Boris Lurie Art foundation

120 Brighton Road, Unit 4
Clifton, NJ 07012 USA
info@borislurieart.org
www.borislurieart.org

President

GERTRUDE STEIN

Chairman

ANTHONY WILLIAMS

Senior Adviser

RAFAEL VOSTELL

Collections Manager / Registrar

ELIZABETH MISEO

Assistant Registrar

PATRICK GORA

BORIS LURIE VIRTUAL GALLERY – Open 24/7

Concept & architecture

RAFAEL VOSTELL

Design & 3D

PEP SEGUÍ, SAMUEL GARCÍA

Programming

DAVID FUSTER

Texts

ECKHART J. GILLEN
CECILIA GONZÁLEZ
THOMAS HEYDEN
FRANCISCO JARAUTA
JÜRGEN KAUMKÖTTER
JULIA KISSINA 
CLAUDIA MARQUARDT
IVONNA VEIHERTE
KURT WETTENGL

Narrator

PATRICK GORA 
ANDY VALVUR

lmage research & proof reading

ELIZABETH MISEO

© Video on Gertrude Stein : MOCAK & Boris Lurie Art Foundation

© Video Trailer on Boris Lurie: BERGMANNsART & Boris Lurie Art Foundation

Legal Notice: The design, content , images, texts and videos are the property of the Boris Lurie Art Foundat ion . No part of this gallery may be used in any form in public without written permission of the copyright owner.

© Boris Lurie Art Foundation, 2020

Boris Lurie Art foundation

120 Brighton Road, Unit 4
Clifton, NJ 07012 USA
info@borislurieart.org
www.borislurieart.org

 

BORIS LURIE VIRTUAL GALLERY – Open 24/7

President

GERTRUDE STEIN

Chairman

ANTHONY WILLIAMS

Senior Adviser

RAFAEL VOSTELL

Collections Manager / Registrar

ELIZABETH MISEO

Assistant Registrar

PATRICK GORA

Concept & architecture

RAFAEL VOSTELL

Design & 3D

PEP SEGUÍ, SAMUEL GARCÍA

Programming

DAVID FUSTER

Text

ECKHART J. GILLEN
FRANCISCO JARAUTA
JULIA KISSINA
CLAUDIA MARQUARDT
IVONNA VEIHERTE
KURT WETTENGL

Narrator

PATRICK GORA
ANDY VALVUR

lmage research
& proof reading

ELIZABETH MISEO

© Video on Gertrude Stein : MOCAK & Boris Lurie Art Foundation

© Video Trailer on Boris Lurie: BERGMANNsART & Boris Lurie Art Foundation

Legal Notice: The design, content , images, texts and videos are the property of the Boris Lurie Art Foundat ion . No part of this gallery may be used in any form in public without written permission of the copyright owner.

© Boris Lurie Art Foundation, 2020

Boris Lurie Art foundation

120 Brighton Road, Unit 4
Clifton, NJ 07012 USA
info@borislurieart.org
www.borislurieart.org

President

GERTRUDE STEIN

Chairman

ANTHONY WILLIAMS

Senior Adviser

RAFAEL VOSTELL

Collections Manager / Registrar

ELIZABETH MISEO

Assistant Registrar

PATRICK GORA

BORIS LURIE VIRTUAL GALLERY – Open 24/7

Concept & architecture

RAFAEL VOSTELL

Design & 3D

PEP SEGUÍ, SAMUEL GARCÍA

Programming

DAVID FUSTER

Texts

JOSÉ ANTONIO AGÚNDEZ GARCÍA 
ECKHART J. GILLEN
CECILIA GONZÁLEZ
THOMAS HEYDEN
FRANCISCO JARAUTA
JÜRGEN KAUMKÖTTER
JULIA KISSINA 
MARKO KOSAN
CLAUDIA MARQUARDT
IVONNA VEIHERTE
KURT WETTENGL
and
BORIS LURIE

Narrator

PATRICK GORA 
ANDY VALVUR

lmage research & proof reading

ELIZABETH MISEO

© Video on Gertrude Stein : MOCAK & Boris Lurie Art Foundation

© Video Trailer on Boris Lurie: BERGMANNsART & Boris Lurie Art Foundation

Legal Notice: The design, content , images, texts and videos are the property of the Boris Lurie Art Foundat ion . No part of this gallery may be used in any form in public without written permission of the copyright owner.

