The artist who lived in hovels but was worth millions

These, says Dehm, were early works and Lurie knew that he would move on from them. When he did though, it was very much a conscious rejection of the conventions of the supposedly avant-garde art world at the time.

You can see reflections of abstract expressionism in Lurie’s work – the swirl and splatter of colours across huge canvases, just as you can see elements that echo Pop Art – advertising materials, labels and packaging. But Lurie rejected both strands, instead founding NO!art, which opposed and criticised contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. “We are not playful!” Lurie wrote in 1962. “We want to build art and not destroy it, but we say exactly what we mean at the expense of good manners.”

“He was against Pop Art and against commercialisation,” says Dehm. “He was against forgetting. He wanted people to keep in mind that what had happened during the Nazi regime did not just stop by the end of the Second World War.”

Take Lurie’s collaged packing box; Immigrant’s NO! box, which was shown alongside Warhol’s iconic Brillo Boxes and Heinz Ketchup Boxes in a Los Angeles gallery in 1964. Lurie’s work takes brutal pictures of concentration camp victims, daubed swastikas and the word NO! and puts them alongside smiling models and bright colours – a critique of magazines that featured reports about the camps amid showbiz gossip. Dehm feels that Lurie’s anger at the media is all the more relevant in today’s digital world where social media offers a dizzying diet of horror and froth.

Juxtaposing images is a key component of collage art, and Lurie never holds back from shocking the viewer – often using a photograph taken by Walter Chichersky in Buchenwald showing corpses piled high on a cart. In Railroad Collage (Railroad to America), 1963, he places it as background to the back view of a nude woman, provocatively posed removing her underwear, the whole picture framed by an advertisement for hair dye. It’s deliberately shocking and confrontational – in puritan America, what shocks more, nudity or genocide?

Bodies – their commodification, their dismemberment, their use and abuse – are a constant theme in Lurie’s art, even their waste products. One of the more challenging pieces on display is a sculpture, made jointly with Sam Goodman, another NO! artist, depicting a large pile of excrement. Although now I am asking myself why human waste on display in a gallery is almost more shocking than images of corpses. These are the questions that Lurie wanted us to confront, and get angry about. 

Stark: Knives in Cement (1972-74)[Missing Credit]

Lurie’s Jewish identity was immensely important to him. The film-maker Rudij Bergmann noted: “No motif appeared more frequently in Boris Lurie’s art than the hexagram… the yellow star which the Nazis regarded as the primary symbol of Jewish identity, was a death sentence for millions of people. For Lurie, prominently featuring the ‘yellow star’ in his art was not a pose, an aesthetic embellishment or even a clever idea, it was a necessity.” Bergmann also points out that the star symbolised Lurie’s “unshakeable declaration of faith” in Israel, where he was buried after his death in 2008. For years he wore a star in America – but often found it was mistaken for a sheriff’s badge.

Lurie sent his final days in a dormitory at a Jewish old age home in New York, and he lived his life as a penniless artist, living in hovels and rejecting commercial concerns in a way that infuriated many in the art world. But, in fact, he’d made a fortune on the stock market, and left $80 million and a vast archive of art, poetry, personal writings and more, money that is now being used to protect and promote his legacy. The exhibition at the Oxo Gallery is just a “taster” says David Glasser of London’s Ben Uri Gallery, joint sponsor of the show with the Boris Lurie Art Foundation. He promises more to come. In the meantime, Boris Lurie: Ever the Radical is on until October 9. Don’t miss it.