The Art of

163
Although Boris rarely leaves his apartment, he is quite well informed. He is
very knowledgeable about the New York gallery scene, which has shown little
if any interest in him. When I tell him about the Mark Rothko exhibition A
Painter’s Progress, The Year 1949 at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery in Midtown,
which made a deep impression on me, he responds with anecdotes about
gallerists’ business methods. Color Field painting is not his thing. I think the
idea that Abstract Expressionism, with its implicit ban on the figurative,
might have been intended as a response to the horrors of the war and of
the present was completely alien to Lurie.
“Back then, the art scene was only interested in aesthetics and not
political subjects. We were too subjective and too political, as well.” 04
In one episode of the television series Mad Men, the employees of the Sterling
Cooper advertising agency sneak into their boss’s office to look at the
artwork he has just acquired. They discuss whether the red bands of color
mean anything, and, if so, what. In view of the increase in value, with his decision
to buy a Mark Rothko painting Bert Cooper is completely correct, but
truly up-to-date he was not. In 1962, the year in which the episode is set,
Abstract Expressionism’s heyday was already over. I am amused by the idea
that Cooper might also have chosen Lurie’s Lolita | see image p. 21.
With their practice of Social Realism, the artists of the March Group—Sam
Goodman, Stanley Fisher, and Boris Lurie—pushed the re-objectification of
art and therefore acted unintentionally, but also unnoticed, as a link between
Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, whose good-natured optimism
they rejected as being too affirmative.
04
BORIS LURIE
in: SHOAH and PIN-
UPS—The NO!-Artist
Boris Lurie, a documentary
by Reinhild
Dettmer-Finke in
collaboration with
Matthias Reichelt
(Germany 2006), time
code 00:47:38.
05
Ibid., time code
00:50:55.
“We were competitors of Pop art. And Pop art was a powerful organization.
American, chauvinist. The Pop artists actually thought America
was really great, and a can of soup is wonderful, and a supermarket is
wonderful. We took a critical attitude. That was the opposite.” 05
But it was particularly their excitement about the present time that prompted
the Pop artists to also be cutting edge with respect to formal aesthetics,
hence making their NO!art colleagues’ recourse to the collage and assemblage
techniques of the interwar period seem somewhat traditional.
“I call it, of course we attempted to do something new . . . . Let’s say
it’s a combination of extreme self-expressionism and social political
ideas with an influence of DADA also. But it was mainly Expressionist.”
06
06
BORIS LURIE
in: Estera Milman,
NO!art and the Aesthetics
of Doom. Boris
Lurie, Estera Milman,
One-on-One, part II
(New York 2000/11),
time code 00:16:14.
A Failed Portrait