In the mid 1950s, Boris Lurie was still a painter and draftsman. We should not underestimate this fact or dismiss it when considering our knowledge about his further development. Although...
In the mid 1950s, Boris Lurie was still a painter and draftsman. We should not underestimate this fact or dismiss it when considering our knowledge about his further development. Although the pictures of that time show the artist still searching for a viable style, he was already staking out and defining a terrain which was and should remain distinctly and uniquely his own. The paintings titled Dismembered Woman are early expressions of his lifelong fixation on an extremely ambivalent image of women. It oscillates between desire and revulsion, between strength and vulnerability, between integrity and dismemberment. Lurie never has in mind any individuals but rather always the aspect of femininity as such. Faces are accordingly silhouetted or hazily schematic. They remain elusive and just hints or are in the shadow and also virtually disappear under the wide brim of a hat.
All attention is focused on bodies and extremities, their organic functional nexus having been lost, however. In an upright obese nude figure which might serve as a prehistoric fertility idol or symbol, the left shoulder is even shown to slip downward – thus tearing apart the otherwise intact and whole contours of the figure. Such deconstruction of the human figure reflects, on the one hand, modern-day achievements which sacrificed the classical ideal body on the altar of the primacy of an abstract pictorial order. On the other hand, and at the same time, the lifelong trauma of the holocaust and of the Rumbula massacre also reverberates with it. Boris Lurie emphasized this potential interpretation in an interview given about forty years later. On that occasion, he also interpreted his paintings of fat ”broads” as a ”reaction to New York and to America”. For him as the new arrival, having narrowly escaped the horrors and having lived through genocide, hunger and war, it must have been scandalous to see such well-fed, heavyset women – a scandal he also grappled with in the paintings titled Dismembered Women.
Among the pictorial highlights of the loose series of paintings is one that – due to its extreme view from below – turns the viewer’s attention to stockinged legs and extremely high-heeled, black shoes. In a submissive perspective, nylons, high heels and one black glove become fetishes of sexual desire. The matron of other pictures here appears explicitly in the role of a dominatrix. She crosses her muscular legs rather awkwardly which results in an extremely unstable position that is evident in the diagonal composition of the drawing. Boris Lurie is entirely focused on the lower body which takes up about two-thirds of the picture. The rest remains vague and escapes any clear identifiability. Does the girl possibly use her right hand to smooth the glove? And what is shown to the right of her face? Despite all its ambiguities, the painting gets to the heart of an ambivalent relationship with females. Sexual desire and dominance are reciprocal powers in a patriarchal game which super elevates the woman to become ruler and at the same time degrades her to an object.
With this delicately and exquisitely painted, finely colored picture from the series of Dismembered Women, Boris Lurie created an oeuvre which is equal to the no less troubling presentations of women by his contemporaries Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. However, a few years later, he terminated the promising career of a painter when he used the label of “NO!art” to rebel against the complacency and hypocrisy of the art scene and the establishment. At that point, traditional painting was no longer an option.