Boris Lurie. American Nonconformist

RUS SI AN MUSE UM

BO R IS

LURIE

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Director of the Russian Museum Vladimir Gusev Editor-in-Chief Evgenia Petrova Article Alexander Borovsky

CONTENTS

Computer Layout Viktor Kosyachenko Translation from the Russian Katherine Foshko Tsan Proofreader Olga Bulatova Art Director and Designer of the Publishing House Joseph Kiblitsky

Boris Lurie

Boris Lurie Art Foundation, New York

Colour plates President Gertrude Stein Chairman of the Board Anthony Williams Exhibition Coordinator Igor Satanovsky Warehouse Staff Chris Schultz Jessica Wallen

The State Russian Museum presents: Boris Lurie / Almanac, Ed. 568 Palace Editions, St. Petersburg, 2019 © State Russian Museum © Palace Editions © Boris Lurie Art Foundation ISBN XXX (International)

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Alexander Borovsky

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Boris Lurie: Biography

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Exhibitions

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Boris Lurie Alex ander B orovsky

Boris Lurie 1960–1970s

rebelling against Abstract Expressionism. It had as much élan and no less of a real opportunity to become museum classics.

Lurie was not just a part of this milieu; sharp-tongued, he dealt out opinions to which his fellow artists, independent and distrustful of any authority, actually paid heed. Most importantly, he was one of a bunch who generated fresh ideas and came up with novel strategies.

Lurie’s life story, from the camps to the very heart of the bohemian art world, followed the logic of overcoming. As such, it is worthy of a biopic — one that never materialized since the genre requires the hero to be absolutely triumphant, in life and in death. Meanwhile, Lurie never courted success in the general understanding of the word, nor did he achieve it. Most importantly, he was an “inconvenient” artist whose oeuvre is just too spiky, too hard to grasp.

Boris Lurie was born in the city that had been recently renamed as Leningrad in 1924. His father was a businessman who had risen up in the NEP era yet understood in good time where the wind was blowing and escaped abroad, apparently taking his capital with him.

Boris’ mother, in a deflecting maneuver, announced in the papers that her husband, an enemy of the working class, had abandoned her and her children. A year later the family reunited in Riga.

Lurie’s upbringing was typical for a child of a well-to-do family, including a German gymnasium, foreign languages, and art classes. In June 1940 the USSR occupied Latvia. e Lurie family immediately faced a double threat as both refugees from the Soviet Union and members of the bourgeoisie. While they were spared in the Great Purge, within a year Soviet Latvia was occupied by Nazi Germany. e new authorities, together with their local collaborators, started exterminating the Jewish population. Lurie went from the Riga ghetto to the concentration camps of Salaspils, Stutthof, and Buchenwald-Magdeburg. He later wrote: “A Latvian Jew’s chances of survival were one in ninety; if you count the foreign-born Jews brought to Latvia for extermination, these came down to one in two hundred fiy to three hundred.” Lurie lost his grandmother, mother, sister, girlfriend, and most of his friends

Boris Lurie’s works are represented at top U.S. museums; he appears as a historical figure in exhibitions of the New York avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s, and in the works of art history scholars specializing in the intersection of art and politics. Several of his solo exhibitions have recently taken place in Europe.

Yet Lurie is not one of the so-called household names of modern art whose works are reproduced on posters and museum souvenirs.

He himself wanted least of all to “grace the screens of every town and be established in every heart,” 1 in the words of the Futurist poet Igor Severyanin. Lurie escaped publicity and despised the art establishment, carrying this tendency to extremes: he would bring down a peg those fellow artists who had managed to attract the interest of a collector or art dealer, and himself stubbornly refused to sell his works. Still, plenty of radical artists eventually become superstars. We might explain Lurie’s failure to become one by the all-powerfulness of the art establishment, unforgiving of its opponents. Yet, the real cause lies elsewhere. Lurie’s works could simply never end up on calendars and t-shirts. ey would bore a figurative hole in these souvenirs, as they do in exhibition spaces to this day with their shocking, in-your-face quality. Lurie is such an artist — inconvenient, caustic, and implacable.

Twentieth-century art is rife with dramatic life stories, yet Lurie’s biography still manages to stand out.

As a young man, born in Leningrad and raised in Riga, he cheated death in several Nazi concentration camps. Aer the war, in New York, he became part of the bohemian milieu, which, according to Clement Greenberg, the leading art critic of the 1950s and 1960s, decided the future of American art 2. is was the second time in the century that the art world stood at a crossroads, while the previous generation, “the New York School,” had already been gradually finding acceptance and becoming “museum quality.” e present generation, which, according to Greenberg, were struggling young people living in apartments with no hot water 3 — were now 5

