Julian Stanczak
Julian Stanczak (born in Borownica, Poland on November 5 1928) is an American painter and printmaker. The artist lives and works in Seven Hills, Ohio with his wife, the sculptor, Barbara Stanczak.
Biography
Stanczak was born in eastern Poland in 1928. At the beginning of World War II, Stanczak 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 moved to England and then the United States, where he eventually settled in Cleveland.
In 2007, Stanczak was interviewed by Brian Sherwin for Myartspace. During the interview Stanczak recalled his experiences with war and the loss of his right arm and how both influenced his art. Stanczak explained, "The transition from using my left hand as my right, main hand, was very difficult. My youthful experiences with the atrocities of the Second World War are with me,- but I wanted to forget them and live a "normal" life and adapt into society more fully. In the search for Art, you have to separate what is emotional and what is logical. I did not want to be bombarded daily by the past,- I looked for anonymity of actions through non-referential, abstract art."[1]
Education
Stanczak received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland Ohio in 1954, and trained under Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven Connecticut, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in 1956.
Works
The Op Art movement was named for Stanczak’s first exhibition in New York. Held at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1964, the exhibition was titled Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings. His work was also included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye. In 1966 Stanczak was named a "New Talent" by Art in America magazine. In the early 1960s he began to make the surface plane of the painting vibrate through his use of wavy lines and contrasting colors in works such as Provocative Current (1965). These paintings gave way to more complex compositions constructed with geometric rigidity yet softened with varying degrees of color transparency such as Netted Green (1972).
In addition to being an artist, Stanczak was also a teacher, having worked at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1957-64 and as Professor of Painting, Cleveland Institute of Art, 1964-1995. He was named "Outstanding American Educator" by the Educators of America in 1970.
Style
Stanczak uses repeating forms to create compositions that are manifestations of his visual experiences. Stanczak's work is an art of experience, and is based upon structures of color. In the 1980s and 1990s Stanczak retained his geometric structure and created compositions with bright or muted colors, often creating pieces in a series such as Soft Continuum (1981; Johnson and Johnson Co. CT, see McClelland pl. 50). More recently, Stanczak has been creating large-scale series, comprised of square panels on which he examines variations of hue and chroma in illusionistic color modulations, an example of which is Windows to the Past (2000; 50 panels).
Public Collections
Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Pennsylvania
Asheville Museum of Art, Asheville, North Carolina
Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana
Baum Gallery of Art, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama
Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
Canton Museum of Art, Canton, Ohio
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Centrum Sztuki Studio im Stanislawa I. Witkiewicza, Warsaw, Poland
Cleveland Artists Foundation, Lakewood, Ohio
Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Herron Gallery, Herron School of Art/IUPUI, Indianapolis, Indiana
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, Connecticut
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Kennedy Museum of Art, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida
Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, Louisiana
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Kendall Campus Art Gallery, Miami-Dade Community College, Miami, Florida
Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee Wisconsin
Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, Massachusetts
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Naples Museum of Art, Naples, Florida
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida
Oklahoma City Art Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California
Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
The Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Southbend, Indiana
Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, Ohio
Tamayo Museum, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico
University at Buffalo Art Gallery, SUNY-Buffalo, Buffalo, New York
The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England
Wake Forest University Fine Arts Gallery, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California
Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
Bibliography
- Arnheim, Rudolf, Harry Rand and Robert Bertholf. Julian Stanczak: Decades of Light (University of Buffalo, Poetry and Rare Book Collection, 1990)
- McClelland, Elizabeth. Julian Stanczak, Retrospective: 1948-1998 (Butler Institute of American Art, 1998)
- Serigraphs and Drawings of Julian Stanczak 1970-1972 (exh. cat. by Gene Baro, Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1972)
- Julian Stanczak: Color = Form (exh. cat. by Jacqueline Shinners and Rudolf Arnheim, Dennos Museum Center, Northwestern Michigan College, 1993)