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Petition to Stop Warhol Exhibit at the Nat’l Arts Club

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Boris Lurie, who died in 2008, was a Holocaust surivor and one of the founders of a radical art protest movement known as NO!art. I’ve blogged about him before. His close friends Clayton Patterson and Dietmar Kirves are sending around a petition to halt an exhibition of Warhol works that opened last week at the National Arts Club in New York, because it is being underwritten by the Boris Lurie Art Foundation. They note that Lurie “explicitly despised Andy Warhol as a consumerist capitalist sell-out.” The exhibition is scheduled to run through Dec. 28.

The foundation was established to preserve and promote Lurie’s art, and to continue the NO!art movement. But Patterson and Kirves have claimed that it is using its considerable resources to promote the interests of the foundation’s board members. The grandest irony of what is a complicated and contentious story filled with many ironies is that Lurie, who pretty much lived like a pauper, left investments worth an estimated $80 million, according to ArtNews. Lurie had amassed the fortune by “buying penny stocks and real estate in his spare time,” the paper reported. He had no heirs, and “his handwritten will specified that his entire estate go toward creating the foundation.”

Comments

  1. the behaviour of the NAC is shameful! They only care about money and by far not about what they are doing by getting an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s silly drawings sponsored by the BLAF.

    The BLAF is an organisation of collectors that has in mind to make more profit and more profit and more profit. The BLAF was formed one and a half years after Boris Lurie died. This organisation is by far not comparable to honest guys of the NO!art movement like Clayton and Dietmar, who treat Boris Lurie with respect.

    Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Baer

  2. “… in 1960 [Boris Lurie] founded the NO!art movement together with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, out of a sense of disillusionment with the contemporary art scene. The goal was to have art address the disconcerting truths: racism, imperialism, sexim, colonialism, depravity. The movement favors “totally unabashed self-expression leading to social action” and is opposed to the worldwide capitalist “investment art market,” to pop-art that celebrates consumerism and to decorative “salon art” such as abstract expressionism. Lurie’s art and the NO!Art movement were largely ignored by the establishment … Boris Lurie abominated established artists like Andy Warhol, and in 1970 Lurie wrote his critique “MOMA as Manipulator.”[citation needed] One of the movement’s earliest champions was the Italian art dealer, Arturo Schwarz.[2] …” (wikipedia)

  4. NO!art is anti Pop-art: Pop-art is reactionary – it celebrates the glories of consumer society, and it mocks only at what the lower classes consume – the can of soup, the cheap shirt. Pop-art is chauvinistic. It sabotages and detracts from a social art for all. Boris Lurie

  5. Soon—in the beginning of the new year- 2013- the 3 volume Jews A Peoples History of the Lower East Side will be back from the printer. There are a couple of good articles on Boris Lurie in this anthology. Will keep you posted. Or I will send you an email and you keep us posted.

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