escape Nazi Germany. In 1951, Lurie traveled to Paris — his first postwar European sojourn, which played an important role in the making of the artist. While McCarthyism had by then taken hold in the United States, France was under the influence of Communism, which appealed to Lurie, sympathetic as he was to le-wing views. He grew close to leists such as Louis Aragon and Renato Guttuso and appreciated the socially engaged figurative painting of Boris Taslitzky and André Fougeron. Yet it seems to me that the artists who exerted the most profound influence on him were of a different breed — most notably, Jean Dubuffet of his ick Impastoes period (The Female Bodies series) and Jean Fautrier. One critic would later note that Lurie was the most European-oriented American artist of his generation; indeed, ever since this period he closely followed what was happening in Parisian art. e influence of French art and Toulouse-Lautrec is evident in Lurie’s early works, for instance in his monumental, grotesque ree Women (ill. 5, 31). In the mid-1950s he started on his series e Dismembered Women — fragments of female bodies, a work which ended up taking him a decade to finish. e series began with images of grotesque corporality: the figures were still “in the zone of seduction,” trying to entice with a pose or the demonstration of sexualized objects such as high heel shoes (e Stripper, ill. 27). Yet the process of deformation had already begun (Nude, Stepping, ill. 24). e flesh here is under the influence of both centrifugal and centripetal forces: it opens up, melts or solidifies and gets trampled down. At times the forces quiet down and then the deformed bodies appear at rest, as in a landscape or a still life. In some works the morphogenesis is not traumatic; for instance, ree Figures (ill. on p. 22, 25) even contains references to classical modernism. Yet any attempts at aestheticization in this series are quite rare. A more dominant trend is negative anthropologizing: in Pin-Up (1963, ill. 26, 32, 35) the flesh is reshaped into a new configuration, as suggested by the flat imprints on the canvas reminiscent of fingerprints, yet without the friction ridges to prevent identification. Lurie’s later works for the series no longer feature the corporal: these are otherworldly dynamic clumps of matter that seem to coalesce in mid-flight. e colour scheme of these images harkens back to print, comics, and early Soviet poster art, unlike the sophisticated hues of the early part of the series.

What stands behind e Dismembered Women cycle? ere is def-

and relatives. In 1946, he and his father, who had also survived the camp ordeal, came to New York. ey joined Boris’ other sister, who had le Latvia before the Soviet occupation, settled in the city and married an American. Normal life resumed. Lurie’s father, unsinkable in his entrepreneurial spirit, started a real estate business. Yet Boris had a hard time getting used to this new, “respectable” existence. He preferred living by himself, alone, in “condemned” one-family apartments that his father was getting ready to renovate for future sales.

His camp experiences haunted him. Boris began a series of works (drawings, watercolours and gouaches and more rarely oil paintings), which he would later call “private.” ese were reminiscences of his experiences in the ghetto and the camps that had burned themselves onto his consciousness: they are mostly genre scenes and pictures of prisoners and guards. e term “genre painting,” while seemingly clashing with the reality of the camps, implies that the artist tried not to soup up the artistry, emphasizing instead the documentary aspect. is was not entirely successful: the “genreness” of the series buckles under the expressive force within it. e young artist did not mean for these paintings to be exhibited, and they only appeared as part of the Buchenwald memorial complex in 1999. Even in his family, the topic remained taboo, as Lurie recalled, and he never showed these works to other young artists.

Zoran Mušič, an artist of similar stature whose life path mirrored Lurie’s, introduced the subject of the camps in his art a full twenty years aer the war, working from sketches to generalized large-scale representations. Such distancing is understandable: neither artist wanted his role to be seen as prisoner testimony. e camp experience, enforced and traumatic as it is, is inimical to a person’s “self-standing” (in Pushkin’s expression); therefore, reducing one’s art to the witnessing and documentation of this experience means reinforcing its compulsory character, its bending to an outside evil will, in other words, its unfreedom. Both Lurie and Mušič seemed to intuitively sense their need to self-realize as universal artists. ey portrayed their life trajectories not as private, situational and stemming from the historical circumstances, but as existential and endowed with greater meaning.

In New York, Lurie went to hear Man Ray speak at the Art Students League 4 and got to show his paintings to George Grosz, the pioneer of Dadaism and Neue Sachlichkeit, who had managed to 6

initely the artist’s dialogue with the contemporary interpretation of corporality, most closely associated with Francis Bacon’s postwar Expressionist transformation of human bodies. Hans Bellmer’s photographs of the Surrealist dolls also come to mind as an embodiment of repressed and traumatized physicality. At the same time, it appears that e Dismembered Women, despite all their references to contemporary trends and art makers, are not founded on the artistic experience. ey emerge first and foremost from a state of consciousness. eodor Adorno’s o-cited question, “Is it possible to write poetry aer Auschwitz?” 5 has by now lost some of its urgency through repetition. Yet for Lurie this remained an existential issue. His experience of supreme tragedy had ruptured any sense of the perfection of the human body’s architecture, its spiritual value. Mušič gives the same answer when he paints mounds of corpses, victims of the Nazi camps, in a state of semidestruction in the literal, physical sense — a statement about the failure of our humanistic beliefs. In other words, artists who have undergone such an experience simply cannot glorify the human body or celebrate its perfection. e New York art world was meanwhile undergoing a transformation. Abstract Expressionism (Action Painting) was at its height, and Greenberg opined that the typology of abstraction was American 6. According to Greenberg, a work of art was not subject to any forces outside of the universality of one’s own consciousness, with extraneous influences seen as “given phenomena outside of art.” 7 By the mid-1950s a number of artists felt abstract art to be hermetic and overly concentrated on itself. ey actually needed the “given,” which they understood as the introduction of some material objects into the work. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were the first to undertake this expansion of the material into the spiritual. In terms of the artistic medium, this meant working with “low” subject matter: kitsch, waste products from print shops and found objects, or, to paraphrase Pushkin, the “many-hued litter” of consumer societies. Manipulating such anti-aesthetic material led to the art of the second half of the 1950s becoming “thing-based,” featuring combines, objects, and assemblages. e Dadaist legacy, especially that of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, became relevant again. It attracted the new avant-garde generation not only in its premise of transcending the medium of the painting and working with everyday objects,

1 Salad. 1962 Paint and transfer on canvas. 114.3 x 99

but also in its willingness to go beyond customary logic, defiance of cause and effect, and provocation. e radical art of this period was multi-vector Abstract Expressionism — by then the dominant, almost state-supported movement — became its main target. e young generation did not approve of Abstract Expressionism’s academic roots and detachment from real life. For them, this meant not just working with low-status objects but also a refusal to accept the museum as the natural place for art. As Claes Oldenburg said in I Am For… (1961), “I am for an art that is po7

is polemic regarding the then reigning style as well as the established value system (also exported to Europe, which had stabilized economically thanks to the Marshall Plan) gave birth to several artistic movements: Neo-Dada, Nouveau réalisme, Fluxus, and Pop Art. All of these phenomena had their own classifying systems, for instance by material (junk sculpture, which used recycled metal, or poster art, which worked with advertisements).

