Boris Lurie

Boris Lurie (July 18, 1924 – January 7, 2008) was an American artist and writer. He co-founded the NO!Art movement which calls for socially and politically involved art that would resist and combat the forces of the market. His controversial work, often related to the Holocaust, has frequently irritated critics and curators.

Though he lived as a penniless artist, Lurie amassed $80 million by buying penny stocks and real estate which was used on August 8, 2009, to create the Boris Lurie Art Foundation.

Early life Lurie was born in Leningrad into a Jewish family and grew up in Riga. From 1941 to 1945 he was imprisoned in the Riga Ghetto, then the Lenta Arbeitslager, and then three separate concentration camps, including Salaspils, Stutthof, and the Buchenwald satellite camp at the Magdeburg Polte-Werke; his mother, grandmother and sister were murdered by the Nazis in the Rumbula massacre.

In 1946 he immigrated to New York and began his career as an artist. For a short time he attended the Art Students' League, where he studied with George Grosz and produced figurative work inspired by his wartime memories and of his life in New York, especially the dance halls around 14th Street. One of his best-known and most controversial works is "Railroad Collage" (1959), a collage juxtaposing a pin-up model undressing over the top of a wagon piled high with bodies of former prisoners in the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. Over the course of his life, he produced thousands of drawings, etchings, paintings, collages, assemblages, and objects, often with pornographic or Holocaust-related imagery, as well as the novel House of Anita (released in a 2016 edition with texts and commentary by Terence Sellers), a large memoir entitled "In Riga" (published in 2019), and scores of poetry, collected in the volume Geschriebigtes - Gedichtigtes: NO!art in Buchenwald (2003)

NO!art Movement

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–Lincoln 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 7, 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. He is buried in Hof Hacarmel cemetery in Haifa, Israel.

Since 1999, the NO!Art Movement has been led by Dietmar Kirves in its Berlin headquarters, and Clayton Patterson in its New York headquarters. After the loss of Dietmar Kirves, the headquarters Berlin is represented by LST (Lars Schubert) in Sitges, Spain.