The Art of

129
05
BORIS LURIE
“Les Lions Show. Introduction,”
New York:
Edition Hundertmark,
1960. In: Boris Lurie/
Seymour Krim/Armin
Hundertmark, eds.
NO!art. PIN-UPS,
EXCREMENT, PRO-
TEST, JEW-ART,
Berlin/Köln 1988, p. 21.
By the late 1950s, Lurie had abandoned painting (as painting) in favor
of making pictures. From then on, he produced assemblages and collage-paintings,
collating and manipulating images from a variety of
mass-media sources. He began using photographic images of women
from pin-ups and pornographic magazines. These came to form the basis
of his most distinctive work.
Some of these works were first exhibited in 1960 in two solo shows in
New York. In an introduction to one of the shows—Les Lions at the March
Gallery on 10th Street in the Lower East Side—Lurie describes a kind of
monstrous fertility produced by the ever multiplying girlies (girlie magazines
featuring pictures of nude or scantily dressed women) 04 on his imaginary
and real studio walls. It seems his sense of being overwhelmed
leads to revelation: “How could I ever paint all of the girls in one painting?
What was the use of painting? ... I looked at them, I watched them. They
watched me. They grew. I longed for that supreme imaginary moment
when I would crown the queen of them all. But the girls increased and
blossomed. ... And then at last I had to act. ... Onto the canvas they went.
... At last I was getting rid of the uninvited inhabitants, the curse, the confusion
of bodies, my beauties!” 05
The text captured a decisive moment. Surrendering to an uncontrollable
surplus of images in fact conceals or displaces a desire for one, singular
woman, or at least for a clear hierarchy among the multiple women,
something that was made impossible for him both personally as well as
culturally. Indeed, two of the works included in this show, Liberty or Lice
| see image page 90/91 (1950–1960) and Les Lions (1959), show a non-hierarchic
scattering of women among ads for high-heel shoes (that recall
Andy Warhol’s early shoe illustrations from the same time, part of his
work as a commercial illustrator), lamps, and cars partly buried in paint.
Liberty or Lice (ambiguously noted by Lurie as “referring to the inevitable
choice between full liberty and concentration camp lice” 06 ), while hinting
at current political events, also employs an autobiographical vocabulary
that amounts to an exposé for all of Lurie’s works to come: a photograph
of the fence surrounding the ghetto in Riga, a yellow Star of David
at the bottom of the canvas, Lurie’s sister’s name Jeanne, written in
black brush strokes, and the Hebrew word “Madua” (why), repeated several
times. The canvas also features two dates that mark the picture’s
time frame: December 8th, the date he believed his family was murdered,
and April 18th (1945), when the camp in Magdeburg was liberated.
The body of the American pin-up woman in Lurie’s works was on the
one hand whole, uninjured, erotic, fertile, and fresh; on the other it was
being used and abused, objectified. With his use of pin-ups, Lurie began
to draw lines of connection between the remnants of his destroyed past
04
In the late 1960s, Lurie
interviewed de Kooning,
with special
attention to his Women
Series, which had
widely been viewed as
an attack on the
American woman. De
Kooning insisted that
his work was art and
not social commentary.
John Wronoski, „Boris
Lurie: A Life in the
Camps,“ in: Igor
Satanovsky, ed. KZ
– KAMPF – KUNST.
Boris Lurie: NO!Art.
New York: NO!Art
Publishing 2014, p. 286.
06
BORIS LURIE
cited after John
Wronoski, in: KZ-
KAMPF-KUNST,
p. 148.
Shock Treatment: Figures of Women in Boris Lurie’s Work