© Boris Lurie Art Foundation, 2020

Key Events

1956
Boris Lurie meets fellow artist Sam Goodman at the Cedar Tavern.

1957
Boris Lurie founds the artist-run March Gallery, one of the famous 10th Street cooperative galleries in New York, with his friend Rocco Armento, William Gambini, and 21 other artists.

1959
Boris Lurie begins to make the NO!art collage and transfer works. He also meets writer and poet Stanley Fisher. Later this year, Boris founds the NO!art movement with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher.

1960
With Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, Boris Lurie takes over the leadership of the March Gallery from Elaine De Kooning in New York City. The March Gallery mounts the first of the shows of canonical NO!art, the Vulgar Show.

1961
The March Gallery hosts the Involvement Show and the Doom Show.

1962
They travel to Italy. Sam Goodman and Boris Lurie display works at Galleria Arturo Schwarz in Milan. The Doom Show is invited to Galleria La Salita in Rome. Boris Lurie meets Gertrude Stein.

1963
Gallery: Gertrude Stein in New York opens with a show of Boris Lurie’s Multiplications. Boris oversees much of the programming, including the NO Show.

1964
Boris Lurie has NO Posters: ANTI-POP show, and with Sam Goodman mounts the infamous NO Sculpture Show [Shit Show], both at Gallery: Gertrude Stein.

Bull by the Horns

Harold Rosenberg (1974)
Published in: Lurie, Boris; Krim, Seymour: NO!art, Cologne 1988

One gets sick of “radical” artists who produce innocuous collages of silk—screened newspaper clippings-scare headlines, electric chairs, corpses—and imagine they are striking a blow at society. All that they are saying is that they read the papers, tabloids by preference, and have found ways of making use of them for art. It’s not really very radical to be aware that two Kennedys were assassinated and that Marilyn Monroe had an appealing mouth. Perhaps this art feels heroic because it has subjected itself to such low-grade information instead of meditating on the continuity of the picture plane and the plangent discovery that paint comes in colours.

Genuine perception of social reality and accompanying grim feelings don’t go down well with critics, curators and collectors, who seek, above all, peaceful enjoyment of art treasures—and thus the “unbroken continuity” not only of the picture plane but of the art market and of works of today with the masterpieces of the past. What is the contemporary art world but the collusion among its parts to turn art into a Sunday Section of life untroubled by the news of the week?

The measure of vanguard art is

1. the degree of heat it registers in its criticism of society and culture;
2. the centrality of the target to which this criticism is applied.

I think NO!art does well with 1, less well with 2. (Incidentally, I think NO!art is a bad title, because it gives the impression of meaning “without art”, whereas its better meaning is nay-saying or negative art.) In the temperature of their reaction against contemporary America, the NO! Artists were the legitimate heirs of Dada, though without the old boys’ slapstick ferocity. At any rate, they showed a natural enmity to cool, slick Pop and post-Dada Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and other housetrained kittens.

It is not easy for an artist to be constantly negative. After all, one becomes an artist through a burst of admiration for a work of art. To say No to art through art requires, first of all, that one say No to that transforming experience. I am talking about slaying a god-or an angel, god’s messenger. If anything less is involved in NO!art, it is simply non-art, and modern society is full of that.

On the other hand, unless the NOI is absolute—principled and non-compromising as a religious or political oath—it becomes automatically a device for smuggling in a style of painting through propaganda about social attitudes.

Lurie, Goodman, Fisher et al smothered their aesthetic angel under a garbage heap of media images belonging to the categories of violence and sex fantasy. They anticipated Documenta V by ten years—it is no wonder NO!art is doing well in the land of an international exhibition conducted under the slogan art is superfluous and of Joseph Beuys. Lurie said in one of his statements that he couldn’t get mass-distributed pictures of big tits and behinds of bent-over girls out of his head until he emptied them into his collages. The organic goodies that happen to be packaged in the human female kept at fever heat his hostility to society that has learned to satisfy mass market demands for anything but genuine ass—it can, on a national basis, supply only ersatz (the Pin-ups), leaving actual toplessness and price-fixed fondling to be controlled by local ordinances. You don’t have to be tit-hungry to like Levy’s, and to appreciate why Goodman and Lurie were sore.