While each of the movements was distinctive, their developmental vectors all pointed in the same direction. e key players’ names also tended to be the same; in the literature, one artist is oen cited as part of several of these distinct yet similar groups.

Lurie was interested in gestural abstraction, and himself conducted several experiments in this field, which he called “feel paintings.” Yet overall, the idea of freeing art from its sociocultural obligations conflicted with his innate convictions. I believe that in Lurie’s case, his “given,” again to quote Greenberg, which he received through repression and violence, was his concentration camp experience. It defined too large a part of who he was, and naturally became both the subject and object of his art. In any case, it meant more to him than the theory of purity of art. I am sure he saw every expression of hermeticism as escapism, the shying away from a confrontation with reality. Meanwhile, he looked upon this same reality with a critical eye; a leist, he felt no affection for what he called “the A/C empire.”

In the 1950s Lurie struck up a friendship with the artist Sam Goodman, a former war correspondent who got to document the horrific reality of the concentration camps while they were being liberated by the Allies. e two became close to Stanley Fisher, a war veteran who had participated in the Normandy landings and then became active not only in new artistic movements but also in civil rights, fighting against racial and gender-based discrimination. While most of the young artists who frequented the studios and small galleries of Greenwich Village had received their education at Black Mountain College, an incubator of modernism, this trio came from quite a different school. eir experience helped them sense the challenges that loomed before the new art. McCarthyism, with its crude political posturing had ended, yet new risks appeared: the manipulation of mass media, the growing power of corporations, the tense international situation. In art, the establishment’s influence kept growing. Against this background, the

2 Mort Aux Juif!

(Israel Imperialiste). 1970 Enamel and oil on canvas. 229 x 324

litical-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” 8 ere was also a sociopolitical aspect to this: dissatisfaction with the state of society, its values, in the words of one critic, “its politics and ethics.” e greatest culprit, though, was seen to be societal consumerism, the positing of consumption as a national virtue. e Russian poet Konstantin Kuzminsky who later ended up in New York, found a crude but precise definition for both the consumer society and the production of artists who had found a way to commercialize their artistic product: “mass junk.”

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and its experience. It cared more about how to represent the “negative side of things” — crime, racial conflict, etc. — than the actual events. I would venture to say there was a pain threshold that Pop Art would not cross. Later, Joseph Beuys in his Auschwitz Demonstration (1964) provides us with an example of a detached, shopwindow-like representation of his material; the window dampens down the human emotional reaction and transforms the “burning reality” of the crimes into archival testimony of “the dark side of the human soul” (Sergei Yutkevich).

Lurie feels for two principal pain points: the Nazi crimes against humanity and the reflection of sexuality in mass consciousness.

He then dramatically unifies the two. e subject of Nazi concentration camps horrified American society, when photographs taken right as the Allies found them appeared in mass media. More than a decade had passed since then, and in those fat years the memory of the Holocaust had been gradually overshadowed by new societal concerns — but not quite: Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg came out in 1961. Yet the film was still a mediated experience — due to its genre, wonderful acting, direction, etc. André Malraux once wrote that the canon (meaning style or any normative aspect of the art) stands between the viewer and the demonstrated torture. Given his experience, Lurie did not accept any mediation or normativity.

The second pain point of mass psychology was sexuality — a subject both seductive and taboo for the average American. For Lurie sexuality was both the object and the subject of his utterances. He was seriously involved with psychoanalytical discourse. Working with repressed fears and substituted desires, he actualized and visualized them, bringing them back into the consciousness.

By unifying these two phenomena, Lurie strove for a cumulative effect. His Railroad to America (circa 1963) is an example. On canvas, the artist creates a collage from a photographic image of a liberated concentration camp depicting a pile of naked bodies — and a black-and-white pin-up portraying a half-naked beauty. e pin-up is a longtime staple of American visual mass culture, the explicitness of which has varied over the years — the beauties have gotten more naked and sexualized with each postwar decade. Yet there is an element of control since the genre remains distinct from pornography. e pin-up culture has militaristic overtones

March Group Gallery was conceived as an attempt to defy the corporations; the artists founded it as a cooperative. Lurie exhibited constantly, and not just at March; his biographers have counted over twenty galleries where he showed his work alongside what are now established names: Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, George Segal and others. His paintings, figurative yet in the Expressionist mold, garnered praise from the critics. e break came in the late 1950s.

Lurie began combining painting with photographs, reproductions, newspaper cuttings, etc. This was a brusque foray into a contemporary, politicized existence: fragments of news about the Algerian War, a photograph of the atomic trials, portraits of media celebrities — Nikita Khrushchev, Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot and others. There was also photographic evidence of a former life — concentration camps, the ghetto and very personal family pictures — a memory of people long since dead. e critic Bill Manville called this “an artistic nightmare” while entitling his article on Lurie in e Village Voice “e Images of Life.” Lurie was not alone in his desire to make combines. He later recalled that the future Pop artists “were busy collecting ideas on 10th Street,” that is, ideas suggested by Lurie and his associates. He exaggerated here since it remains difficult to pick out one group that pioneered the turn to products of mass culture. Robert Rauschenberg, the Neo-Dada, the English Brutalist Nigel Henderson all worked in the same direction, almost at the same time. ey were oriented towards Urbanism, life in its crude fullness, undiluted by high aestheticism. e media they used sabotaged the museum and commercial status of the painting by turning to litter and waste. e artistic establishment eventually absorbed this nonconforming material as well, yet it proved more difficult to absorb the works of Lurie and his fellow-thinkers.

