Boris Lurie
Encyclopedia
Boris Lurie was an American
artist and writer. He co-founded the NO!Art
movement which calls for art leading to social action. His controversial work, often related to the Holocaust, has frequently irritated critics and curators and has sold poorly.
Though he lived as a penniless artisit, Lurie amassed $80 million by buying penny stocks and real estate which he left to create the Boris Lurie Art Foundation.
into a Jewish family and grew up in Riga
. From 1941 to 1945 he was imprisoned in German concentration camps; his mother, grandmother and sister were killed by the Nazis.
In 1946 he came to New York and produced several figurative paintings processing his wartime memories. One of his best known and most controversial works is "Railroad Collage
" (1959), a collage
of two photographs showing a pin-up girl
undressing in the midst of corpses of gas chamber victims on a flatcar. He continued with several etchings, sculptures and paintings, often with Holocaust or death themes.
In 1960 he founded the NO!art
movement together with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, out of a sense of disillusionment with the contemporary art scene. The goal was to have art address the disconcerting truths: racism, imperialism, sexim, colonialism, depravity. The movement favors "totally unabashed self-expression leading to social action" and is opposed to the worldwide capitalist "investment art market", to pop-art that celebrates consumerism
and to decorative "salon art" such as abstract expressionism
. Lurie's art and the NO!Art movement were largely ignored by the establishment, and in 1970 Lurie wrote his critique "MOMA
as Manipulator." One of the movement's earliest champions was the Italian art dealer, Arturo Schwarz
.
Pieces by Lurie are now contained in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art
(Washington, D.C.) and the Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA; NYC). In 2001, the NO!Art movement was subject of a retrospective at the University of Chicago
, the University of Nebraska and at the Whitney Museum of American Art
(NYC).
In 2002, Amikam Goldman completed a documentary on Boris Lurie entitled No!Art Man, which was premiered at the Anthology Film Archives with Mr. Lurie present.
Lurie's art has found more resonance in Germany than in the United States. Germany saw two large exhibitions of his work in 1995 and 2004. A documentary, Shoah and Pin-Ups: The NO!-Artist Boris Lurie, was shown on German TV in 2007.
On January 7th, 2008, Lurie died from kidney failure, days after having suffered a stroke. At age 83, he was the last surviving founder of the NO!Art movement.
Since 1999 the NO!Art
Movement is led by Dietmar Kirves (headquarters Berlin), and Clayton Patterson
(headquarters New York).
Members are Rocco Armento, Isser Aronovici (t), Enrico Baj
(t), Paolo Baratella, Herb Brown
, Ronaldo Brunet, Guenter Brus, Al D'Arcangelo (t), Aleksey Dayen, Frank-Kirk Ehm-Marks, Erro (Ferro), Klaus Fabricius, Charles Gatewood, Paul Georges (t), Jochen Gerz, Dorothie Gillespie, Esther Morgenstern Gilman (t), Amikam Goldman, Leon Golub (t), Blalla W. Hallmann (t), Harry Hass, Allan Kaprow
(t), Kommissar Hjuler
(Detlev Hjuler) and Mama Baer (Andrea Katharina Ingeborg Hjuler), Yayoi Kusama
, Konstantin K. Kuzminsky, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Suzanne Long (Harriet Wood), LST, Enzo Mastrangelo, Stu Mead
, Peter Meseck, Lil Picard (t), Leonid Pinchevsky, Bernard Rancillac, Francis Salles, Naomi Tereza Salmon, Reinhard Scheibner, Bruno Schleinstein (t), Dominik Stahlberg, Michelle Stuart, Aldo Tambellini, Seth Tobocman, Jean Toche, Toyo Tsuchiya, Wolf Vostell
(t), Friedrich Wall, Mathilda Wolf, Natalia E. Woytasik, Miron Zownir.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
artist and writer. He co-founded the NO!Art
NO!Art
NO!art is a radical avant-garde anti-art movement started in New York in 1959. Its founders sought to deliver a shock to the complacent consumerist society around them....
movement which calls for art leading to social action. His controversial work, often related to the Holocaust, has frequently irritated critics and curators and has sold poorly.
Though he lived as a penniless artisit, Lurie amassed $80 million by buying penny stocks and real estate which he left to create the Boris Lurie Art Foundation.
Early life
Lurie was born in LeningradLeningrad
Leningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:- Places :* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...
into a Jewish family and grew up in Riga
Riga
Riga is the capital and largest city of Latvia. With 702,891 inhabitants Riga is the largest city of the Baltic states, one of the largest cities in Northern Europe and home to more than one third of Latvia's population. The city is an important seaport and a major industrial, commercial,...
. From 1941 to 1945 he was imprisoned in German concentration camps; his mother, grandmother and sister were killed by the Nazis.
In 1946 he came to New York and produced several figurative paintings processing his wartime memories. One of his best known and most controversial works is "Railroad Collage
Railroad Collage
Railroad Collage is a controversial mixed media collage produced by Boris Lurie in 1959 which superimposed a pin-up girl onto a well-known liberation photograph, which featured a flatbed of stacked with corpses, juxtaposing the American consumer culture with the Holocaust...
" (1959), a collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
of two photographs showing a pin-up girl
Pin-up girl
A pin-up girl, also known as a pin-up model, is a model whose mass-produced pictures see wide appeal as popular culture. Pin-ups are intended for informal display, e.g. meant to be "pinned-up" on a wall...
undressing in the midst of corpses of gas chamber victims on a flatcar. He continued with several etchings, sculptures and paintings, often with Holocaust or death themes.
