Boris Lurie

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Boris Lurie (born July 18, 1924 in Leningrad , Soviet Union , † January 7, 2008 in New York City , New York State , USA ) was an American visual artist and author.

Life

Boris Lurie was born in Leningrad in 1924 to a secular Jewish family. Just one year after his birth, his family left the former Soviet Union to settle in Riga , Latvia . Lurie grew up in Riga with his younger sister Jeanna. In 1940 Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union.

1941 to 1945: four years in concentration camps

After Germany declared war on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and German troops marched into Riga on July 1, 1941, the systematic persecution and murder of the Jewish population began. At the mercy and violence of the German occupiers and local collaborators, Lurie's family was forced to resettle in the Riga ghetto formed on July 21, 1941 in the Moscow suburb of Riga . When the ghetto was "cleared" at the end of November 1941 to make room for Jews to be deported from Germany, Lurie witnessed the so-called "Great Actions", which took place on November 30 and December 8, 1941, around 28,000 Jewish men , Women and children were killed in the nearby forest of Rumbula . Among the murdered were Lurie's mother, his grandmother, his younger sister Jeanna and his classmate and great childhood sweetheart Lyuba Treskunova. At this point in time Lurie and his father Ilya were among the “capable of work” of the work details who were held captive in the so-called “Small Ghetto” (a separate part of the “Great Ghetto”) and were (still) spared for the time being. Father and son survived the mass murder. Both were deported from one concentration camp to the next between 1941 and 1945: Riga-Kaiserwald , Salaspils (also: Kurtenhof camp), Lenta , a branch of the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp and the workshop of the security police and the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD), in the Luxury goods for the higher SS officers were produced, Stutthof , finally to the Buchenwald concentration camp (Buchenwald satellite camp Polte-Werke ).

In April 1945 Boris Lurie and his father were liberated by the arrival of American troops in Magdeburg . As he spoke English, Boris Lurie worked briefly for the American intelligence service Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), a forerunner of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), as an interpreter during interrogations of Nazi suspects, then in an American prisoner of war camp in Babenhausen .

Emigration to the USA and work as an artist

In June 1946 Boris Lurie emigrated with his father to the USA in New York . Lurie and his friend Rocco Armentosin moved into an apartment on Columbia Street in the Lower East Side and began working as an artist. In 1959 he was one of the co-founders of the New York NO! Art movement, an artist formation that emerged in the late 1950s as an alternative to Abstract Expressionism and the emerging Pop Art .

Lurie's unaesthetic , provocative-extreme collages , sculptures and literary works, in which he deliberately (ostensibly) contradicting one another, were created against the background of the atrocities he had personally experienced. In a letter to the art historian Thomas Baer Hess, editor of the journal Art news , Boris Lurie wrote in 1962: "I acquired the basics of my artistic education in concentration camps like Buchenwald ." Unperturbed, the Holocaust survivor remembered the war victims and the extermination of the Jews, put them in a current everyday context of advertising , pornography and politics, paired images of the Nazi atrocities, the gassed with pornographic elements of consumer society, horror and lust.

His works are at the same time a protest against the predominant art movements that seem too shallow, too superficial, too “remote”, against the established art business, against the art trade that is exclusively oriented towards profit. According to Lurie's understanding, art could not be an escape from reality, it was not allowed to escape, but had to deal with “the issues of real life”, to show the horrors of civilization - such as war and violence, oppression and colonialism , racism and sexism .

Exhibitions

Fonts

  • (with Seymour Krim): No! art. Pin-ups, excrement, protest, jew art . Edition Hundertmark, Berlin and Cologne 1988.
  • (with Dietmar Kirves): Written - Poetic. About the exhibition at the Weimar-Buchenwald Memorial. Supplemented with works by his friends from the current NO! Art movement . Published by Volkhard Knigge on behalf of the Weimar-Buchenwald Memorial. Eckhart Holzboog publishing house, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2003. ISBN 3-9807794-0-8 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Boris Lurie, Seymour Krim (ed.): No! art. Pin-ups, excrement, protest, jew art . Edition Hundertmark, Berlin and Cologne 1988, pp. 74–75.
  2. ↑ Boris Lurie Pay . Museo Vostell Malpartida
  3. ^ Boris Lurie Art Foundation
  4. ↑ Website for the exhibition “KZ - Kampf - Kunst. NO! Art “. Retrieved September 2, 2014 .
  5. ↑ Die Rache des Wutkünstlers in FAZ from April 28, 2016, p. 14.
  6. ↑ Boris Lurie, Anti-Pop . New Museum Nuremberg
personal data
SURNAME Lurie, Boris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American visual artist and author
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Leningrad
DATE OF DEATH January 7, 2008
Place of death New York City