The Art of

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While most survivors of the National Socialists’ mass extermination no longer
felt comfortable in the world of those who had been spared and were
therefore eager to forget the time in the ghettos and camps, Boris Lurie,
who was born in Leningrad in 1924 and grew up in Riga, Latvia, never stopped
processing his persecution and detention artistically and politically. The obsessive
passion with which Boris Lurie hurled his views on art and politics at
society and above all the art world reinforced his role as a social outsider.
While looking for a title for our retrospective, we looked in his texts and
the texts of his friends and opponents for suitable ideas, for key words reflecting
Lurie’s struggle against a society that, in the first decades after the
war, was not able or willing to comprehend what had befallen the victims of
the Holocaust. We realized that the terms that he used have today been
usurped by advertising and product campaigns and lead nowhere. The language
of resistance from the middle of the last century has lost its punch
and, to the ears of younger generations, sounds like text modules for a diffuse
pathos of consternation. However, the language of Boris Lurie’s art has
lost nothing of its provocative power and aesthetic radicalism. Lurie’s paintings,
assemblages, sculptures, and texts still impressively testify today to
the perplexing and fascinating power of an art that can only be classified
with difficulty within the art-historical canon.
Works by artists who were born after the war and reflect the inconceivable
and seemingly impossible mass murder organized by technocrats oftentimes
transcend conventional boundaries of artistic forms of expression. By contrast,
artists who processed their own personal experience aesthetically often remained
closer to the events in their art or interpreted the empirical reality using
symbolic stylistic elements. Contemporary witnesses such as Leo Haas and
Bedrich Fritta left behind a body of artistic work about the hopeless living conditions
in the Theresienstadt ghetto. After the end of the war, Samuel Bak, who
began drawing at the age of nine in the Vilnius ghetto, recorded his experience
of persecution in paintings that, in the manner of the Old Masters, symbolically
paraphrase the world destroyed by the Holocaust. Felix Nussbaum created his
visions of life-threatening persecution in a hiding place in Brussels, before being
deported and then murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Józef Szajna, the Polish
set designer, author, painter, and graphic artist who survived Auschwitz and
Buchenwald, built three-dimensional silhouettes that stand allegorically for the
concentration camp prisoners who were reduced to numbers and whose individuality
was destroyed before they were killed. Few artists who have taken up
the theme of mass extermination long after the event itself have resorted to
such drastic means as the Spanish action artist Santiago Sierra, who, in 2006, in
what was identified as an art project, had the exhaust fumes of six cars piped
into the Stommeln Synagogue in order to avoid trivializing representations of
piles of corpses and creatures oppressed by hunger and humiliation.
CILLY KUGELMANN