Boris Lurie and his Battle Cry of NO!

published in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of Aufbau magazine

"No" as an Answer

Boris Lurie survived the Riga ghetto and four German concentration camps. These experiences became the basis of a radical artistic examination of consumer culture and the art market. 

by Miles Ladin

There is a well-known story about the first-time John Lennon met Yoko Ono. In the fall of 1966, Ono had an exhibition at the Indica gallery in London titled, Unfinished Paintings and Objects. Lennon, entered the gallery and encountered a ladder leading up to a piece of paper stuck to the ceiling. When the Beatle walked up the ladder to read the piece of paper he was greeted by the word YES. The joyful optimism expressed through the work titled Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting, was enough to spark intense curiosity about its maker, Ono. The rest is history and Lennon often recounted this important moment.  In a 1971 Rolling Stoneinterview, Lennon explained “I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn't say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something, it said ‘yes.'”

At the same time in New York City, another artist by the name of Boris Lurie not only relished the word “no” but in fact used it as a de facto “fuck you” by adding an exclamation point and extending the English lexicon to include NO! For Lurie, NO! was his visual imperative, his life view, and from 1959 the name of the art movement he founded with fellow artists Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. Although one could easily discount the word no, as John Lennon had, as being a word of cynicism and nihilism, for Lurie it became a radical battle cry to save humanity from itself as well as an artistic call to action.

The conceptual art of Yoko Ono stands in stark contrast to that of the lesser known Boris Lurie. Her body of work is often spoken about in relation to Zen Buddhism.  She lived through the WWII bombing of Tokyo and along with her late husband John Lennon is a fierce advocate for a simplistic (if appealing) dream of world peace.  Boris Lurie also survived WWII but his life experience and the message he chose to channel through his art was radically different. 

Born in 1924 to a Jewish family in Leningrad, Lurie was interned in four different concentration camps during WWII. By the time the Allies liberated him in 1945 from a Buchenwald satellite camp, his mother, grandmother, sister, and childhood sweetheart had all been shot at the Rumbula Massacre. In 1946, Lurie emigrated with his father from Germany to New York City where from memory he documented the horror of his wartime experience into powerful drawings and paintings. 

The memory works of war were soon joined by dedicated images of women that moved towards a more modernist aesthetic. Now in his early 20s and experiencing the freedom of New York City, Lurie was able to explore his feelings towards women and sexuality outside of the camps. At the same time, he was still grieving over the female members of his family who were murdered.  This complex association with the female gender eventually produced pictures where the female body is segmented, creating works that contain both beauty and horror. It is with these pictures developed in the mid-1950s that Lurie starts to find his unique voice. 

While dedicating himself to his art, Lurie socialized with other artists and became aware of the growing market value towards new art, specifically abstract expressionism. In 1958, with Jasper Johns’ solo exhibition at the trendy new Leo Castelli gallery, pop art became a hot commodity that celebrated popular culture with an ironic joie de vivre sensibility.  Lurie, who was still reeling from his war time experience, found these incarnations of new art to be not only hollow but an insult towards the reality that he and other European Jews had recently endured.  

His indignation towards the art world ignited his growing disgust towards American consumerism and the trappings of post-war capitalism. This was the catalyst for both a more critical approach in Lurie’s art as well as the anti-establishment art movement of which he was a co-founder. The NO! art moment developed from a group of like-minded artists who exhibited at the cooperative March Gallery located on New York’s 10^thstreet. After Theodor Adorno’s famous 1949 pronouncement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” these artists decided to make a commitment to an art that confronted the atrocities of the recent past rather than ignoring them.  They positioned themselves against the more palatable art movements of the day, which they considered decadent and consciously stayed outside the prevailing art world. 

Lurie’s creative response to pop art was to turn that idiom on its head. The artist co-opted pop art and created paintings using the motif of magazine pin-up girls. Rather than a celebration of sexuality, these works critiqued the commodification of sex and were often emblazoned with the word NO.  In the early 1960s, Lurie extended this body of work by combining the pin-ups with images portraying victims of concentration camps after the liberation.  Both dead and alive, the juxtaposition between the victims of genocide and the objectified subjects of pornography are extremely jarring.  

