Boris Lurie

Boris Lurie
Born	July 18, 1924 Leningrad, Soviet Union
Died	January 7, 2008 New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Artist

Boris Lurie (July 18, 1924 – January 7, 2008) 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 artist, Lurie amassed $80 million by buying penny stocks and real estate which was used by his main collectors on August 8, 2009, to create the Boris Lurie Art Foundation.

Lurie was born in Leningrad 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, sexism, 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, by part for Boris Lurie abominated established artists like Andy Warhol, and in 1970 Lurie wrote his critique "MOMA as Manipulator." One of the movement's earliest champions was the Italian art dealer, Arturo Schwarz.

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