The Last Civil War Veteran

The work of Larry Rivers bridges the Abstract Expressionists’ manifestation of subjectivity and interiority in painterly form with the Pop artists’ navigation of consumer culture and advertising. Rivers took on iconic American images and brands—from Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware to Dutch Master cigar branding—and rendered them in a manner that was part inspired improvisation and part calculated critique. This wry commingling of modes, often in one picture, identifies a moment of transition: from the aspirations of post-World War II America to the recognition of a world now dominated by products and capital.

Rivers frequently worked in series and The Last Civil War Veteran is one of three major paintings, in addition to smaller paintings and prints, inspired by a perhaps apocryphal story published in Life Magazine in 1959. According to Rivers, the artist Ray Parker sent him the article with a note that simply read: "Go!" The photograph illustrating the article depicted a man named Walter Williams (1854–1959) lying in bed, with a gray uniform and the flags of both the Confederacy and the United States hanging on the wall behind him. Williams claimed to have enlisted in the Confederate Army as a young child. Rivers deemphasizes the figure and even Williams’s identity, obscuring his features into a pink blur that rhymes with a Matisse-like decorative border on the top of the painting. Instead, the work foregrounds the flags, those easily identifiable icons that stand in for both the antagonisms of the Civil War and the bitter divisions that roiled the Civil Rights era during which Rivers worked. Like Jasper Johns—who first painted the American flag in 1955 because it was something "the mind already knows"—Rivers uses these flags as images upon which the viewer can project their own experiences, accruing meaning between the painting and the present day. The subject of this work can be seen as both a reflection of time passing into history and as a signifier of the cruel and eternal resonance of a haunted past in a present where the Confederate flag is still a painful symbol for many.