Julian Stanczak, Abstract Painter, Dies at 88
New York Times, 04/11/2017
Roberta Smith

Julian Stanczak, a Polish-born American abstract painter who rose to fame as a leading figure of the popular Op Art movement but slipped into obscurity when its reputation flagged, died on March 25 at his home in Seven Hills, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his New York gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash. His family said that he had died after a short illness.

Mr. Stanczak was a firmly optimistic artist, despite injuries in a Soviet labor camp during World War II that rendered his dominant right arm useless. He helped name the art movement to which he was linked in 1964 when his New York debut at the Martha Jackson Gallery was titled “Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings.”

Reviewing that exhibition in Arts magazine, Donald Judd, then an emerging Minimalist sculptor, coined the phrase Op Art in a sardonic closing sentence, linking the upsurge in perceptual abstraction, as it was sometimes called, to the Museum of Modern Art’s plans to survey the trend.

Indeed, Op Art went supernova in 1965, with the Modern’s exhibition “The Responsive Eye” (even though the museum avoided the term). While critically derided, the exhibition set attendance records at the museum. It represented around 100 artists, from 15 countries and nearly three generations, working in assorted optical or geometric styles.

Mr. Stanzcak’s art evinced a tremendous geometric inventiveness. He constantly elaborated on the possibilities of parallel stripes, both straight and undulant; squares, both checkerboard and concentric; and grids, usually amplified by contrasting saturated colors.

He once told an interviewer that his style was an attempt to forget about his war traumas. “I did not want to be bombarded daily by the past,” he said. “I looked for anonymity of actions through nonreferential abstract art.”

But his work was far from anonymous. He produced some of the most emotionally gripping paintings associated with the Op trend. This was achieved partly by his delicately textured paint surfaces and partly by the soft light that often infiltrated his forms and patterns, the result of an infinitesimal adjustment of the shades of one or two colors.

His main concern, in fact, was color, which he viewed subjectively. “Color is abstract, universal,” he once said, “yet personal and private in experience. It primarily affects us emotionally, not logically, as do tangible things.”

Julian Stanczak was born on Nov. 5, 1928, on his grandfather’s farm near the village of Borownica, Poland. His father worked in construction and built houses in addition to farming, and Julian loved to make things from wood, including furniture and toys.

In 1940, during Russia’s occupation of the eastern half of the country, Mr. Stanczak and his family were caught up in the first wave of mass deportations of Poles to Siberian labor camps. They ended up cutting timber in the Ural Mountains, where conditions were brutal. Mr. Stanczak survived pneumonia, encephalitis and near starvation, but overwork permanently incapacitated his right arm.

In 1942 the Soviet Union granted amnesty to imprisoned Polish citizens, and Mr. Stanczak and his family walked and hitchhiked 2,500 miles south to Tehran, where his father joined the Polish Army in exile. Saying he was 17 and not 14, Mr. Stanczak also joined — partly to eat, partly in the hope that the army’s doctors might help his arm. When they made it worse, he deserted. Mr. Stanczak, his mother and his sister ended up spending six years in a Polish refugee camp in Uganda.

There, Mr. Stanczak learned to write and paint left-handed. He was, he said, profoundly affected by the African light, the intensely colored sunsets and what he called “the immense visual energy” of nature there — the plants, trees and animals, especially zebras. He also admired the geometric patterns of the textiles from which Ugandan women made their clothing.

By 1948, when his family was reunited in London, Mr. Stanczak was making small, patterned abstractions in bright colors or in black and white. He studied art at the Borough Polytechnic Institute for two years and devoted himself to the city’s art museums. In 1950 the family relocated to Cleveland, and in 1954 he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art.

He then studied for his master’s at Yale with Conrad Marca-Relli and Josef Albers, who was well known for his color theories (and who was also the oldest artist in the “Responsive Eye” exhibition). Mr. Stanczak’s roommate was Richard Anuszkiewicz, another graduate of the Cleveland Institute and, later, another prominent Op artist.

Mr. Stanczak, who became a United States citizen in 1957, taught at the Cincinnati Academy of Art for seven years. In 1964, the year of his first New York show, he was appointed professor of painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he taught for 38 years.

He married Barbara Meerpohl, a sculptor, in 1963. She survives him, as do their daughter, Danusia M. Casteel; their son, Krzys; two grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

Mr. Stanczak remained affiliated with the Martha Jackson Gallery until it closed in 1979, by which time Op Art had been largely superseded by Minimalism and other more austere kinds of geometric abstraction — at least within the confines of New York. He continued to exhibit frequently elsewhere, especially in galleries and museums across the Midwest; more than 90 museums in the United States and abroad ultimately acquired his work. But he did not have a solo show in New York until 2004, at the Stefan Stux Gallery, followed by another there in 2005.

On that occasion Grace Glueck of The New York Times noted that Mr. Stanczak’s work “has steadily become more refined and ingenious” and asked, “Who says Op Art is dead?”

By then, renewed interest was bringing it back to life. From 2010 to 2016, D. Wigmore Fine Art, a New York gallery, mounted six group shows examining different aspects of Op Art, including its manifestations in Ohio; the shows featured Mr. Stanczak’s work prominently. Articles on his work appeared in Artforum and Art in America.

