About Boris Lurie
Boris Lurie was the avant-garde incarnate. NO!art, the movement he founded with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher in 1959, was a reaction against what they viewed as the debased avant-garde of Abstract Expressionism and its social and political dis-engagement, a resistance that would become all the more strident with the rise of Pop Art. NO!art insisted that art again address the real world; it called for an art dealing with difficult truths, such as imperialism, racism, sexism, and nuclear proliferation, and leading to social action. Lurie’s highly controversial work, sometimes combining imagery deriving from the Holocaust with samplings from popular culture, advertising, and girlie magazines, alienated critics and curators and was ignored by the art establishment. Lurie deplored what he called the “investment art market,” and he resisted its blandishments at every turn, rarely showing his art after the seventies and almost never offering it for sale.
Excerpt from exhibition catalogue of “NO! Boris Lurie” at David David Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, 2012.