The NO!artists had the advantage of a self-fueled loathing. The next question is, how good was their choice of targets? Primarily, I think, their target turns out to be not society but the art world. And the art world can only go down the drain when society does. NOI Art features pinups, a kind of art, according to Lurie’s testimony, capable of becoming an obsession. From pinups NO!art advances to excrement, exhibited in anticipation of anti-form sculpture.

Where’s the radical criticism? In the exhibits themselves, I mean, not in the accompanying manifestos? Naked girls are at home on the walls of art galleries, and to exhibit them as scandalous, with or without garter belts, in cut-outs from porno magazines is to imply that they ought to be denied to the poor and uneducated.

Shit is not a radical phenomenon either—Rabelais wrote a poem in praise of it as a factor in the humanist revolution. So the NO! message boils down to the assertion that while pornography and shit are facts of life they have not hitherto been found in art galleries. But a lot worse things are prevalent in galleries and are considered highly respectable. To deal in masterpieces as if they were diamond-studded shit is more culturally destructive than to exhibit shit as If it were a diamond-studded masterpiece.

NO!art reflects the mixture of crap and crime with which the mass media floods the mind of our time. It attacks this mixture through reproducing it in concentrated images. It is Pop with venom added. I think its greatest value is to remind the art world that there are things to be uncomfortable about, whereas Pop glad-handed Madison Avenue as if it were looking for campaign funds. Granted that people flee unpleasant reminders, especially when there’s nothing they can do to change the situation, art can only answer, let them. It’s not the business of art to get things done but to keep reality on the agenda. Art has been apoliticized since the war not because artists chose to shun politics but because they found a genuine artist can only do what he can do, not what he thinks ought to be done.

Besides, politics itself has abandoned all hope for a better world. Individuals can shriek, but no one knows what to do. Art by itself can do nothing to change the general conditions of life. And if art merely shrieks it is accused of abandoning art for bad politics. Did NO!art do that? Did it ask what is good art for in the world today? A “Swiss Investment Group?” A “Japanese-American Group—highest prices paid?”

NO!art fixed itself in the reality defined by the self-destructive New Left of the early sixties. It accepted the letter’s package of things to attack: tyranny, filth and aesthetic hypocrisy, but it could not offer any contributions toward a new political consciousness or a rebellious sensibility. All the March Gallery could do was to make noise to drive away evil spirits. And to take the bull by the horns, at the risk of getting dragged in the dirt.

Some Questions as Appendix:

1. Will NO!art be co-opted by art history?

2. Does it seek co-option?

3. Will shit multiples be produced by Marlboro, Pace and Castelli to comInforate this episode of art history?

4. Will a retrospective shit show be sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts?

5. If not, is the omission a falsification of art history?

6. What about other artists who have existed but have been omitted from art history?

About Harold Rosenberg

Boris Lurie exhibition history 


2020
Boris Lurie in America: He had the courage to say NO!, January 26 – April 26, 2020, The Center for Contemporary Political Art, Washington, DC 


2019
Portable Landscapes and Imaginaries of Refugee Modernism, Nov.19, 2019 – Feb. 15, 2020, The James Gallery, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY 

Altered Man: The Art of Boris Lurie, Nov. 15, 2019 – Jan. 15, 2020, Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Odessa, Ukraine

Shit and Doom – No!art, Sep. 19 – Nov. 3, 2019, Cell Project Space, London, United Kingdom

Altered Man: The Art of Boris Lurie, September 6, October 30, 2019, Kyiv National Art Gallery, Shokoladnyi Budynok Art Center, Kyiv, Ukraine

It is The Sunlight That Warms The Room, Sep. 1, 2019 – Mar. 31, 2020, Museo Vostell Malpartida, Caceres, Spain

Boris Lurie: American Nonconformist, August 29 – November 11, 2019, The State Russian Museum / The Stroganov Palace, St Petersburg, Russia 

Confrontation NO!art Group, Jul. 20 – Nov. 30, 2019, Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod Israel

Boris Lurie: Artist and Witness, April 26 – June 23, 2019, Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia

Flashes of the Future: The Art of the ’68ers or The Power of the Powerless, Apr.20 – Aug. 19, 2019, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany

Boris Lurie and NO!art Group, April 5 – June 2, 2019 Koroška Art Gallery, Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia

Forgetting: Why We Don’t Remember Everything, Mar. 6 – Jul. 14, 2019, Historisches Museum, Frankfurt, Germany