NO!art Movement
| The art market is nothing but a racket. |
| —Boris Lurie |
In 1960 he founded the NO!art
NO!Art
NO!art is a radical avant-garde anti-art movement started in New York in 1959. Its founders sought to deliver a shock to the complacent consumerist society around them....
movement together with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, out of a sense of disillusionment with the contemporary art scene. The goal was to have art address the disconcerting truths: racism, imperialism, sexim, colonialism, depravity. The movement favors "totally unabashed self-expression leading to social action" and is opposed to the worldwide capitalist "investment art market", to pop-art that celebrates consumerism
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
and to decorative "salon art" such as abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. Lurie's art and the NO!Art movement were largely ignored by the establishment, and in 1970 Lurie wrote his critique "MOMA
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
as Manipulator." One of the movement's earliest champions was the Italian art dealer, Arturo Schwarz
Arturo Schwarz
Arturo Umberto Samuele Schwarz son of a German father and an Italian mother, is an Italian scholar, art historian, poet, writer, lecturer, art consultant and curator of international art exhibitions...
.
Pieces by Lurie are now contained in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
(Washington, D.C.) and the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
(MOMA; NYC). In 2001, the NO!Art movement was subject of a retrospective at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
, the University of Nebraska and at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
(NYC).
In 2002, Amikam Goldman completed a documentary on Boris Lurie entitled No!Art Man, which was premiered at the Anthology Film Archives with Mr. Lurie present.
Lurie's art has found more resonance in Germany than in the United States. Germany saw two large exhibitions of his work in 1995 and 2004. A documentary, Shoah and Pin-Ups: The NO!-Artist Boris Lurie, was shown on German TV in 2007.
On January 7th, 2008, Lurie died from kidney failure, days after having suffered a stroke. At age 83, he was the last surviving founder of the NO!Art movement.
Since 1999 the NO!Art
NO!Art
NO!art is a radical avant-garde anti-art movement started in New York in 1959. Its founders sought to deliver a shock to the complacent consumerist society around them....
Movement is led by Dietmar Kirves (headquarters Berlin), and Clayton Patterson
Clayton Patterson
Clayton Patterson is a Canadian-born artist, photographer, videographer, and folk historian. Since moving to New York City in 1979, his work has focused almost exclusively on documenting the art, life and times of the Lower East Side in Manhattan.-Early life:Before moving to New York City in...
(headquarters New York).
Members are Rocco Armento, Isser Aronovici (t), Enrico Baj
Enrico Baj
Enrico Baj was an Italian artist and writer on art. Many of his works show an obsession with nuclear war. He created prints, sculptures but especially collage. He was close to the surrealist and dada movements, and was later associatied with CoBrA. As an author he has been described as a leading...
(t), Paolo Baratella, Herb Brown
Herb Brown
Herb Brown is an American basketball coach. He is the former head coach of the Detroit Pistons . Brown was named head coach of the NBA's Detroit Pistons during the 1975-76 NBA season, replacing Ray Scott, who'd gone 17-25...
, Ronaldo Brunet, Guenter Brus, Al D'Arcangelo (t), Aleksey Dayen, Frank-Kirk Ehm-Marks, Erro (Ferro), Klaus Fabricius, Charles Gatewood, Paul Georges (t), Jochen Gerz, Dorothie Gillespie, Esther Morgenstern Gilman (t), Amikam Goldman, Leon Golub (t), Blalla W. Hallmann (t), Harry Hass, Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
(t), Kommissar Hjuler
Kommissar Hjuler
Kommissar Hjuler works as a sound recordist in the field of Noise and Post-industrial music, visual artist and film maker at Flensburg, a town on the German border with Denmark. He often works together with his wife Mama Baer as Kommissar Hjuler und Frau. As self-taught artist he began making...
(Detlev Hjuler) and Mama Baer (Andrea Katharina Ingeborg Hjuler), Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama
is a Japanese artist whose paintings, collages, soft sculptures, performance art and environmental installations all share an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation...
, Konstantin K. Kuzminsky, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Suzanne Long (Harriet Wood), LST, Enzo Mastrangelo, Stu Mead
Stu Mead
Stu Mead is an American painter living in Germany. He is primarily-known for girl art incorporating strong elements of sexual fantasy and taboo themes, including adolescent sexuality and bestiality...
, Peter Meseck, Lil Picard (t), Leonid Pinchevsky, Bernard Rancillac, Francis Salles, Naomi Tereza Salmon, Reinhard Scheibner, Bruno Schleinstein (t), Dominik Stahlberg, Michelle Stuart, Aldo Tambellini, Seth Tobocman, Jean Toche, Toyo Tsuchiya, Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...
(t), Friedrich Wall, Mathilda Wolf, Natalia E. Woytasik, Miron Zownir.
Sources
- Boris Lurie: Uneasy visions, uncomfortable truths. The VillagerThe VillagerThe Villager is a weekly newspaper serving Downtown Manhattan. It was founded in 1933 by Walter and Isabel Bryan. In 2001, 2004 and 2005, The Villager won the Stuart Dorman Award, honoring New York State's best weekly newspaper, in the New York Press Association's Better Newspaper Contest.The...
, Volume 74, Number 42. 23 February 2005 - The artist as provocateur, Jewish Quarterly, Autumn 2005, Number 199. Includes an interview.
- Die Nackten und die Toten. Der SpiegelDer SpiegelDer Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It is one of Europe's largest publications of its kind, with a weekly circulation of more than one million.-Overview:...
, 8 June 2007. - Obituary
- NY Times Obituary
External links
- NO!art website
- BORIS LURIE and NO!art
- Short biography and list of exhibitions
- Shoah and Pin-Ups, the movie
- Selection of documentary No!Art Man, including archival footage and photographs
- Discussion with makers of Lurie documentary