Russian-born Artist Boris Lurie, 83, Dies in Manhattan

Saturday, 12 January 2008 12:04

NEW YORK CITY - Russian-born artist Boris Lurie, 83, died in Manhattan due to kidney failure, reported The New York Times. He survived the Holocaust and portrayed the horrors of it in a confrontational movement he called No! Art.

Lurie, born in 1924, was incarcerated at the age of 17 and transported to various ghettos, labor camps and Nazi concentration camps including Riga, Lenta, Stutthoh and Buchenwald. After being liberated from Buchenwald in April of 1945, Lurie emigrated to the United States. A decade later he became co-founder of New York City's March Group, also known as the NO! Art Collective. Lurie's works have been called a powerful and troubling indictment of man's injustice to fellow man.

Mr. Lurie, the last survivor of the three artists who started out at the March Gallery, left no immediate survivors. He continued to make art through the 1970s and 1980s but took part in only a handful of shows during those decades, all overseas.

In 1993 the Clayton Gallery on the Lower East Side organized the first American show in 29 years to display Mr. Lurie’s work. In subsequent years his work appeared in several shows in the United States, Latvia and Germany, including one in 1998 at the opening of the Buchenwald Museum, Ms. Stein said.

His work is included in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.