The Art of

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camp and the Stutthof and Buchenwald concentration camps. In 1945, Lurie,
prisoner number 95966, was liberated by American troops in a satellite
camp of Buchenwald in Magdeburg. In 1946, he and his father emigrated to
the United States. From then on, New York was the topographical and social
center of his life. It was there that he produced his first pictures after the
war: on the one hand, sketches not intended for the public in which he assured
himself of the facts of his story of persecution, the reality of his
memories: visual notations on the credibility of the incredible. On the other
hand, he attempted to lend duration and expression to the experience of
the concentration camp by employing the means of classic oil painting.
Back from Work—Prison Entrance, 1946/47 | see image p. 7 features a stream
of people reduced to their creatureliness, dissolving into distortion; in a
deep black setting, they are drawn as if by flames through a camp gate,
which is simultaneously the opening into a cremation furnace. In this picture
the world has ceased to exist. Being engulfed by force is the only reality.
Entrance | see image p.13 dates from the same period and is an epitaph.
Two Muslims—Muselmänner, as such prisoners were known in the language
of the camps—reduced to skeletons, any spark of life extinguished from
them, gray in gray, keep sad and melancholy watch in front of the entrance
to a room with a flaming cremation furnace. Their faces emaciated but
spiritual, bones sharp beneath their skin, ribs like sticks standing out so
clearly they can be counted, claw-like hands, buckets on their heads, clunky
wooden shoes on their feet, shouldering broom-like fronds, they stand
there on death watch like two grotesque angels. It is a real-historical allegory
and a memory and acknowledgment of Soviet prisoners of war actually
humiliated in this way, as Boris Lurie wrote to me in 2002.
No God, no teleology of history that guarantees a good ending despite
everything; not men and devils but men and men: one group persecuted,
and the other persecutors and murderers. Loneliness, absence, loss, and a
death that does not point beyond itself because the mass murder based on
racist biology, the Shoah, cannot be tied back into our reference systems of
political, religious, or national martyrdom. Following this naked, sheer death,
which would have been his own and was that of his mother, his sister, and
his first love, Lurie’s Entrance is an attempt at taking leave and acknowledgment
without self-deception, and premature, that is, pre-established solace
in the sense suggested above; without self-deception and premature solace—not
for him, not for us, not for anyone.
It is only logical that after this—also in terms of manual skill—high-quality
mobilization of the possibilities of the panel painting and oil painting, from
nineteenth-century tone-in-tone painting to the Surrealism of the twentieth
century, Lurie radicalized his means of expression. In 1947 he produced
the work List, tantamount to a ready-made of the radically evil. In 1962 he
VOLKHARD KNIGGE