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reprinted an enlarged photograph featuring an inmate after his liberation
from the “small camp,” which was set up in 1942, a zone of particular misery
and death in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Happening by Adolf Hitler
is the sarcastic, only superficially cynical title with which the artist Lurie
“acknowledges” and at the same time unmasks his “colleague” Hitler, the
failed but later so dreadfully successful aspiring artist in Vienna. Lurie now
equates art that takes seriously the experience of barbarism nesting within
culture with outcry and confrontation. From this point onward, he is no
longer concerned with mobilizing all his efforts to transfer the recognized
artistic means ennobled by tradition and custom to the horrifying subject
of camp reality. To ennoble the dead in this way meant making their death
beautiful, meant premature consolation. Quite on the contrary: now Lurie
saw art as a prudent and deliberate reduction of traditional means as well as
their entanglement with visual fragments, clippings from the storehouse of
the mass-cultural representation of National Socialism and its crimes, mostly
newspaper photos.
We would overlook Lurie’s aesthetic intentions and the autonomous rules
of artistic reflection if we sought to trace the radical change in Lurie’s work
outlined above to the experience of National Socialist camps alone, or even
to understand it as an inevitable consequence of his traumatization linked
to that experience. In the late forties, early fifties, Lurie could also have
made a different choice with respect to his artistic future. Because beginning
in 1947, he also began producing in part large-format, abstract works
that are formally reminiscent of Fernand Léger, sometimes of Matisse as
well. As the New York Times wrote in this context on May 15, 1952: “The current
show of paintings at the Hotel Barbizon Plaza contains a wide variety of
work, all by one artist, Boris Lurie. His style is totally abstract though tempered
at moments with visual reminiscence, and he will jump from a small
water-color of the slow stain variety to a huge canvas that must be 15 by 10
feet and is filled with capering geometrical shapes. Color is restricted to a
small number of pure tones emphasizing their strong contrasts, and forms
are everywhere decisive.”
The photo accompanying the article shows twenty-eight-year-old Lurie in a
smart jacket and intellectual pose in front of Composition, 1952, a “high point
of interest.” There would be no more to say about this image from 1952 if it
did not show Lurie corresponding to the very role model that he decisively
refused to follow in public only a short time later: that is, the modern,
avant-garde, intellectual artist who knows so well how to combine individualism
with social and commercial success. From Lurie’s perspective, the names
Jasper Johns or Jackson Pollock could be taken as emblematic of this type.
If one examines texts by Boris Lurie, both those that are autobiographical
as well as texts in which he reflects on art and society, for evidence of what
“Art really exists, no kidding.”