at the Cedar Tavern in 1959,aFrench hundred-franc notepreceded Pop Art but eluded the limitations of thatmovement. And his pastiches of famous paintings of the pastsuch as his irreverentrendition of Emmanuel Leutzes Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953)anticipatedthe breezy ironies of postmodernism without forfeiting the painterly touches of AbstractExpressionism. The painting, Rivers told OHara, "was just a way for me to stickmy thumb out at other people. I suddenly carved a little corner for myself. Luckily for meI didnt give a crap about what was going on at the time in New York painting. Infact, I was energetic and egomaniacal and, what is even more important, co*cky and angryenough to want to do something that no one in the New York art world could doubt was disgusting,dead, and absurd. So, what could be dopier than a painting dedicated to anational cliché?"
Rivers denied that his Washington Crossing the Delaware was specifically aparody of Emmanuel Leutzes painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He maintainedthat his true inspiration derived from the patriotic grade school plays he had acted in orwatched as a boy. This explanation made the picture no less heretical in an art world thathad given up on representation and was bound to consider a patriotic theme as eitherhopelessly corny or retrograde. But for Riverss poet friends, the painting- -whichthe Museum of Modern Art purchased in 1955was an electric charge. Kenneth Koch wrotea play, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, in which the father of our countryis glorified with ironic hyperbole. And Frank O'Hara. in his poem "On Seeing LarryRivers.s Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art," usedthe opportunity to state a "revolutionary" credo:
To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger.
It is conceivable that the "redcoat" O'Hara envisioned here coat of redpaint. The gun in Rivers's hands, or in his own, the promise of freedom from dogma ordomination:
Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.from The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. Copyright © 1998 by Doubleday, Inc.
Hazel Smith
While some of O'Hara's poems are more pop camp and others moreabstract, poems like 'Rhapsody' (O'Hara 1977a, p. 325) combine the two. Thismixture of Pop Camp and Abstract Expressionism is also to be found in the workof Larry Rivers. Rivers worked on the edges of the New York School of painterswho included Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Alfred Leslie, Michael Goldberg,Norman Bluhm and Jane Freilicher. The close relationship between Rivers andO'Hara, and the way in which Rivers's worklike O'Hara'scombines abstractand representational modes, has already been well discussed by Marjorie Perloff(Perloff 1979). I want to argue that Rivers's work is in a similar relationshipof 'complementary antagonism' to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Camp asO'Hara's. Rivers often used commercial images in his painting and was animportant forerunner of Pop Art. However, like O'Hara, Rivers's work deviatedfrom Pop Art. Hefen Harrison argues that Rivers differs from Pop Art, which'comments on the social implications of standardization, mass dissemination ofinformation, and the dehumanizing effects of modern culture'. What Rivers doeshave in common with the Pop Artists, Harrison argues, is to employ'traditionally unacceptable raw material' (Harrison 1984, p. 48). Similarly,Libby suggests that 'While pop art flattens . . . Rivers discovers the radianceof ordinary things, imaginatively transforming them in ways that Williams wouldadmire but Warhol might consider perversely romantic' (Libby 1990, p.134).Although these comparisons make a useful distinction, again they tend tounderestimate the aestheticisation of the image within Pop Art.
In fact, 'pop camp' is also an important ingredient of Rivers's work, andthis is shown not only in his inclusion of consumer goods but also in hisparodic revisions of historical representations which are deeply ingrained inAmerican popular culture. A good example of this kind of work is 'WashingtonCrossing the Delaware' (1953), an important 'repainting' of a traditionalAmerican icon, Leutze's painting of 'Washington Crossing The Delaware', whichundermined the heroism, masculinity and patriotism of the original. The paintingappeared the year after the Leutze was in the public eye in the celebrations forthe 175th anniversary of the river crossing. At that time the Cold War andMcCarthyism were at their height, and patriotism had become a nationalobsession. Rivers's painting undercuts the heroic Napoleonic stance ofWashington in the Leutze and humanises it. Washington becomes only one of manygoing about their business; he seems isolated and his stance is much less heroicand purposeful than in the original. While seeming to buy into the sentiments ofnationalism and patriotism, Rivers subverts them by taking Washington off hisheroic pedestal. Rivers said of the painting:
The last painting that dealt with George and the rebels is hanging at the Met and was painted by a coarse German nineteenth-century academician who really loved Napoleon more than anyone and thought crossing a river on a late December afternoon was just another excuse for a general to assume a heroic, slightly tragic pose . . . What could have inspired him Ill never know. What I saw in the crossing was quite different. I saw the moment as nerve-wracking and uncomfortable. I couldn't picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hand-on-chest heroics. (Davidson 1983, p. 74).
Conflicting readings, however, inhabit the painting, and it seems to be moreambiguous than critics sometimes allow. Does Washington really look as'uncertain' as critics say? The deconstruction is all the more effective becausethe attitudes which are being questioned still have a presence within thepainting, in the same way that they do within O'Hara's poems.
O'Hara responded to the painting with the poem, 'On Seeing Larry Rivers' WashingtonCrossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art'. This poem characterisesWashington as afraid, gun-happy and a liar. He is the father of debatablenotions about freedom which honour individualism rather than community. 'See howfree we are! as a nation of persons.' In other words, the poem narrativises thepainting further, implying, but not determining, trajectories of plot, characterand past history.
from Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara:Difference/hom*osexuality/Topography. Liverpool UP, 2000. Copyright © 2000by Hazel Smith.
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