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