It’s easy to dislike the art of Boris Lurie. At first blush it appears bracingly violent, misogynistic and, on occasion, self-righteous. From the comprehensive, densely hung survey of Lurie’s work from the 1950s and ’60s – put on outside the Chelsea Art Museum’s auspices using funding from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation – one got the distinct feeling of being shouted at and browbeaten with a blunt object. However, despite the myriad problematic hurdles that Lurie’s work gleefully erects, it was also a vital, provocative, historically significant riposte to the hermetic triumphalism of Abstract Expressionism and the cool-handed irony of Pop with which it co-existed, one that has been largely forgotten and is in need of more serious consideration.
It was never Lurie’s intention to be liked. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Even the name of his insular art movement – begun in 1959 with fellow artists Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher and initially based in the March Gallery on New York’s 10th Street and later moving to the Gallery Gertrude Stein uptown – was one of opposition and refusal: NO!art. It was a movement that took a vocal stance against crass commercialism and cronyism, as well as art that avoided engagement with what Lurie and his cohort deemed to be the most pressing ‘subjects of real life’: desire, death and socio-political injustice. But if Lurie’s compulsion to foist these subjects on an art world he believed to be ham-strung by complacency and capitulation to market concerns appeared aggressive – the NO!art movement, Lurie would later remark, was founded ‘out of desperation’, and put on exhibitions with titles including Vulgar Show (1961), Doom Show (1962) and Shit Show (1964) – it was not without cause.
