Painting and Writing Matters: Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara’s Stones (1957-58)

Collaborative work between painters and writers was a common activity among the New York School poets in the 1950s. Its popularity was a combined result of circumstance and choice. Artistic collaboration served Frank O’Hara and his New York School colleagues in their attempt to escape from the academic orthodoxies of New Criticism, the latter decreeing the autonomy of poetry and the harmonious integration of form and content in a signifying poetic whole. By experimenting with the interplay between poetry and other artistic genres, their collaborations with painters seriously tested the limits of the poetic and “what a poem can be” (John Ashbery).
One such experiment is poet Frank O’Hara and painter Larry Rivers’s series of poem paintings Stones (1957-58). This paper will focus on how poetry as well as painting are brought to their generic limits in these works through and around the theme of textual materialization. At the same time as O’Hara and Rivers investigate the often conflicting powers of both genres to incarnate the reality of the material world (especially the human body) in their respective media, they also playfully foreground the materiality of painterly/poetic text as paint and writing. This double strategy contributes to a re-inscription of poetry and painting as sheer physical matter and means of artistic production within that world which they purport to represent in the first place. Thus, it seeks to point to the complicity of both genres in the material processes of cultural production, where reality produces art as much as art produces reality.