Napoleon Standing Next to Chair

Description

Declared a "wonder boy" by LIFE magazine in 1958 for his ability to play sax, paint a masterpiece, and win big money, Larry Rivers has been involved in a variety of roles in his life. Having won $32,000 in 1957 on the game show "The $64,000 Challenge," Rivers was thrust into the national limelight. He appeared with several Beat generation poets in the 1959 film "Pull My Daisy," by photographer Robert Frank and painter Alfred Leslie. As a painter, Rivers utilized painterly abstraction but refused to expunge recognizable references. His interest in nostalgic themes often found him appropriating images both from art and from popular culture.
Napoleon Standing Next to a Chair is a re-working of an earlier work by Rivers. In 1964, he completed a piece entitled The Greatest Homosexual, a take off of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon in his Study, which began as an homage to the master but finished as an ironic parody of the emperor’s effete pose. This work, now in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., is more abstracted than the painting on view here. In both cases, however, the reference to David’s Napoleon is clear, not only in the borrowed figure of Napoleon but also in the inclusion of the word "David," stenciled on the canvas.
Sean M. Ulmer, University Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, for "A Matter of Degree: Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art," November 10, 2001 - January 27, 2002