NO!art Exhibition, Jan. 11 – Mar. 10, 2019, The Riga Bourse (Latvian National Museum Of Art), Riga, Latvia 


2018
Boris Lurie-Art After the Holocaust, October 26, 2018 – January 2019, MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art In Krakow, Krakow, Poland

Boris Lurie in Habana, October 6, 2017 – January 28, 2018, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba


2017
You’ve Got 1243 Unread Messages, Dec. 9, 2017 – Feb.4, 2018, Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia

Boris Lurie: Anti-Pop, March 17 – June 18, 2017 Neues Museum Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design Nürnberg, Germany

Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, Jan.10 – Apr. 1, 2017, Grey Art Gallery, NYU, New York, NY

Boris Lurie: Life After Death, January 6 – February 18, 2017, Westwood Gallery, New York NY 


2016
Boris Lurie. Adieu Amérique, October 27, 2016 – January 8, 2017, CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Torino, Italy

Boris Lurie NO!, June 25 – November 23, 2016, Janco Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel

No Compromises! The Art of Boris Lurie, February 26 – July 31, 2016, Jewish Museum Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Unorthodox, Nov. 6, 2015 – Mar. 27, 2016, Jewish Museum, New York , NY


2015
Boris Lurie NO!art, October 22 – December 22, 2015 Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris, France 


2014
KZ — Kampf — Kunst. Boris Lurie: NO!art, August 27 – November 2, 2014, National Socialism Documentation Center, Cologne, Germany 

Boris Lurie, May 18 – July 14, 2014, Museo Vostell Malpartida, malpartida de Caceres, Spain

Dessinez Eros, Jun. 11 – Jul. 22, 2014, Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris, France 


2013
Art against art: Yesterday and Today: Boris Lurie in the Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, September 20 – October 20, 2013 Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia

Boris Lurie at (e)merge, October 3 – October 6, 2013 (e)merge art fair, Washington, D.C., United States

Boris Lurie: The 1940s: Paintings and Drawings, September 20 – November 15, 2013, Studio House, New York, NY

The Three Prophets: Sam Goodman, Stanley Fisher, Boris Lurie, April 27 – June 22, 2013 The Box, Los Angeles,California 

Boris Lurie NO!, David David Gallery, November 16, 2012 –  January 4, 2013, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 


2012
Boris Lurie: NO!art of the 1960s: Boris Lurie in Florence, Italy, Robert F. Kennedy

Center for Justice & Human Rights, June 8 – July 31, 2012, Firenze, Italy

A Self To Recover: Embodying Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Oct. 23,  2012 – Feb. 4, 2013, Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, IN 


2011
NO! The Art of Boris Lurie, Chelsea Art Museum, March 26 –  May 15, 2011, New York, NY

Boris Lurie: No!art: Prologue to a Retrospective, Pierre Menard Gallery, January 25 – February 25, 201, Cambridge, Massachusetts

NO!art at the Barricades, NO!art 50 Years Later, Jun. 9 – Jul. 31, 2011, Chelsea Art Museum New York, NY


2010
Boris Lurie–No!art: An Exhibition of Early Work, Westwood Gallery, June 4 –  July 31, 2010 New York, NY 


2009
On the Tectonics of History, International Studio and Curatorial Program, May 28 – June 28, 2009, Brooklyn, NY


2005
THE 80s: 326 YEARS OF HIP: with Boris Lurie, Mary Beach, Herbert Huncke and Taylor Mead, Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Art Museum, January 19 to March 31, 2005, New York

Wild Boys, Bad Boys, Outsiders, and Originals, Clayton Gallery, New York


2004
Optimistic – Disease – Facility, Boris Lurie – Buchenwald–New York, with Naomi T. Salmon, Haus am Kleistpark, May 7 – June 20, 2004, Berlin-Schoeneberg

Feel Paintings / NO!art show #4, Janos Gat Gallery, February 17 – March 20, 2004,  New York


2003
Optimistic – Disease – Facility, Boris Lurie – Buchenwald–New York, with Naomi T. Salmon, Buchenwald Memorial, August 30 – October 19, 2003, Weimar-Buchenwald

NO!-ON, Gallery Berliner Kunstprojekt, November 8 to December 1, 2003 Berlin 


2002
NO!art and the Aesthetics of Doom, Iowa Museum of Art, Apr 27 – Jun 23, 2002,  Iowa City, IA

2001
NO!art and the Aesthetics of Doom, Block Museum, Northwestern University, November 9, 2001 – January 13, 2002, Evanston, IL 


