Larry Rivers - Legacy

Legacy

Rivers married Augusta Berger in 1945, and they had one son, Steven, as well as an earlier adopted child, Joseph. The couple divorced. He married Clarice Price in 1961, a Welsh school teacher who cared for his two sons. Rivers and Clarice Price had two daughters, Gwynne and Emma. After six years, they separated. Shortly after, he lived and collaborated with Diana Molinari, who featured in many of his works of the 1970s. After that Rivers lived with Sheila Lanham, a Baltimore poet. In the early 1980s, Rivers and East Village figurative painter Daria Deshuk lived together and in 1985 they had a son, Sam Deshuk Rivers. At the time of his death in 2002, Jeni Olin, a poet, was his companion.

Rivers also sustained a relationship with poet Frank O'Hara in the late 1950s and delivered the eulogy at O'Hara's funeral in 1966.

New York University bought correspondences and other documents from the Larry Rivers Foundation to house in their archive. However, both daughters he had with Clarice Price, Gwynne and Emma, object to one particular film being displayed, as it depicts them naked as young children. The film's purpose is supposedly to be a documentation on their growth through puberty, but it was made without their consent. This matter is addressed in the December 2010 issue of the magazine Vanity Fair, and the October 2010 issue of Grazia.