Seminal Works:

Dutch Master and Cigars
1963

"After 1961, popular and commercial images and insignia became a major element in Rivers' painting. He showed consistent if not immediately conscious preferences of subject in terms of his own particular attitudes and technical gifts. He was drawn to the Dutch Masters cigar box label because it in turn reproduced Rembrandt's Syndics, and gave him the opportunity to modulate a theme in both crude and more finished definition across popular media and back to its original source in fine art. The medium of traditional art is the theme of his popular subjects; the contemporary world, the object of his 'fine art' handling and painterly virtuosity."

(Excerpt from the book Larry Rivers by Sam Humter, Arthur A. Bartley Publishers, 1989)

Dutch Masters and Cigars is in the collection of The Harry N. Abrams Family Collection, New York.

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