Pop Art and related movements indeed overcame Abstract Expressionism’s fondness for transcendental universalism by bringing it down to the street. ey brought the consumer society onstage by at once making fun of its values and paying tribute to its vital drive and life force (paradoxically reminiscent of the Northern Renaissance, while speaking in very different codes and descriptive terms). Yet, there was an unspoken limit: Pop Art worked with political events and even criminal news (see Andy Warhol and Edward Kienholz), yet shied away from delving into real tragedy 9

Lurie was no political analyst or social critic. He did not stage protests against racial, gender-based, or any other oppression. Yet he was not happy with the picture of the world as a whole — both its representation and its essence.

How does Lurie achieve the effect of total non-acceptance of the existing reality? More and more oen he puts a big NO over his collages and found objects, using various fonts — handwritten, stenciled, print — put together from newspaper headlines. Experimenting with fonts is an old modernist story dating back to Cubism, where words and letters were the building blocks for the creation of a new visual language. Futurists and Constructivists used them for propaganda purposes, besides other reasons. Pop Art in its different permutations created a whole iconography of brands, signs, and letter-based representations of idioms and sounds. Its visuals combined elements of shocking novelty, unexpectedness as well as recognition. e iconography of thought-bubble letters from comic books as well as trademarks, all those “BLAM!” and “Coke” were immediately identifiable in the mass consciousness and served as a channel of communication with the viewer.

Lurie, once again, forged his own path. In the context of his work, “no,” which can be a particle, interjection, adverb or even a noun, has its negative potential multiply. is part of speech becomes a catalyst for not just semantic but also gestural and physical action. I would consider his NO works in the context of John L. Austin’s theory of speech acts. In his thesis How to Do ings with Words 11 Austin states that one not only describes an action with sentences but also performs it. He introduced the concept of performatives — utterances equivalent to actions. In the context of Lurie’s art “NO” is definitely performative. Situated on top of the collage’s vibrating surface or an individual reproduction, frequently of an erotic character, or existing as an ornamental font composition, Lurie’s “NO” is similar to an action. e artist truly lashes us with his negative; as Marina Tsvetaeva wrote, “To your mad world/One answer exists — refusal.” 12 Lurie was not alone in his negativism, a mask behind which he hid his humanity, threatened by the universal consumer drive. His associates now included, in Konstantin Kuzminsky’s words, “a dozen geniuses, trampled upon and silenced by mass junk.” is coterie held plenty of authority in its professional milieu. “Andy Warhol ran into their exhibits, said “Wow!” and ran off to paint his

since soldiers continue to be its top consumers; the pictures are “pinned up” in the lockers of military barracks.

Desire and prohibition form the core of the pin-up’s suggestiveness. Pop Art exploited this feature to the utmost for its own purposes – the seduction and the enticing advertising at the core of the pin-up were in line with the movement’s strategy. Yet Lurie saw the pin-up as more than a publicity tool. What stands behind the shocking synthesis of the photographic documentation of a mass crime and a pin-up? Surely a slap to society, its forgetfulness and indifference. The image’s perceptual violence has become psychological, resulting in transgression. The artist was probably also thinking of “mass junk” since there is no material value, labour cost or craft skills to these glued-on newspaper cutouts. (It must be said that sometimes Lurie does go over the reproductions with a paintbrush, achieving delicate, pulsing tonalities, as in his Salad, ill. 1). Yet, overall, this is a typical Lurie of the 1960s, disturbing and dread-provoking, something that could never grace an interior or be put up for auction. At its heart is a provocation: Lurie shows the conditionality of wellbeing that could turn into tragedy, the ephemerality of seductive flesh behind which are loom hecatombs of “bodies without organs” (Antonin Artaud) 9. Nazism destroys soul and body while consumerism puts the body up for sale and devalues the soul.

With his early 1960s’ collages Lurie anticipated an important trend in the culture of the following decade. 1969 saw the appearance of Luchino Visconti’s film e Damned, 1974 Liliana Cavani’s e Night Porter and 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. ese years witnessed the birth of the term Nazisploitation: denunciation of Nazism with the admixing of Freudian motifs. e same themes could be found in William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice (1979). In Lurie’s later prose work House of Anita 10 violence goes hand in hand with sexuality. His artistic work, marked as it was by the juxtaposition of corporality and the camps, predated this discourse, which came to play an important role in Seventies’ culture.

In the 1960s Lurie created a whole series of collages and assemblages featuring this shocking symbiosis. Nazism was, however, just one of his subjects. Pin-ups and Nazi symbols or photodocumentalism became part of the structure of works that tackled many other topics, as in the collage Lumumba Is Dead (1959–61).

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neat cans for the salons,” Kuzminsky wrote in his characteristic expressive manner. is international group included Yayoi Kusama, Wolf Vostell, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Isser Aronovici, Allan D’Arcangelo, Erró and several others. Some of them would gain fame as members of other movements such as Fluxus. Yet then, in the early 1960s, they formed a movement, if not an entirely stable one — NO!art. Besides, they formed a community that discussed political events — Eichmann’s capture, Lumumba’s murder, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the H-bomb, the Berlin Wall, Algeria and later Vietnam. ey exhibited together, at the March Group, D’Arcy and other galleries, and their shows grew more and more politically engaged (e Doom Show would go down in history as one of the most politicized ones). Criticism of Abstract Expressionism was no longer interesting to them, while among their small circle disinterest in politics drew opprobrium — some of the representatives of Neo-Dada (who would soon become a part of Pop Art) were ostracized for this reason, although critics saw them as “typical journalists.” Lurie was the leader of this NO!art movement. He and Sam Goodman were the most radical of the group; Italian leist journalists called them “true Socialist Realists.”

