The Art of
Katalog_Boris-Lurie_English
Katalog_Boris-Lurie_English
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camp and the Stutth<strong>of</strong> and Buchenwald concentration camps. In 1945, Lurie,<br />
prisoner number 95966, was liberated by American troops in a satellite<br />
camp <strong>of</strong> Buchenwald in Magdeburg. In 1946, he and his father emigrated to<br />
the United States. From then on, New York was the topographical and social<br />
center <strong>of</strong> his life. It was there that he produced his first pictures after the<br />
war: on the one hand, sketches not intended for the public in which he assured<br />
himself <strong>of</strong> the facts <strong>of</strong> his story <strong>of</strong> persecution, the reality <strong>of</strong> his<br />
memories: visual notations on the credibility <strong>of</strong> the incredible. On the other<br />
hand, he attempted to lend duration and expression to the experience <strong>of</strong><br />
the concentration camp by employing the means <strong>of</strong> classic oil painting.<br />
Back from Work—Prison Entrance, 1946/47 | see image p. 7 features a stream<br />
<strong>of</strong> people reduced to their creatureliness, dissolving into distortion; in a<br />
deep black setting, they are drawn as if by flames through a camp gate,<br />
which is simultaneously the opening into a cremation furnace. In this picture<br />
the world has ceased to exist. Being engulfed by force is the only reality.<br />
Entrance | see image p.13 dates from the same period and is an epitaph.<br />
Two Muslims—Muselmänner, as such prisoners were known in the language<br />
<strong>of</strong> the camps—reduced to skeletons, any spark <strong>of</strong> life extinguished from<br />
them, gray in gray, keep sad and melancholy watch in front <strong>of</strong> the entrance<br />
to a room with a flaming cremation furnace. <strong>The</strong>ir faces emaciated but<br />
spiritual, bones sharp beneath their skin, ribs like sticks standing out so<br />
clearly they can be counted, claw-like hands, buckets on their heads, clunky<br />
wooden shoes on their feet, shouldering broom-like fronds, they stand<br />
there on death watch like two grotesque angels. It is a real-historical allegory<br />
and a memory and acknowledgment <strong>of</strong> Soviet prisoners <strong>of</strong> war actually<br />
humiliated in this way, as Boris Lurie wrote to me in 2002.<br />
No God, no teleology <strong>of</strong> history that guarantees a good ending despite<br />
everything; not men and devils but men and men: one group persecuted,<br />
and the other persecutors and murderers. Loneliness, absence, loss, and a<br />
death that does not point beyond itself because the mass murder based on<br />
racist biology, the Shoah, cannot be tied back into our reference systems <strong>of</strong><br />
political, religious, or national martyrdom. Following this naked, sheer death,<br />
which would have been his own and was that <strong>of</strong> his mother, his sister, and<br />
his first love, Lurie’s Entrance is an attempt at taking leave and acknowledgment<br />
without self-deception, and premature, that is, pre-established solace<br />
in the sense suggested above; without self-deception and premature solace—not<br />
for him, not for us, not for anyone.<br />
It is only logical that after this—also in terms <strong>of</strong> manual skill—high-quality<br />
mobilization <strong>of</strong> the possibilities <strong>of</strong> the panel painting and oil painting, from<br />
nineteenth-century tone-in-tone painting to the Surrealism <strong>of</strong> the twentieth<br />
century, Lurie radicalized his means <strong>of</strong> expression. In 1947 he produced<br />
the work List, tantamount to a ready-made <strong>of</strong> the radically evil. In 1962 he<br />
VOLKHARD KNIGGE