Born in 1923 in the Bronx, New York, as Larry Grossberg. In 1940 he began a musical career as a jazz saxophonist and changed his name to Larry Rivers. He studied theory of music and composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. His first encounter with fine art was through a musical motif based on a painting by Georges Braque. He began painting in 1945 and in 1947-48 studied at the Hans Hofmann School. In 1948 he studied at New York University and met Willem de Kooning. In 1949 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Jane Street Gallery, New York, graduating in 1951 in art and in this year met Jackson Pollock. In 1954 he had his first exhibition of sculptures at the Stable Gallery, New York. In 1958 he spent a month in Paris and played in various jazz bands and collaborated with poet Kenneth Koch on the collection of picture-poems, New York 1959-1960. He had his first major retrospective in five important American museums. His final work was The History of the Russian Revolution. He travelled in Central Africa and made the TV-documentary Africa and I with Pierre Gaisseau.

In 1969 he started using spray cans, in 1970 the air brush and later on, video tapes in his work. He taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara. In 1973 he had exhibitions in Brussels and New York. In 1974 he finished his Japan series and in 1978 he started a series called Golden Oldies Series, revising his own works of the fifties and sixties.

In 1980-81 he was given his first European retrospective at Hanover, Munich and Berlin.