However, the principal New York curators, while giving Lurie his due, were in no hurry to include him in blockbuster museum shows; he was too radical and non-conformist and did not abide by political and sexual taboos.

In 1963, Gertrude Stein (a New York art dealer not to be confused with her literary namesake) opened her own gallery. Despite her youth, she had experience in the art business. At the same time, she had faith in art’s life-affirming potential, and Lurie’s anti-bourgeois and anti-establishment rhetoric did not faze her. She became his muse and guardian angel and aer his death created a Fund that popularized his legacy. During the movement’s “heroic” period she was no less a part of NO!art than its principal artists, as John Wronoski noted in his biography of Lurie.

As this biography suggests, Lurie was determined and unwilling to compromise; it seems like considering aesthetic issues that according to him had no social underpinnings, meant to him “showing weakness.” Yet, as much as he might stifle aestheticism, he was still first and foremost an artist. His NO in Orange paradoxically manifests the colour’s saturation. NO Stencils (ill. 42, 43) exhibit a minimalist structuralism. e later Love Series (ill. 60) har-

3 Untitled Circa 1975 Paper collage, acrylic, and fabric on board. 81 x 44.5

kens back to classical modernism — late Picasso’s linocuts and Matisse’s arabesques. Lurie treats his means of expression with great forethought. In his objects (the series Knives in Concrete, ill. 86, 88–95; and Axes, ill 105) he comes to a new, non-rendering, “naked” understanding of the representational in art at the same time with Beuys and Fluxus’ other members. He rethinks imagery as an extension of the material’s functionality. What he could not accept was formalism, by which he meant flawless, distanced, “attractive” perfection of form, as well as the playfulness and “cool11

equal to his manifestoes and polemic statements. When Lurie digressed from his program of hitting the pain points of the consumer society and its derivative — the artistic establishment — he sometimes created works that were beautifully lyrical, sad, and had nothing to do with politics or social commentary. A case in point is his object Immigrant’s NO Suitcase (ill. 63).He probably had in mind a polemical work — the sides of a suitcase feature the stenciled slogan “anti-Pop,” as evidence of the unequal battle with the all-powerful Pop Art. e work also features a Star of David and a swastika; the presence of these incompatible symbols would always frighten away gallery owners and curators and explains why he never participated in big museum shows. e evil sign of Nazism was the main deterrent — as a rule, it was never shown in public spaces. And yet the two symbols stemmed from the artist’s own experience: one he got from birth, and the other — from his survival in circumstances of almost certain annihilation. Both forever stayed in his consciousness. Omnia mea mecum porto.

Boris Lurie the artist developed most fully from the 1950s to the 1970s. In his last two decades, until his death in 2008, he became a poet and a writer, the author of an anthology of poems, a memoir, and a novel. In the last few years his artistic and literary legacy has been attracting an increasing amount of attention. is exhibit, organized by the Russian Museum together with the Boris Lurie Foundation, is a sign of the justly growing interest in this extraordinary figure.

4 Untitled Circa 1972–1977 Assemblage: pillow with plastic flower, paint, and tape. 24 x 51 x 42

Transl ate d f rom t he Russi an by Kather ine Foshko Ts an

5 Three Women Circa 1958–1959 Acrylic on paper mounted on board. 110 x 115

Notes

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ness” of formal solutions. (One of the classics of Russian art called this “winking.”) He could not forgive Pop Art for this, even some of Claes Oldenburg’s massive yet entertaining objects. at is why Lurie and some other NO!art members deliberately adopted deskilling — the rejection of any artifice, stylizing, or attractive and formalist realization. Art according to them should be coarse, rugged, and sharp-edged — this way it has more of a chance to break through the audience’s comfort level, of getting to the beating heart of the consumer society. Be that as it may, the artist is never

2 3 4

5 12

Severyanin, Igor. Epilogue (1912). Tim Harte. Fast Forward. e Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009, p. 55.

Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” Partisan Review. July– August 1940: Vol. VII. No 4, p. 296.

Greenberg, C. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” e Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City. e League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists and for over 130 years has maintained a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a flexible schedule to accommodate students from all walks of life.

“To write poetry aer Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno, eodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983, p. 34.

6 7 8

Greenberg, C. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.”

Greenberg, C. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.”

Andreeva, Ekaterina. Everything and Nothing: Symbolic Figures in Post-War Twentieth-Century Art. St. Petersburg: Limbakh, 2011.

9 Artaud, Antonin. e eater and Its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

10 Lurie, Boris. House of Anita. New York: NO!art Publishing, 2017.

11 Austin J. L. How to Do ings with Words: Second Edition (e William James Lectures). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

12 Tsvetaeva, Marina. Oh Tears in my Eyes! (1939). Karlinsky, Simon. Marina Tsvetaeva: e Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 226.

