The Figurative ‘50s--for Sentimental Reasons : <i> Visual Novels and Short Stories </i>

“There were a lot of people who considered themselves modern up to the last minute . . . who didn’t want to paint the figure. I was just doing something else. I think I had a different personality.”

Larry Rivers, on the phone from New York, was asked how it felt to spend the heyday of Abstract Expressionism painting subjects like a priapic Civic War veteran in bed, folks on the lawn on a July day or the ample figure of his mother-in-law--canvases included in the Newport Harbor Art Museum show.

“I had a lot of admirers who were not all members of the Abstract Expressionist painting world,” he said. “So when I did something it interested a variety of people. While the Museum of Modern Art didn’t break trails to my door, other people did. And then very shortly after that the Museum of Modern art did break trails to my door.

“You do what you do and you let the cards fall.”

Never an abstract painter, Rivers regards his studies with abstract art theorist Hans Hofmann as involving “a way of learning how to draw the figure. He wanted you to see the space around the figure and deal with the space that seemed to be coming forward or going back. He wanted you to end up with something that was the force of the figure. . . . It’s very contradictory but it sounded good at the time.”

(Grace Hartigan, who never studied with Hofmann but modeled for him, remembers the German painter telling Rivers, “A woman’s arm is not a sausage, nicht wahr? “)

Nowadays Rivers thinks of his paintings “like visual novels or short stories. I do large works which turn out to be a series of chapters. . . . There’s really one somewhat thematic thing that unfolds as I work. . . . I also feel I’m making remarks about things in my life. My work is a little outside just how I paint--what kind of brushes I use, what kind of forms, the way paint is handled.”

The images for his paintings come from his personal photo archive (“I can’t paint from my head.”) “The Last Civil War Veteran,” part of an extensive series on the subject, was done from a Life magazine photo.

But some subjects were close friends or family. Rivers’ mother-in-law Berdie Burger, who lived with him for many years, was “a slave,” he said, laughing. “She posed free.”

“I was very interested in seeing what a person that age looked like in the nude,” Rivers said. “I put her on a bed because she had to sit down. (The standing image) was something I was doing to fill out the space, I guess. I’m not sure. Doing it twice was more about taking care of the space in an interesting way.”

Sounds like the sort of thing an abstract painter might say.

“No one can ever gauge how an artist or anyone else is going to take what he looks at,” Rivers said. “If the generation before me were, quote-unquote, dealing with space and surface and all that, well there are a lot of ways to skin a cat. I feel as if I was involved with the same things they were involved with.”