To understand Growing , one must look at the artist’s timeline. By 1981, Rivers had survived the tumultuous 60s and 70s. He had moved away from the clean, appropriated imagery of his early Pop works toward a more complex, multi-paneled narrative style often referred to as "History Painting with a dirty mouth." He was also dealing with the recent death of friends (like poet Frank O’Hara) and the aging of his own body.
By 1981, Rivers had mastered the use of plastic stencils and airbrushing, tools he adopted to mimic commercial art processes. In this piece, sharp, mechanically precise edges contrast sharply with loose, expressive oil smudges, creating a tension between the handmade and the manufactured. Color and Light
Growing (1981) is emblematic of Larry Rivers’s late practice: intimate, referential, and formally resourceful. By layering autobiographical content, painterly bravura, and cultural signifiers, Rivers creates a compact meditation on development—personal, artistic, and cultural—affirming his place in the conversation between mid‑century innovation and late 20th‑century painting’s pluralism.
Growing is not a pleasant picture. It is a necessary one. It asks the viewer: Are you growing, or are you just getting older? And it refuses to answer the question for you. growing 1981 larry rivers
The Growing series (1976–1981) remains one of the most polarizing entries in Larry Rivers' career. It stands as a complex artifact from an era of the New York art scene where the boundaries of the "private" were frequently challenged. Whether analyzed as a raw attempt at documenting human maturation or criticized as an exploitative misuse of paternal authority, the work necessitates a serious examination of the intersections of artistic freedom, the ethics of consent, and the responsibilities of the artist toward their subjects.
The core of the debate surrounding Growing lies in the intention of the artist. The Argument for Art as Documentation
The legacy of Growing resurfaced years after Rivers' death when his daughter, Emma Tamburlini, publicly condemned the work. To understand Growing , one must look at
In this article, we explore the Growing series (1981), its context within Rivers’ career, the artistic and ethical questions it raises, and its legacy in contemporary art discussions.
: Unlike his famous "Pop Art" paintings, Growing was a series of films and videotapes edited into a final project in the early 1980s.
The controversy resurfaced in 2010 when New York University (NYU) attempted to acquire the Larry Rivers Foundation archive. Upon learning of the film's contents and the lack of consent from the subjects, NYU returned the tapes to the Foundation. Emma Rivers Tamburlini has since characterized the work as child pornography and "a document of exploitation and abuse," leading to a movement to have the original tapes destroyed or permanently suppressed. Art Style and Wider Influence in 1981 By 1981, Rivers had mastered the use of
Emma Tamburlini publicly stated that she felt the project was invasive and that she had not provided meaningful consent to be documented in that manner. She also discussed the long-term emotional impact the project had on her well-being during her youth.
Rivers anticipated the postmodern mashup — mixing high and low, abstraction and representation, serious and silly. Growing feels like a 1981 punk-jazz poem about how art, like a vine, just keeps moving.
: The painting incorporates still images captured from the video footage.