The Art of

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way power is erotically charged, as well as how nakedness destabilizes
power. Finally, they are a mother, a sister or a lover, a corpse.
Boris Lurie was one of very few visual artists that were survivors of the
Nazi concentration camps. The youngest of three children, he was 17
when the Germans occupied Riga (Latvia) in 1941, splitting his well-established
Russian family apart. His mother, sister, and grandmother, as well
as his boyhood lover, were murdered in one of the mass killings outside
Riga, executed in pursuit of the Final Solution. He and his father then began
an odyssey that lasted four years, surviving together through chance
and resourcefulness three different concentration camps from Riga (Kaiserwald,
Lenta) through Stutthof (near Gdansk) and finally a sub-camp of
Buchenwald near Magdeburg, which was liberated in April 1945. Soon after
the war ended, they both emigrated to New York, where Boris Lurie’s
older sister lived. His father gradually improved his financial position by
dealing in real estate.
Soon after arriving in New York in 1946, Lurie started to produce a group
of works titled Dismembered Women | see images pp. 25–31, of which the last
painting dates from 1956. They are painted in profoundly different styles,
but all show female figures whose bodies have undergone deformation–
their skin seems like a membrane rendering organs inside out. These figures
are isolated twice. They are framed once by the borders of the canvas,
then again by geometric planes, recalling cartoons or advertisements.
Those early paintings correspond with various modern figurations of
human bodies from Cubism through German Expressionism. Such modernist
abstractions cannot be dissociated from the experience of modern
war and the physical fragmentation of the body. Soldiers in the
ditches during the World War I, for example, or Londoners taking shelter
in the Underground tunnels during the bombings of World War II were
formative experiences that found expression in Henry Moore’s sculptural
abstractions. Similarly, Giacometti’s elongated frail sculptures of men
stem from existentialist ideas of solitude and alienation, their uneven
surfaces suggesting flesh that is being eaten away. Yet the configuration
of bodies in the work of Lurie—who later abandoned painterly figuration
altogether and turned to collages of found photographic images—arises
not only from the mass destruction of two world wars. It is informed
by the erosion of death itself in the context of Auschwitz—where instead
of people dying, corpses were produced.
In Dismembered Women the figures have undergone a form of massive,
general violence that has left their bodies dehumanized and disintegrated.
Their organs are cut and scattered and function autonomously,
like the amputated tail of a reptile still spasming after being truncated
from the living body.
TAL STERNGAST