Testimony

Images of women occur throughout the oeuvre of Boris Lurie (1924–2008), images in which the artist, who had Jewish roots, combined sex and death, arousal and disgust, humiliation and dignity. This was his way of dealing with the trauma of the Holocaust.

Lurie lost almost all of his female relatives during the massacre at Rumbula (near Riga). When he heard that the women were forced to undress before their execution, he spoke of the “greatest striptease of all time”. His horror found expression above all in Dismembered Women, a series of paintings from the period 1950–55.

The US curator Sara Softness, who works for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, contrasts these distorted images with self-determined art by women. In these works, contemporary Jewish women artists question their own relationships with sexuality, physical harm, trauma and family history. Mostly based in New York, the artists explore changing attitudes to Jewishness, femininity and self-portrayal in ways that cast Lurie’s works in a new light.