Other works that are equally confrontational include, Immigrant’s NO Suitcase (Anti-Pop), 1963. Painted on a suitcase typical of those clutched by Jews forced from the ghettos and onto cattle cars by the Nazis, Lurie has transformed this iconic object with color, slogans, pinups, and a swastika. The viewer is made to engage with these visual signifiers on various levels at a time when the culture at large was trying to forget the six million dead. Lurie’s work can still be difficult to contemporary viewers. In 2009 at the ArtHamptons fair another work combining pin-ups with a swastika titled Lumumba is Dead (Adieu Amérique)from 1961garnered a complaint and was ultimately censored from the exhibition.

Incredibly, Lurie’s powerful oeuvre was not limited to the visual arts. The artist wrote a novel, the House of Anita, that was never published in his lifetime. The book is semi-autobiographical and deals with the traumas that Lurie suffered during WWII. As a metaphor for man’s degradation towards man, the novel integrates sexual sadomasochism into the disturbing narrative. The novel is available in English, Russian, and will soon be printed in German. Lurie’s memoir of his early days in Riga is also available but awaits the publication of two additional volumes of his later memoirs. There are also essays and poems that faithfully extend his anti-establishment NO! beyond the visual. 

Throughout their period of active production, both Lurie and the NO! art movement willfully put themselves outside of the art world and away from the commodification of art. Lurie was brazen in his disdain to the extent that in 1970 published an indictment of the famed ivory tower of modern art titled MoMA as Manipulator.  As an artist, myself, it is easy to understand Lurie’s frustration. From its inception, the Museum of Modern Art was myopic and white male dominated in regards to its power structure and its collection. The museum has just reopened after a major renovation and is finally making an admirable commitment towards diversity within their permanent collection displays.  As much as the established canon of modern art can be viewed as dogma the latest push for political correctness in and outside of MoMA, certainly risks its own curatorial pitfalls. Still as Lurie must have known, an artist who bites the hand that feeds, puts the long-term viability of their work at risk.

Luckily for Lurie, he and his father were always able to attract wealth starting in Latvia then after the liberation in Germany and finally in New York City.  By the time of his death in 2008, Lurie managed to amass a fortune in real estate and other investments. With little reputation towards his large artistic output, a self-sustaining foundation was formed to promote his unique vision.  Since the foundation’s inception, Lurie’s work has been ambitiously exhibited at international venues including in Cuba, Israel, Italy, Germany, Latvia, Poland, and the US.  

Besides the promotion of Lurie’s work and the dissemination of his message, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation has also lent support to exhibitions focused on the NO! Art movement whose more than a dozen participants included Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, and Aldo Tambellini. The foundation is also involved with charitable initiatives that include providing aid to Israeli soldiers and holocaust victims in need of wheelchairs and medical rehabilitation. The foundation has also funded two art libraries in Israel at the Dada Janco Museum and at the Tel Aviv Museum. These new repositories of learning will ensure that the message of Lurie and NO! Art will be remembered by future generations. 

Currently on view at Moscow’s Museum of Modern Art is a retrospective for the very well established Yoko Ono. This exhibition features her famous 1966 Ceiling Painting/Yes Paintingthat perhaps was the original catalyst for the Lennon/Ono peacenik lyric “all we are saying is give peace a chance”.   At the same time and around the corner at the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Boris Lurie’s battle cry of NO! will be viewed by an audience mostly unfamiliar with the under-recognized artist. In his retrospective, ALTERED MAN: The Art of Boris Lurie, the people of Ukraine will get the opportunity to consider an important artist who loudly confronted the fascism, hypocrisy, and horror that he and many others experienced in the 20^thcentury. 

Boris Lurie current exhibitions:

November 15 – December 15, Altered Man: The Art of Boris Lurie, Odessa Fine Arts Museum, Odessa, Ukraine

January 23 - April 26, 2020. REDISCOVERING BORIS LURIE (1924–2008): The Artist who dared to say ‘No!’ , Center for Contemporary Political Art, Washington DC

June 25 - October 14, 2020,Boris Lurie Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile

(collaborating with the archives of the Museo de la Memoria, Santiago, Chile)

July 7 - Sept. 13, 2020, Boris Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, Russia 

September 3, 2020 - October 29, 2020, Boris Lurie Retrospective, MUSEO BORGES, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Yoko Ono current exhibitions:

until November 24^thYoko Ono: The Sky is Always Clear, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art 

until December 31, YOKO ONO: INTERVENTIONS/2 at The Georgian House Museum, part of The Bristol Museum group