13

6 Untitled Circa 1946 Pen and ink on paper. 26 x 20 7 Untitled Circa 1946 Pen, ink, and pencil on paper 14.6 x 19.7

8 Untitled Circa 1946 Conte crayon and estompe on paper. 21 x 30

9 Untitled Circa 1946 Charcoal on paper. 30 x 21 10 Untitled Circa 1946 Pen and ink, wash, and colour pencil on paper. 22.2 x 25.7

11 Untitled Circa 1946 Pencil and estompe on paper. 27.3 x 18.7 12 Untitled Circa 1946 Conte crayon and estompe on paper. 29.6 x 21

13 Untitled Circa 1946 Charcoal and watercolour on paper. 21 x 29.5 14 Untitled Circa 1946 Conte crayon and estompe on paper. 25.7 x 20.6

15 Untitled Circa 1946 Ink on paper. 23 x 14 16 Untitled Circa 1946 Ink, conte crayon, and estompe on paper. 13.5 x 18

17 Portrait of My Mother Before Shooting 1947 Oil on canvas. 93 Ń… 65 18 Untitled Circa 1946 Colour pencil, conte crayon, and estompe on paper 29 Ń… 21

19 Untitled Circa late 1940s Oil on board. 51 x 38

20 Untitled Circa late 1940s Pastel and gouache on paper. 62.2 x 47

21 Hanging at Stutthof 1946 Pastel and gouache on paper. 58.5 x 43

22 Three Figure 1947 Oil on canvas 79 х 95

23 Lana Turner’s Daughter (who slew her mother’s lover) 1955 Oil on canvas. 51 x 51.5

24 Dismembered Women: Nude, Stepping Circa 1955 Oil on cotton twill fabric 155 x 119

25 Untitled (Three Figures) Circa early 1950s Oil on unstretched canvas 18.5 x 27

26 Pin-Up Girl Circa 1955 Oil paint on canvas 89 х 66

27 Dismembered Women: The Stripper 1955 Oil paint on canvas. 165 х 90

28 Dismembered Woman Circa 1955 Oil on canvas. 145 x 135

29 Dismembered Woman 1955 Oil on canvas. 89 x 112

30 Dance Hall Circa 1957–1959 Oil on canvas. 127 x 96.5 31 Three Women Circa 1955 Oil on linen. 117 x 119.5

32 Pin-Ups over Mother and Child 1947–1957 Oil, acrylic, and transfer on canvas. 92 х 76 33 Feathers 1962 Paint and transfer on canvas 184 x 117

34 Dismembered Stripper 1956 Oil paint on canvas. 109 x 102 35 Altered Photos: Pin-Up (Dismembered Figure) Circa 1963 Photo emulsion and acrylic on canvas. 117 x 142

36 NO with Lipstic Circa 1962 Acrylic, transfer, and lipstick on wood. 119 Ñ… 71 37 Silver NO on Torn Pin-Ups Circa 1963 Acrylic and paper collage on masonite. 48 x 40.6

38 Untitled (NO) 1963 Oil and paper collage on cardboard. 43 x 37

39 NOs with Skull and Crossbones Circa 1963 Acrylic and spray paint on plywood. 64 x 59

40 NO Poster 1963 Paint and offset print on wastepaper mounted on canvas. 86 x 48

41 NO Poster 1963 Paint and offset print on wastepaper mounted on canvas. 74 x 57

42 NO Stencil 1963 Cardboard, staples, and acrylic on canvas. 62 x 46

43 Stencilled NOs 1969 Acrylic on canvas 34.2 x 76.2

44 Literal Paintings: Pin-Up Head 1969 Enamel and oil on cardboard 51 x 53 45 Literal Paintings: Pin-Up (Altered Photo) 1969 Acrylic and paper collage on board. 27 x 21

46 SABER Hdw 1970s Assemblage: fabric, pictures and oil paint on a cardboard box 213.5 x 66 x 14 47 Untitled (Deliberate Pin-Up) Circa 1975 Paper collage with pigment on found paper. 61 x 50

48 NO Circa 1963–1970 Paint over offset printing on wastepaper mounted on canvas. 130 x 95

49 Suzy Sweet 1963 Paint, paper, and photos on canvas 130 х 109

50 Lolita 1962–1963 Paper collage mounted on canvas. 142 x 103

51 Altered Man (Cabot Lodge) 1963 Paint on paper mounted on canvas. 98 x 81

52 Altered Man (Cabot Lodge) 1963 Paint on paper mounted on canvas. 74 x 60 53 Altered Man (Cabot Lodge) 1963 Paint on paper mounted on canvas. 75 x 61

54 Altered Man (Cabot Lodge) 1963 Paint on paper mounted on canvas. 117 x 79 55 Untitled Circa 1963 Paper collage and paint on a cardboard box top. 36 x 28

56 Red Painting 1961–1969 Lead paint and sand on canvas 61 x 61

57 NO-ON 1962 Oil on canvas 63.5 x 71

58 Untitled (NO Sprayed) 1963 Spray paint on masonite. 56 x 52

59 Untitled (Saturation Painting) Circa 1963 Paper collage and varnish on a cotton towe 52 x 71

60 Love Series: Blindfolded Circa 1963 Photo emulsion and paint on canvas. 147 x 145 61 NO with Pleasure Pictures 1963 Acrylic, cardboard and paper collage, and staples on cardboard. 56 x 46

62 A Jew Is Dead 1964 Paint, paper collage, and tape on canvas 190.5 x 315

63 Immigrant’s NO Suitcase (Anti-Pop) 1963 Acrylic, fabric, and paper collage on a suitcase. 38 x 58 x 18

64 American Circa 1970 Paint and paper collage mounted on plywood 173 x 114 65 Torn Pin-Ups: Cross 1963 Paint and paper collage on canvas. 160 x 129.5

66 American Circa 1970 Paper collage, oil, rope, and rubber on styrofoam and cardboard 124.5 x 124.5

67 Amerique Amer (Pleasure) Circa 1963 Paper collage and acrylic on paper. 33 Ń… 19

68 Untitled Circa 1970–1974 Acrylic, plastic flower, paper collage, concrete, and tape on cardboard 66 x 68.5 69 Hair 1972 Assemblage: dry paint, wigs, and oil on cardboard 107 x 53

