NO! Art: Downtown Rebellion, 1960s
August 7, 2026
Tribute Exhibition for NYC Galleries Gertrude Stein (1927-2026)
26 March— 16 May 2026
Curated by James Cavello, in collaboration with Boris Lurie Art Foundation.
When I left the Kunst Academy in Munich, my students bought me a cactus. Because I once said, a cactus is like an artist; it can survive a lack of attention, and it flowers when it feels like it. They are disobedient and mysterious.
When I was a teenager, I had a huge cactus collection. And, of course, I painted one. – Sean Scully
If Boris Lurie (1924–2008) had not existed, it would be impossible to imagine him. Born in Leningrad, Russia, in 1920, Lurie was a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to New York in 1946. And then, while choosing to live in squalor in the East Village, he made a fortune in the stock market, and, in turn, made art! In 1987, he published essays by himself and the other members of his movement, NO!art, in a book whose title covers a vast territory of pure negativity: NO!art: Pin-Ups, Excrement, Protest, Jew-Art. The book stands against Pop Art on one side, and Abstract Expressionism on the other. And he established the foundation that now presents this show of him with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher — in conjunction with Tribute Exhibition: Gertrude Stein (1927–2026), NYC Gallerist, in honor of the New York gallerist who supported their work and other experimental artists. This is difficult to understand.
The next time that someone tells you that in our art world, everything is permitted, and nothing forbidden, tell them about NO!art. “The art market,” Lurie said, “is nothing but a racket.” And so he seems to have been blackballed by most of its institutions. As yet, he remains a marginal artist, a cult figure, an incomprehensible crux of contradiction, alive. Compared with him, our fire-breathing leftist colleagues in the art world feel like registered Republicans.
And yet, Lurie’s foundation now runs a large gallery, solicits reviews and has a Catalogue Raisonné in progress. His Black Susan and Mirror, both 1962, juxtapose female pinups and expressive brushwork. Untitled (1963) sets the pinups against a fragmentary abstract painting. And his NO (1969), a brilliant graphic design, features that word.
In short, Lurie is a gifted artist. More than fifty works are on view in his gallery across two floors. In contrast to the polished imagery of Pop Art and the formal emphasis of Abstract Expressionism, NO!art artists adopted a confrontational visual language addressing politics, consumer culture and historical trauma. When Theodor Adorno famously said, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” he meant that, after the ineffable, unnameable atrocities committed by humans upon co-humans, there was no room for action, no space for the world of poetry to exist by itself. Poetry was dead. Lurie took up that very challenge. The Holocaust has become yet another artistic subject, in scholarly as in popular culture. Catastrophe, it turns out — pace the great Adorno — is picturable and trauma can be represented. What does this say about how we should judge Lurie’s artworks? To purely respond to them as artworks seems to miss the point.
His taking on art as a professional practice could be considered as an act of stabbing the very system within which it existed. It took the shape at first of a sheer performative contradiction: sawing the very branch of the tree on which he was sitting. But, as Trotsky emphasized, there is no room outside the system. And Lurie is no exception. The system caught up with him. Or more likely, perhaps, Lurie enjoyed the lure of capitalism as much as he detested it on the surface.
The result — his legacy, his fascinating relationship with Gertrude Stein II, his muse, his support, his partner, this Jewish woman whom he portrayed with the features of Rosa Parks — all this, and more, makes up a riveting, terrifying material from which a few lessons can be learned.
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