1999
Life – Terror – Mind, Buchenwald Memorial, Weimar, Germany

BORIS LURIE: COLLAGES & PRINTS 1950 – 1999, Gallery Dorn, August 14-22, 1999, Stuttgart, Germany

Knives in Cement and Other Selected Constructions, University of Iowa Museum of Art, South River Gallery, March 1999, Iowa City, IA 


1
998  
Boris Lurie: Works 1946-1998, Buchenwald Memorial, December 23, 1998 – May 10, 1999, Weimar, Germany

NO!art Show #3 with Dietmar Kirves, Clayton Patterson & Wolf Vostell, Janos Gat Gallery, July – October 1998, New York

Tompkins Square Park Police Riots: 1988 to 1998, Then ‘til Now, Clayton Gallery, August 7 to 30, 1998, New York 


1995
NO!art, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Oct 21 to Nov 26, 1995, Berlin  

Boris Lurie und NO!art, Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin

Dance Hall Series, endart Gallery, Berlin

Holocuast in Latvia, Jewish Culture House, Riga, Latvia


1994
NO!art: Boris Lurie, Isser Aronovici and Aldo Tambellino, Clayton Gallery, New York 


1993
Outlaw Art Show, Clayton Gallery, New York


1989
On the wall / Graffiti between Anarchy and Gallery, Nassauischer Kunstverein 30. April 1989 to 18. June 1989 Wiesbaden 


1988
Feel-Paintings, May 1988, Gallery and Edition Hundertmark, Cologne


1978
Counterculturale Art: Boris Lurie, Erro and Jean-Jacques Lebel, American Information Service, Paris 


1975
Recycling Exhibition, Israel Museum,  June – July 1975,Jerusalem  


1974
Boris Lurie at Inge Baecker — Inge Baecker Galerie, Bochum, Germany

NO!art Bags, Galerie und Edition Hundertmark, Cologne

Boris Lurie & Wolf Vostell, Galerie Rewelsky, Cologne

NO!art with Boris Lurie, Sam Goodman & Marcel Janco, Ein-Hod-Museum, Ein-Hod, Israel


1973
NO!art Painting Since 1959, Galerie René Block, Berlin; Galleria Giancarlo Bocchi, Milano


1970
Art & Politics, Kunstverein Karlsruhe


1964
NO & ANTI-POP Poster Show, Gallery Gertrude Stein, January 14 to February 8, 1964,  New York

Boxes, Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles


1963
NO!show, Gallery Gertrude Stein, New York

NO SHOW with Rocco Armento, Stanley Fisher, Ester Gilman, Sam Goodman, Gloria Graves, Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, Boris Lurie, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tyler, Gallery Gertrude Stein, October 8 to November 2, 1963, New York

Boris Lurie at Gallery Gertrude Stein, Gallery Gertrude Stein,  April 16 through May 4, 1963, New York 


1962
Sam Goodman & Boris Lurie, Galleria Arturo Schwarz, September 19 to October 29, 1962, Milan

Doom Show, Galleria La Salita, November 1962, Rome 


1961
Pinup Multiplications, D’Arcy Galleries, New York

Involvement Show with Isser Aronovici, Rocco Armento, Al D’Arcangelo, Herb Brown, Ferró (Erro), John Fisher, Stanley Fisher, Esther Gilman, Sam Goodman, Gloria Graves, Dorothy Gillespie, Ted Joans, Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Bob Logan, Lora, Suzan Long (Harriet Wood), Boris Lurie, Mihal Mishorit, Jerome Rothenberg, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tyler, Ray Wisniewski, Lee Zack, March Gallery, April 1961, New York

Doom Show, Stanley Fischer, Sam Goodman, Jean-Jacques Lebel and Boris Lurie, March Gallery, November 1961, New York 


1960
Dance Hall Series, D’Arcy Galleries, New York

Adieu Amerique, Roland de Aenlle Gallery, New York

Les Lions,  March Gallery, New York

Tenth Street New York Cooperative, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Vulgar Show, March Gallery, New York; Joe Marino’s Atelier, New York


1959
Drawings USA, Museum of Modern Art, New York

10th Street, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston


1958
Black Figures, March Gallery, New York


1951
Dismembered Figures, Barbizon Plaza Galleries, New York


1950
Boris Lurie, Creative Gallery, New York