70 Untitled (Deliberate Pin-Up) Circa 1975 Paper collage, concrete, and acrylic on board. 81 x 43 71 Untitled (Deliberate Pin-Up) Circa 1975 Acrylic and paper collage on cloth mounted on board 61 x 61

72 Hard Writings: PLEASE Circa 1963–1972 Paper collage, tape, and charcoal on cardboard. 46 х 91

73 Hard Writings: LOAD 1972 Paper and tape on paper mounted on canvas. 60 x 88

74 LICK Circa 1960s Collage: tape and paper mounted on paper. 56 x 76

75 Untitled Circa 1959–1964 Collage: oil and paper on fabric mounted on plywood. 142 x 61

76 Hard Writings: NO on Reversed Pin-Ups 1972 Oil and paper collage on canvas 48 x 57 77 Hard Writings: NO on Pin-Up Circa 1972 Oil paint and paper collage on canvas 61 x 55

78 Hard Writings: SLAVE Circa 1972 Paper collage, paint, and varnish on paper. 56 x 79

79 Hard Writings: NO on Pin-Up Circa 1972 Acrylic on paper mounted on canvas. 51 x 38

80 Hard Writings: IN Circa 1972–1973 Paper collage, paint, and varnish on paper. 55 x 81 81 Untitled (Deliberate Pin-Up) Circa 1972–1973 Acrylic, paper collage, canvas, and tape on cardboard. 71 x 69

82 Untitled Circa 1972–1974 Paint, paper collage, and concrete on acardboard box 50 x 24 x 13

83 NO Bra (NOs cast in cement) Circa 1972–1974 Bra with concrete 37 x 79 x 6

84 Untitled (Deliberate Pin-Up) Circa 1972–1975 Paper collage, acrylic, and velvet fabric on board. 89 x 61

85 Sold God Circa late 1970s Assemblage: rubber materials mounted together 32 x 73 x 4.5

86 Knives in Cement Circa 1972–1974 Metal, wood, and concrete 79 x 53 x 38

87 Cement Star of David Circa 1972–1974 Concrete 20 х 51 х 55

88 Knife in Cement Circa 1972–1974 Metal, wood, and concrete 46 x 81 x 20

89 Knife in Cement Circa 1972–1974 Metal, wood, and concrete 58.5 x 60 x 48

90 Knife in Cement Circa 1972–1974 Metal, wood, and concrete 29 x 66 x 36

91 Knife in Cement Circa 1972–1974 Metal, wood, and concrete 46 x 20 x 46

92 Knife in Cement Circa 1972–1974 Metal, wood, and concrete 58.5 x 15 x 23

93 Knives in Cement Circa 1972–1974 Metal, wood, and concrete 32 x 72 x 15

94 Knife in Cement Star of David Circa 1972–1974 Metal, wood, and concrete 43 x 30.5 x 30.5 95 Knife in Cement Circa 1972–1974 Metal, wood, and concrete 58 x 19 x 10

96 NO Bra (NOs cast in cement) Circa 1972–1974 Bra with concrete. 25.5 x 66 x 4

97 Untitled (Corset with Stars of David) Circa 1972–1982 Oil on corset with chains and concrete. 86.5 x 58.5 x 10.2

98 Untitled Circa 1974 Acrylic, paper collage, and fabric on cardboard 81 x 44.5

99 Untitled Circa 1972–1976 Аssеmblage: pillow with paint and plastic flower 18 x 51 x 38

100 Untitled Circa 1972–1974 Assemblage: pillow with plastic flower 23 x 56 x 43

101 Untitled Circa 1970–1974 Paint, paper collage, duct tape and found objects on a cardboard box 206 x 49.5 x 8 102 Untitled Circa 1970–1974 Paint, paper collage, light bulb and fabric on a cardboard box 48 x 41 x 11.5 103 Untitled Circa 1972–1974 Concrete, acrylic, and fabric on canvas. 76 x 76

104 Untitled 1970s Assemblage: found objects, paint, and pictures on a cardboard box 137 x 46 x 10

105 Ax Series 2003 Tree stump with ax assemblage 74 x 41 x 30

Boris Lurie: Biography

Exhibitions

Boris Lurie was born in 1924 in Leningrad, Russia, and grew up in Riga, Latvia. At the age of sixteen he was taken prisoner by the Nazis and spent four agonizing years at Buchenwald and other concentration camps. His mother, grandmother, and one of his sisters were murdered by the Nazis in the Rumbula massacre, which took place near Riga in 1941. Aer his liberation Lurie remained in Germany for a year and worked for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps.

He moved to New York City in 1946 and began his art career there. From 1954 to 1955 he lived and worked in Paris.

Boris Lurie first gained national attention in 1960. During this year he, along with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, created the NO!art. e principle aim of NO!art was a return to socially and politically engaged art. It thus stood in opposition to the two most popular movements of the era, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. For the most part critics and curators of the day rejected Lurie and NO!art.

As he has stated, “e art market is nothing but a racket. ere is an established pyramid which everybody who wants to benefit from it has to participate — if he is permitted to participate.” Yet Lurie continued to produce his highly charged political and social imagery and, in 1963, his now famous collage, Railroad Collage — which superimposed a pin-up girl in front of victims of a concentration camp — caused a major furor.

He died in 2008 in New York. Boris is buried in Hof Hacarmel cemetery in Haifa, Israel. In 2017 the Russian publishing house Kolonna published a Russian translation of Boris Lurie’s novel House of Anita, written in English in the 1970s.

