Artist Biography & Facts

Julian Stanczak

Art & Design, The New York Times, Julian Stanczak, Abstract Painter, Dies at 88, By Roberta Smith, April 11, 2017

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. Stanczak’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 is survived by his wife, Barbara Stanczak, a sculptor; their daughter, Danusia M. Casteel; their son, Krzys; two grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

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.

The Op Art movement was named for Julian Stanczak's first exhibition in New York.  Held at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1964, the exhibition was titled "Julian Stanczak Optical Paintings." Stanczak's work was included in the major exhibition of Op Art at New York's Museum of Modern Art (the exhibition was titled "The Responsive Eye"), and it was reproduced in articles in Time and Life magazines pertaining to Op Art.  In 1966, Stanczak was named an "Outstanding Artist, USA" by Art in America magazine.  Although his work remains connected to the Op Art movement, Stanczak is primarily a colorist, and his use of optical mixture and interaction of color has been said to be perhaps the most sophisticated in the history of art.

Stanczak was born on his grandfather's farm in eastern Poland in 1928.  At the beginning of World War II, this aspiring young musician was forced into a Siberian labor camp, where he permanently lost the use of his right arm (he had been right-handed).  In 1942, Stanczak (age 13) escaped from Siberia to join the Polish army-in-exile in Persia. After deserting from the army, he spent his teenage years in a hut in a Polish refugee camp in Uganda, Africa.  It was in Africa that Stanczak learned to paint (left-handed).  He then moved to England and the United States, where he eventually settled in Cleveland.

Stanczak's most influential formal training was in the Bauhaus tradition: he was a student of Josef Albers at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1956. While at Yale, his roommate was fellow Op artist Richard Anuszkiewicz.

In addition to his work as a painter and print maker, Stanczak has had a distinguished career as a teacher.  From 1957 to 1964, Stanczak taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.  He was Professor of Painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1964 until he retired in 1995.  He has served as artist in residence or visiting lecturer at numerous colleges and universities, including Dartmouth College, Washington University, MIT and The Corcoran School of Art.

Stanczak's work is in over 70 museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Princeton University Art Museum, and all of the major Ohio Museums as well as museums in Canada, Mexico, Germany and Poland.

In 1990, the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo published a monograph on Stanczak's work titled Decades of Light.  A second monograph was published in 1998 by the Butler Institute of American Art to accompany a travelling retrospective of Stanczak's work.  In a major review in the Los Angeles Times, David Pagel said that "the exhibition stands out as one of the most scintillating shows of the year."  More than 20 museums acquired paintings for their permanent collections during the tour of the exhibition.

Submitted by Neil Rector, President of Contemporary Collections, Ltd., in Columbus, Ohio.

Julian Stanczak, an artist synonymous with Optical Art, left an indelible mark on the world of Contemporary Art through his mesmerizing and groundbreaking optical illusions. Born in Poland, Stanczak’s life journey was testament to the power of perseverance and creativity. Overcoming significant personal challenges, he became a pioneer of a unique and captivating art movement.

As a child, Stanczak suffered a debilitating bout of Tuberculosis which left him with impaired vision. During his recovery, he discovered a profound connection with his art. Stanczak’s fascination with the interplay of colors and shape was comma in part comma a response to his altered vision period his experiences with visual distortions and the merging of colors laid the foundation for the leader explorations in op art.

After immigrating to the United States in 1941, Stanczak pursued his passion for art relentlessly. He enrolled at the Cleveland institute of art and later earned his BA degree from Yale. Under the guidance of renowned artist Joseph Albers, Stanczak’s understanding of color theory and perception deepened significantly. Albers’ guidance was pivotal in Stanczak’s development.

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of Op Art, a movement characterized by geometric abstraction, optical illusions, and a focus on the viewer’s perception. Stanczak was at the forefront of this movement, alongside Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. His meticulous paintings, often composed of arranged lines, squares and circles, had an hypnotic effect on viewers; his work seems to vibrate, shift and pulsate as if in constant motion.

Stanczak’s influence on the Op Art movement and his ability to challenge the way we perceive the world are testament to his enduring legacy. His work can be found at MoMA, the Whitney and the Guggenheim, where they continue to intrigue and inspire.