In 2012, Mr. Stanczak’s paintings were included in “Ghosts in the Machine,” a thematic exhibition at the New Museum in Manhattan. In 2014, he had his first show with Mitchell-Innes & Nash. A second one will open there next month.

Associated Artist

• Julian Stanczak

Associated Exhibitions

• JULIAN STANCZAK
  Lineal Pathways
  March 14, 2014 - April 19, 2014
  MORE INFO
• JULIAN STANCZAK Grids and Planes
  August 17, 2012 - September 15, 2012
  MORE INFO

Associated News

• August 5, 2019
  ‘Optical Art’ to be shown at Fort Wayne Museum of Art
  Wane.com
  August 5, 2019
  Dirk Rowley
  


• April 8, 2019
  JULIAN STANCZAK
  The Lobby Gallery, 499 Park Avenue, New York
  On view through September 2019
  Reception: Tuesday, April 9, 5-7 pm
  
  


• March 26, 2019
  Rhythm, Rhythm, Everywhere
  Toledo City Paper, 03/26/2019
  Thena Cocoves
  
  


• July 28, 2018
  Unique art 'treasure hunt' spans dozens of Ohio venues
  The Blade, 07/28/2018
  Roberta Gedert
  
  


• July 12, 2018
  Cleveland Hopes to Become the Next Venice
  The Wall Street Journal, 07/12/2018
  Kelly Crow
  
  


• February 17, 2018
  Julian Stanczak
  Visual Art Source, 02/17/2018
  Amanda Malloy
  
  


• February 9, 2018
  Julian Stanczak at David Richard Gallery
  Santa Fe New Mexican
  Pasatiempo, 02/09/2018
  Michael Abatemarco
  
  


• February 8, 2018
  Love is in the Art
  Santa Fe Arts Journal, 02/08/2018
  Emily Van Cleve
  
  


• January 31, 2018
  Press Release - Julian Stanczak "Dynamic Fields"


• July 22, 2017
  FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art


• April 19, 2017
  Julian Stanczak’s Contribution to Cincinnati Art
  City Beat, 04/19/2017
  Steven Rosen
  
  


• April 11, 2017
  Julian Stanczak, Abstract Painter, Dies at 88
  New York Times, 04/11/2017
  Roberta Smith
  
  


• March 31, 2017
  Julian Stanczak on the Power of Red
  ArtInfo, 03/31/2017
  
  


• March 28, 2017
  Op Art Loses One of Its Leading Figures With Death of Julian Stanczak
  ArtNet News, 03/29/2017
  Perwana Nazif
  
  


• March 28, 2017
  Julian Stanczak, Central Figure of Op Art Movement, Dies at 88
  ArtNet News, 03/28/2017
  Alex Greenberger
  
  


• March 28, 2017
  Julian Stanczak (1928–2017)
  Artforum, 03/28/2017
  
  


• March 27, 2017
  Julian Stanczak, globally renowned Op artist based in Cleveland, has died at age 88
  Cleveland.com, 03/25/2017
  Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
  
  


• December 16, 2015
  Julian Stanczak Op Art paintings smash local price ceiling and rocket nationally
  Cleveland.com, 12/16/2015
  Steven Litt
  
  


• January 29, 2015
  Color Color' evokes harmony between two disparate mediums
  The New Record, 01/29/2015
  Christina Drobney
  
  


• December 15, 2014
  'Color Color' at the Cincinnati Art Museum showcases digital prints and poetry
  ArtDaily.org, 12/15/2014
  
  


• March 3, 2014
  Press Release - Julian Stanczak "Lineal Pathways"


• February 23, 2014
  1969 Cleveland Arts Prize for Visual Arts
  


• April 30, 2013
  JULIAN STANCZAK
  COLOR WONDER
  Cleveland Magazine, May 2013
  
  


• April 8, 2013
  AKRON ART MUSEUM
  Line Color Illusion: 40 Years of Julian Stanczak
  Apr 13, 2013 - Nov 3, 2013
  


• October 16, 2012
  THE MARKET'S HOTTEST ARTISTS
  Bloomberg.com, 10/16/2012
  Ben Steverman
  
  


• May 1, 2012
  An Interview with Artist Julian Stanczak
  GeoForm, May 2012
  Julie Karabenick
  
  


• May 1, 2012
  An Interview with Artist Julian Stanczak
  GeoForm, May 2012
  Julie Karabenick
  
  


• December 13, 2011
  JULIAN STANCZAK: GREAT COLORIST OF THE 20TH CENTURY
  Cleveland Institute of Art, 12/13/2011
  
  


• November 6, 2011
  Cleveland Institute of Art touts its own history in shows on Robert Mangold, Julian Stanczak and Ed Mieczkowski
  Cleveland.com, 11/06/2011
  Steven Litt
  
  


• September 21, 2011
  CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART OPTICAL ART EXHIBIT A TEST FOR THE EYES
  WEWS, 09/21/2011
  
  


• August 23, 2011
  Press Release - Julian Stanczak "Tactile See Through"


• November 1, 2010
  The New Criterion review of "Julian Stanczak: Color - Grid"
  Gallery Chronicle, November 2010
  James Panero