Inaugurating its new exhibition space at the Studio House, 239 East 77th Street, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation will present "Boris Lurie, The 1940s, Paintings and Drawings."
Ninety-three drawings and paintings will be installed, comprising Lurie's documentation and recollection of his experiences in concentration camps of Nazi Germany at the end of the war. Created from mid 1945 though late 1946, the work is a chronology of Boris's time there when he worked for the Allied occupying army and saw survivors living in Displaced Persons Camps that still resembled the likenesses of the former Nazis' death camps.
In 1945 Lurie was twenty-one years old and had no formal training in art, beyond the grade school level. Remarkably, he was able to create visually powerful depictions of prisoners marching out of enormous labor barns, Allied soldiers overseeing DP inmates and tending to management duties, survivors still dressed in stripped uniforms as they try to put themselves and their lives back together, as well as unnamed portraits and emaciated women, nude and sometimes with shaved heads.
Throughout all of this work there is the presence of fierce raw talent. Lurieʼs violently strong, graphic line quality is confident and assured, with a tense nervous energy that reminds us of El Greco, who Boris admired. We also see, in nascent form, subjects Lurie will explore throughout his career: dancing figures, emotional figurative compositions, and nude women, an obsessive theme that will reemerge in his shocking work of the '50s and '60s. There is a grim look to this work that provides forceful visual credibility to the assessment of Earl G. Harrison, Truman's envoy to the DP camps, when he said: "We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we don't exterminate them."
Boris Lurie Art Foundation is dedicated to reflect the life, work and aspirations of the Founder and to preserve and promote the NO! ART movement with its focus on the social visionary in art and culture.