NEW YORK, NY.- In 1961, Clarice Rivers and her husband, Larry, an outlandish proto-pop artist and jazz musician, spent nearly a year in Paris, living on the Impasse Ronsin, a tiny cul-de-sac and artist’s enclave that was home to Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle and her husband, Jean Tinguely, a Swiss-born sculptor of kinetic, self-destructing contraptions.
There, Rivers, an effervescent Welsh expatriate, and de Saint Phalle became fast friends. At the time, de Saint Phalle was known for her “shooting” paintings — pieces embedded with bags of paint that she would blast with a rifle so they would explode in a spectacular fashion. But her work changed dramatically when she saw a drawing that Larry Rivers had made of his pregnant wife.
Her voluptuous form inspired de Saint Phalle to make what would become her most enduring work, the Nanas — “nana” is the French equivalent of “broad” or “chick” — bulbous and boldly painted female figures that look like a cross between the Venus of Willendorf and a Mexican pinata.
In 1966, when de Saint Phalle built her first large-scale piece, a house-size Nana that she called “Hon” — the Swedish word for “her” — in a museum in Stockholm, she installed a milk bar in her breast and a theater in one arm. Visitors entered through her vagina. In a letter to Clarice Rivers, de Saint Phalle boasted that a psychiatrist had written in a newspaper that “the Hon would change people’s dreams for years to come.”
Rivers, the exuberant muse who inspired de Saint Phalle and her husband, died Aug. 22 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. She was 88.
Her death, which was not widely reported, was announced by her daughter Gwynne, at whose house she died.
Rivers was “a true art icon,” Bloum Cardenas, de Saint Phalle’s granddaughter, wrote in an email. Her grandmother, she added, was moved by Rivers’ “wonderful curves and humor,” and the two of them “shared a different sense of wit and some lovers.”
She was charismatic and welcoming, a bohemian saloniste whose lifestyle was a kind of art-making. She was a skilled photographer. She sewed her own clothes, including a velvet bikini trimmed with pearls, and her own curtains, which she switched out often — one night purple chiffon, another night Day-Glo orange and pink iridescent panels. Her cooking drew crowds, a melange of art, theater and literary types, among them poet John Ashbery, painter Howard Kanovitz, and composer Lukas Foss and his wife, painter Cornelia, as well as experimental playwright and director Charles Ludlam and actor Rip Torn.
“Clarice had a very direct, beaming, spirited, generous personality,” German historian Rainer von Hessen, who was Rivers’ partner in the 1970s, wrote in an email. “Winning, radiant and outspoken, which triggered spontaneous likes or dislikes.”
Rivers, then known as Clarice Price, was 23 in 1960 when she landed in New York City. She had been modeling for artists and teaching school in London, and she wanted to see America. Through the art-world network, which was then small, she was introduced to Larry Rivers, who hired her to run his household, a chaotic loft scene brimming with outsize characters, music and parties, and to take care of his young son, Steven.
Larry Rivers had a girlfriend at the time, and at first, their relationship was mostly professional, despite the occasional romantic encounter. But, with omnivorous Larry Rivers being who he was, their encounters grew more frequent, and they fell in love. It helped, as Larry Rivers wrote in his 1992 autobiography, “What Did I Do?,” that his son liked Clarice more than his other girlfriends. They married in London in 1961.
But Larry Rivers continued to maintain a menagerie of current and former lovers — it was a domestic scenario, as his friend Frank O’Hara, a poet, put it, “of staggering complexity.” Shelly Dunn Fremont, an art director and filmmaker who was one of Larry Rivers’ girlfriends, recalled meeting Clarice Rivers and bonding over a bottle of Champagne.
Clarice Rivers presided over it all with great good humor, until she had had enough, at which point she moved to a rambling prewar apartment on the Upper West Side. She and Larry Rivers remained close, however, and they never divorced. (Larry Rivers died in 2002.)
“We parted in 1967,” Larry Rivers wrote in his autobiography, “and have been married ever since.”
Clarice Mary Price was born in Port Talbot, Wales, on Aug. 21, 1936, and grew up in Hay-on-Wye, a market town on the border of England. Her mother, Gwladys (Davies) Price, was a house cleaner; her father, Godfrey Joseph James Price, worked as a brick layer and volunteer firefighter, among other odd jobs. Clarice moved to London when she was 18.
She was mischievous, as was Larry Rivers, and when they were still together, they often played tricks on their guests, including the “funny” meals they made, as Larry Rivers put it, to contrast with her haute gourmet dinners. One night, it was a turkey stuffed with hashish, which almost did in Ashbery. Another dinner involved a sandwich made with white bread strewed with corn silk and uncooked rice and topped with cat food; Kanovitz was the victim of that prank.
But Clarice Rivers also tried to keep her husband in check. She saved her older daughter, Gwynne, from being named Bang, Larry Rivers’ first choice, or Ten, his second, for the date of her birth. And she prevailed again when he wanted to name their second daughter Franco America, in honor of O’Hara. (They compromised on Emma Francesca.)
More seriously, she interceded when he wanted to show a film he had been making of the girls when they were young teenagers. He had filmed them topless, while asking them how they felt about their developing breasts, a queasy mix of art-making and exploitation. In 2010, when the Larry Rivers Foundation wanted to sell the film, along with his archives, to New York University, his daughters protested, with their mother’s support. The foundation ended up keeping the film in storage, where it cannot be viewed by the public.
Clarice Rivers was often a subject for Larry Rivers, who made films, drawings and portraits of her. She appears in a few of his major works, including a gouache portrait, “Clarice With a Blue Eye: The Artist’s Wife,” and “Parts of the Face: French Vocabulary Lesson,” an oil portrait stenciled with French words for the parts of the face. (He was learning French at the time.)
In addition to her daughters, Rivers is survived by a brother, Stephen James Price, and five grandchildren.
“My mother had a great absurdist sense of humor,” her daughter Emma said, “and she could laugh at herself. She was really game, and up for anything. I think that’s why everyone was so drawn to her.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
