Us

(1957). Original collaborative lithograph, editioned ("B1"), and signed by O'Hara and the artist, Larry Rivers. "Us" was the first in a series of lithographic prints, collectively called "Stones", produced by O'Hara and Rivers for Tatyana Grosman's Universal Limited Art Editions studio from 1957-1960. In his autobiography, Rivers recounts how the project came about and progressed: "As a young painter, I had the notion that there was an intrinsic good in painters and poets working together. It seemed like socialism in its smallest and most personal form. I had the idea that the assault on the senses coming from two directions, pictorial and poetic, would be twice as strong. . . . My chance came along in the summer of 1957 when Tanya Grossman started her lithography studio and asked me to do a series of stones with Frank O'Hara. . . . Each time we got together, we would choose some very definite subject, and since there was nothing we had more access to than ourselves, the first stone was called Us. . . . Frank was almost as important as myself in the overall visual force of the print." - Rivers, Drawings and Digressions. With Carol Brightman. (NY: Clarkson N. Potter, 1979), p. 115. "With his [O'Hara's] own hands, using a mirror to write backward, he put his poetry on the litho stones in and around my images." - Rivers, What Did I Do? (NY: Harper Collins, 1992), pp. 233-234. Fine. RIVERS, Larry. Original lithograph, 23 3/4" x 18 3/4", black ink on cream paper by Larry Rivers. Fine.