Larry Rivers, The Last Civil War Veteran, 1970

1970 Mixed media collage multiple based upon famous Larry Rivers 1961 painting "The Last Civil War Veteran'. (In 1979-80, Rivers reprised this theme with another edition of 125, but this is the original 1970 print from the limited edition of only 100)
In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art acquired The Last Civil War Veteran and by early 1963 put it on view. 1963 marked the hundred-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which Abraham Lincoln signed during the American Civil War to free enslaved people. The year was furthermore a defining moment in the civil rights movement, with Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech and scores of demonstrators risking their lives to demand freedom and justice across the nation. In 2022, Rivers painting went on loan to the Jewish Museum in New York for an exhibition dedicated to New York in the early 1960s. The blurb on the exhibition states,
"Larry Rivers' Last Civil War Veteran borrows its composition from a photograph of Walter Williams, the last living Confederate soldier who fought in the American Civil War. Addressing that romantic understanding as a problem, Rivers abstracts and distorts the figural image to confront the viewer with the nation's unresolved relationship with the past."

1970 Mixed media collage multiple based upon famous Larry Rivers 1961 painting "The Last Civil War Veteran'. (In 1979-80, Rivers reprised this theme with another edition of 125, but this is the original 1970 print from the limited edition of only 100)
In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art acquired The Last Civil War Veteran and by early 1963 put it on view. 1963 marked the hundred-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which Abraham Lincoln signed during the American Civil War to free enslaved people. The year was furthermore a defining moment in the civil rights movement, with Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech and scores of demonstrators risking their lives to demand freedom and justice across the nation. In 2022, Rivers painting went on loan to the Jewish Museum in New York for an exhibition dedicated to New York in the early 1960s. The blurb on the exhibition states,
"Larry Rivers' Last Civil War Veteran borrows its composition from a photograph of Walter Williams, the last living Confederate soldier who fought in the American Civil War. Addressing that romantic understanding as a problem, Rivers abstracts and distorts the figural image to confront the viewer with the nation's unresolved relationship with the past."mixed media collage multiple based upon famous Larry Rivers 1961 painting "The Last Civil War Veteran'.

Below is an excerpt from Amy Rahn's analysis of the work:

"...For The Last Civil War Veteran (1961), Rivers was inspired by photographs of two dying and dead Civil War soldiers taken in 1959 and 1960 and subsequently published in Life magazine. The veterans, both Confederate soldiers well over one hundred years old, were photographed in highly staged settings. In the 1959 photograph, the veteran lies dying in a hospital bed, the Confederate and U.S. flags and his Confederate uniform hanging behind him. Beyond simply publishing the images, the editors of Life magazine saluted the veterans, captioning the 1960 photograph “End of the Gallant Rebs.”

In this painting, Rivers abstracts the 1959 photograph, compressing the historical time of the Civil War and the present time of the man’s imminent death with his own experience of seeing the staged photograph published in a popular magazine. By appropriating the politically charged image and transforming it into a large-scale semi-abstract painting, Rivers highlights the photograph’s glorification of a dark past. Painted during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, this image channels both the grandiosity of history painting and the expressive potential of abstraction to question, not valorize, the past and its representation in the present..."
And from the Larry Rivers Foundation:
"While discussung the series of paintings that includes The Next to Last Confederate and The Last Civil War Veteran, Rivers has said: "...there was this one guy left from the Civil War. Now he was a media thing immediately; the last Civil War veteran. So I began getting interested in him and I did paintings. Then he died. They started to look up his records and it turned out that maybe he lied - and the guy who was supposed to be the 'next-to-the-last' was actually the last. But this was covered up - and Mr. Walter Williams, I believe his name was, was buried with honors."

"This Last Civil War Veteran was done from a photograph that appeared in Life magazine of the vet in his coffin with a Marine guard. When it appeared, Ray Parker, the artist, sent it to me with a note reading 'Go!' He wanted me to do something with it, make a painting of it. He knew that somehow this had become a subject of mine."