Boris Lurie, Holocaust Survivor, Artist, and the "No!Art" Movement

NOTE: I started this blog a few months ago, but it resonates now more than ever, when the world is screaming NO! to Putin's unprovoked war of total destruction in Ukraine, NO! to the real possibility of a World War III in the 21st century. 

Boris Lurie, Holocaust survivor, artist, poet, writer, co-founder of the NO!Art movement

                in New York City, post-WWII, using art to educate & protest man's inhumanity to man.  

Lurie, "Immigrant Suitcase."

He was only 16 years old in December 1941 when the Nazis captured him, branded and demeaned him, and sent him to Buchenwald. It was the end of the age of innocence.

Boris Lurie was born in Leningrad, Russia (now St. Petersburg) and raised in Riga, Latvia, where his father had moved the family when Boris was a young boy in order to be freer to explore new opportunities.

.. 

Boris' youth was taken from him and tragically, beyond words, so were the lives of his mother, sister, grandmother, and his teenaged girlfriend. At the end of December 1941, Boris' family was herded into a ravine in the Rumbula forest on the outskirts of Riga and shot to death. It was the place where Boris grew up, went to school, found his first love. It was the time when life as he knew it ended. 

The Rumbula massacre is considered one of the most horrific crimes of the Nazi era, its echoes heard to this day. It repeated exactly the massacre at Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine, three months earlier, when Nazis herded the Jewish residents of Kyiv into a ravine and shot them dead. The SS soldiers stood around the top rim of the ravine, shooting bullets down into the innocent victims trapped below. I thought I heard the cries of the victims as I stood on that rim with fellow Peace Corps Volunteers during a walking tour of Kyiv. 

"The most difficult ingredient in all art is the
hardest to learn. It is courage." Boris Lurie

"Dance Hall Yellow,1955, Lurie's trauma
 comes out of the shadows into the light. 

At Rumbula, 38,000 Jewish residents of Riga were shot dead in cold blood: Nazi soldiers standing at the top of the ravine, like they did at Babi Yar, shooting bullets into the bodies of the people trapped below, falling in horror on top of each other, women, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, friends, doctors, lawyers, teachers, shop-keepers. And this over a two-day period, carrying out Hitler's "final solution," the genocide of the Jews.

I came across Boris Lurie when I was writing about the Fritz Ascher Society and Ascher's art. His story, the stories of the Holocaust, continue to shock.  

And to think that such ugly authoritarianism, fascism, Nazism, haunt us to this very day, warning us of the past, warning us to be diligent, to remember. How can we stand silent in the face of rampant, vicious anti-semitism that gave us Hitler and the Holocaust, that is on the rise right here at home? 

And now, today, I can't help but ask this: How can one man in a position of power, Vladimir Putin, decide to viciously attack a peaceful country that was no threat to Russia. None whatsoever.  An unprovoked war to annihilate Ukraine's cities, towns and villages, and murder its people. To attack not military targets, but civilian targets, deliberately, intentionally, bombing homes, neighborhoods, apartment buildings, hospitals, schools?

How can we be witnessing another European genocidal war in the 21st century? I wake up in the middle of the night and cry out "No.

N-o-o-o-o-o-o. It can't be happening. It has to stop."  

This was the anguished cry of Boris Lurie after he came to  America in 1946, the pain of his experiences still raw. He came to live free and to paint, to start a new life in New York City. But he could not forget. He found himself fighting against the post-War indifference of friends, of contemporary artists like Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Johns. America wanted to forget the war and move on. This mood, a national mood, was reflected in the two most popular art movements of the era, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. 

In the camps.

But Boris had a hard time moving on, He was driven to say "NO" to the Holocaust of his youth, to the horror, the losses, the struggle to survive in the death camps. He was driven to tell about it.

In 1959, he, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, also artists and writers, founded the NO!Art movement. Its goal was to bring back into art the subjects of real life. It thus stood in opposition to abstract and pop art. I had never heard of NO!Art, but it seems altogether too timely to ignore.

In his art and also in his poetry and writings, including a memoir, Boris Lurie pushed the reality of man's inhumanity to man to the limit. It didn't make the New York art world comfortable. It doesn't make me comfortable. 

Railroad Collage, 1966.  A pin-up in front of a railroad car filled with dead Jewish victims, perhaps his own family among them. This is considered Lurie's most famous work. Besides showing us the horrors of the Holocaust, reviewers note that it brings together for the first time American consumerism and the brutality of the Holocaust and in a way that caused a furor in the art world. 

Lurie died in 2008 in New York City, after some sixty years of painting, writing, pushing against indifference to the Holocaust and human suffering, exhibiting his work, educating his audiences about the pain and loss of war. He is buried in Hof Hacarmel cemetery in Haifa, Israel. He found peace at last.  

Before his death and with the support of friends, he established the Boris Lurie Art Foundation. Its mission was "preserving and promoting the social vision of the NO!Art group in art and culture."  It's still going today, in Clifton, NJ, and exhibitions of Lurie's work are ongoing at various museums and galleries around the world.  

As we witness Putin's War in Ukraine, on TV, in our living rooms, on social media, we can remember Boris Lurie's obsession, his trauma and his fury. Sad to say, when we thought the Holocaust and World War II were tragedies of the past, we find them painfully alive in the present. We need a "NO!Art" movement today. 

SOURCES/NOTES:

1. https://borislurieart.org/about-boris-lurie

2. https://hyperallergic.com/707579/boris-luries-search-for-historical-truth-in-trauma/ 

3.  https://www.huffpost.com/entry/revolution-in-the-avanteg_b_868378, fascinating article by Lisa Streitfeld on women in Boris Lurie's art and in his notes. 

4. https://borislurieart.org/ Boris Lurie foundation still going strong in Clifton, NJ, educating about  and showing his paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures. "A Holocaust survivor who emigrated to New York in 1946, Boris Lurie was active in the post-war New York avant-garde scene. Always outspoken and often confrontational, he was never easy with his adopted home, America, or with his place in the art world. The loss of his mother, grandmother, sister, and first love in the massacres perpetrated by the Nazis at  Rumbula near Riga, Latvia in 1941 inflicted a lasting sense of suffering and loss on Lurie, which he attempted to process through his work."

5.  https://borislurieart.org/2021/boris-lurie-nothing-do-try an exhibit at the Jewish Heritage Museum in NYC. 

6. https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2005/01/boris_luries_noart_and_the_hol.html, article by Jan Herman

7.  https://ssuu.com/matt-bluelightstrategies/docs/lurie_catalogue_01.16.20

8.  https://arterritory.com/en/visual_arts/interviews/23488-a_conversation_about_boris_lurie/

9.  https://www.politicsartus.org/events/boris-lurie-exhibit/ 

10. https://kunstaspekte.art/event/boris-lurie-and-wolf-vostell-art-after-auschwitz, a January 2022 exhibit in Germany, "Art After Auschwitz."