In 1961, Clarice Rivers and her husband, Larry Rivers, the 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, the Swiss-born sculptor of kinetic, self-destructing contraptions.
There, Ms. Rivers, an effervescent Welsh expatriate, and Ms. de Saint Phalle became fast friends. At the time, Ms. 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 Mr. Rivers had made of his pregnant wife.
Her voluptuous form inspired Ms. 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 piñata.
In 1966, when Ms. 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 Ms. Rivers, Ms. de Saint Phalle boasted that a psychiatrist had written in a newspaper that “the Hon would change people’s dreams for years to come.”
Ms. Rivers, the exuberant muse who inspired Ms. de Saint Phalle as well as her husband, died on 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.
Ms. Rivers was “a true art icon,” Bloum Cardenas, Ms. de Saint Phalle’s granddaughter, wrote in an email. Her grandmother, she added, was moved by Ms. Rivers’s “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 mélange of art, theater and literary types, among them the poet John Ashbery, the painter Howard Kanovitz, and the composer Lukas Foss and his wife, the painter Cornelia, as well as the experimental playwright and director Charles Ludlam and the actor Rip Torn.
“Clarice had a very direct, beaming, spirited, generous personality,” the German historian Rainer von Hessen, who was Ms. Rivers’s partner in the 1970s, wrote in an email. “Winning, radiant and outspoken, which triggered spontaneous likes or dislikes.”
Ms. 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. Rivers had a girlfriend at the time, and at first their relationship was mostly professional, despite the occasional romantic encounter. But, the omnivorous Mr. Rivers being who he was, their encounters grew more frequent, and they fell in love. It helped, as Mr. 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 Mr. Rivers continued to maintain a menagerie of current and former lovers — it was a domestic scenario, as his friend the poet Frank O’Hara put it, “of staggering complexity.” Shelly Dunn Fremont, the art director and filmmaker who was one of Mr. Rivers’s girlfriends, recalled meeting Ms. Rivers and bonding over a bottle of Champagne.
Ms. Rivers presided over it all with great good humor, until she’d had enough, at which point she moved to a rambling prewar apartment on the Upper West Side. She and Mr. Rivers remained close, however, and they never divorced.
“We parted in 1967,” Mr. 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 fireman, among other odd jobs. Clarice moved to London when she was 18.
She was mischievous, as Mr. Rivers was, and when they were still together they often played tricks on their guests, like the “funny” meals they made, as Mr. Rivers put it, to contrast with Ms. Rivers’s haute gourmet dinners. One night it was a turkey stuffed with hashish, which almost did in Mr. Ashbery, the poet. Another dinner involved a sandwich made with white bread strewn with corn silk and uncooked rice and topped with cat food; Mr. Kanovitz was the victim of that prank.
But Ms. Rivers also tried to keep her husband in check. She saved her older daughter from being named Bang, Mr. Rivers’s first choice, or Ten, his second, for the date of her birth. And she prevailed again when Mr. Rivers wanted to name their second daughter Franco America, in honor of Mr. O’Hara. (They compromised on Emma Francesca.)
More seriously, she interceded when Mr. Rivers 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. (Mr. Rivers died in 2002.) The foundation ended up keeping the film in storage, where it cannot be viewed by the public.
Ms. Rivers was often a subject for Mr. 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, Ms. 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.”
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