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015 2014

2013

Boris Lurie Circa 1924 Lurie with pin-up 1960–1970s 106

2012

Boris Lurie: Artist and Witness, Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre, Latvia Boris Lurie and NO!art, Koroška Art Gallery, Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia Forgetting — Why We Don’t Remember Everything, Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Germany Boris Lurie: Pop-Art Aer the Holocaust, MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland Flashes of the Future: e Art of the ’68ers or e Power of the Powerless, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany You’ve Got 1243 Unread Messages, Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia Boris Lurie in Habana, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba Anti-Pop, Neues Museum Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design Nürnberg, Germany Boris Lurie: Life Aer Death, Westwood Gallery, New York, USA Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, Grey Art Gallery, NYU, New York, USA Boris Lurie. Adieu Amérique, CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Turin, Italy BORIS LURIE NO!, Janco Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel No Compromises! e Art of Boris Lurie, Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany Unorthodox, Jewish Museum, New York, USA Boris Lurie NO!art, Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris, France KZ – KAMPF – KUNST. Boris Lurie: NO!art, NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln, Germany Dessinez Eros (group exhibition), Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris, France El Museo Vostell Malpartida, Spain e Box LA, Stand A14, Frieze Art Fair, New York, USA Charles Krause/Reporting Fine Art, (e)merge art fair, Washington, DC, USA Art Against Art: Yesterday and Today, Zverev Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia Boris Lurie: e 1940s Paintings and Drawings, Studio House, New York, USA NO!art: e ree Prophets, e Box, Los Angeles, USA A Self to Recover: Embodying Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, USA

2011

2010

2009

2005

2004 2003

2002 2001 1999

1998 1995

107

Boris Lurie, David David Gallery, New York, USA Boris Lurie: NO!art of the 1960s, Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights, Florence, Italy NO!art at the Barricades, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA NO!art of Boris Lurie, Zverev Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia NO! e Art of Boris Lurie at Chelsea Art Museum, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA Boris Lurie: NO!art, Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, MA, USA Los Angeles Art Fair, Westwood Gallery Booth, USA Art Miami, Westwood Gallery Booth, USA NO!art: An Exhibition of Early Work, Westwood Gallery, New York, USA On the Tectonics of History, ISCP, New York, USA ART FAIR 2009, New York; Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, USA e ’80s, Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Art Museum, New York, USA Wild Boys, Bad Boys, Outsiders, and Originals, Clayton Gallery, New York, USA Boris Lurie: Feel Paintings. NO!art show No. 4, Janos Gat Gallery, New York, USA Optimistic — Disease — Facility. Boris Lurie: Buchenwald — New York (with Naomi T. Salmon), Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin-Schöneberg, Germany NO!-ON, Gallery Berliner Kunstprojekt, Berlin, Germany NO!art and the Aesthetics of Doom, Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, USA NO!art and the Aesthetics of Doom, Block Museum, Evanston, USA Works 1946–1998, Weimar-Buchenwald Memorial, Weimar, Germany Life — Terror — Mind, Show at Buchenwald Memorial, Weimar, Germany Knives in Cement, South River Gallery (UIMA), Iowa City, USA NO!art Show No. 3 (with Dietmar Kirves, Clayton Patterson, and Wolf Vostell), Janos Gat Gallery, New York, USA NO!art, Neue Gesellscha für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, Germany Boris Lurie und NO!art, Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, Germany Dance Hall Series, endart Gallery, Berlin, Germany Holocaust in Latvia, Jewish Culture House, Riga, Latvia

1994 1993 1989 1988 1978 1975 1974

1973 1970 1964

NO!art (with Isser Aronovici and Aldo Tambellini), Clayton Gallery, New York, USA Outlaw Art Show, Clayton Gallery, New York, USA Graffiti-Art, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Germany Feel-Paintings, Gallery and Edition Hundertmark, Cologne, Germany Counterculturale Art (with Erró and Jean-Jacques Lebel), American Information Service, Paris, France Recycling Exhibition, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel Boris Lurie at Inge Baecker, Inge Baecker Galerie, Bochum, Germany NO!art Bags, Galerie und Edition Hundertmark, Köln, Germany Boris Lurie & Wolf Vostell, Galerie Rewelsky, Köln, Germany NO!art (with Sam Goodman and Marcel Janco), Ein-Hod-Museum, Ein-Hod, Israel NO!art Painting Seit 1959, Galerie Ren é Block, Berlin; Galleria Giancarlo Bocchi, Milan, Italy Art & Politics, Kunstverein Karlsruhe, Germany NO & ANTI-POP Poster Show, Gallery Gertrude Stein, New York, USA Boxes, Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, USA

1963

1962 1961

1960

1959 1958 1951 1950

NO!show, Gallery Gertrude Stein, New York, USA Boris Lurie at Gallery Gertrude Stein, Gallery Gertrude Stein, New York, USA Sam Goodman & Boris Lurie, Galleria Arturo Schwarz, Milan, Italy Doom Show, Galleria La Salita, Rome, Italy Pin-Up Multiplications, D’Arcy Galleries, New York, USA Involvement Show, March Gallery, New York, USA Doom Show, March Gallery, New York, USA Dance Hall Series, D’Arcy Galleries, New York, USA Adieu Amerique, Roland de Aenlle Gallery, New York, USA Les Lions, March Gallery, New York, USA Tenth Street New York Cooperative, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA Vulgar Show, March Gallery, New York; Joe Marino’s Atelier, New York, USA Recent Drawings U.S.A., Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA 10th Street, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, USA Black Figures, March Gallery, New York, USA Dismembered Figures, Barbizon Plaza Galleries, New York, USA Boris Lurie, Creative Gallery, New York, USA