Larry Rivers’s 1981 painting Growing is a compact but revealing work that encapsulates many of the artist’s late-career interests: the compression of autobiography and art history, the interplay of figuration and abstraction, and a wry engagement with American popular culture. Below is a focused, structured essay that situates the painting historically, analyzes its form and content, and assesses its significance within Rivers’s oeuvre and late 20th‑century American art.
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In this piece, notice the hands. The hands in Growing are enormous, disproportionate, and rendered almost entirely in charcoal pencil over a thin wash of oil. They hover near the groin and the heart—two centers of biological growth. The fingers look like roots digging into the soil of the torso. It is gross, tender, and utterly profound. Larry Rivers’s 1981 painting Growing is a compact
The late 1970s and early 1980s were a period of reflection for Rivers. Having achieved fame in the 1950s with works like Washington Crossing the Delaware , he spent much of the 1970s on large-scale historical pastiches and multimedia experiments. By 1981, the art world was shifting toward Neo-Expressionism (Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer) and the early days of appropriation art. Rivers, then 58, did not follow these trends. Instead, Growing looks inward. The work was created at his studio in Southampton, New York, and reflects a pastoral, almost meditative quality—a departure from the frenetic energy of his earlier jazz-influenced pieces. However, due to the potential for confusion and