Larry Rivers

Larry Rivers (born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg) (1923 – 2002) was an American artist, musician, and filmmaker.
Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg was born in the Bronx, New York. He changed his name to Larry Rivers in 1940 when he started his professional jazz career. He played the saxophone. After being in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942-43, he studied music at the Juilliard School of Music. There he met jazz musicians Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.
Rivers started painting in 1945 after he saw a show of Cubist paintings. He studied painting with Hans Hoffman, who made abstract expressionist paintings. In 1949 he had his first art show, and he became friends with the poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. The next year he met poet Frank O'Hara. They began to work together on art and poems. They wrote many letters to each other until O'Hara died in 1966.
Rivers is connected to the Pop Art movement. Sometimes he used ordinary things in his paintings like a cigar box or the menu from a bar. One very large work, "History of the Russian Revolution: From Marx to Mayakovsky" used not just paint but actual things he found and attached to the canvas.
Rivers died of liver cancer in 2002 at his home in Southampton, New York.