Julian Stanczak (1928-2017)

Born in Borownica, Poland in 1928, Julian Stanczak's childhood was marred by political upheaval in eastern Europe. In 1939, his family was deported to a Siberian gulag, where they spent two years before being granted amnesty. Due to the conditions in the camp, the young Stanczak lost the use of his dominant right arm, which made his subsequent artistic achievements that much more impressive.

Following their internment in Siberia, the family migrated south - first through central Asia, then the Middle East, on to north Africa, before finally settling in a Polish refugee camp in Uganda in 1942. The family would remain in Uganda for six years, during which time Stanczak received his first private art lessons. In 1948, the family briefly moved to London, where they lived for two years before ultimately deciding to immigrate to the United States.

In 1950, Stanczak arrived in Cleveland, OH, and at some point thereafter, enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He graduated with a BFA in 1954 and was subsequently admitted to theMFA program at Yale, which he completed in 1956. During his time at Yale, Stanczak studied under Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli, and was roommates with Richard Anuszkiewicz. After receiving his MFA, Stanczak became a U.S. citizen and began a seven-year tenure teaching at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

The 1960s proved transformative for Stanczak, beginning in 1963, when he married the artist Barbara Meerpohl. The following year, he won first prize in an exhibition sponsored by the Dayton Museum of Art entitled Artists of Southern Ohio. This caught the eye of the famed gallerist Martha Jackson, who immediately added Stanczak to the prestigious roster of artists at her eponymous gallery in New York. Later that year, Jackson gave Stanczak his first solo show at the gallery, Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings. In a review for Arts Magazine, the artist Donald Judd coined the term "Op Art" when describing Stanczak's use of shapes and color.

In 1965, Stanczak's work was included in The Responsive Eye - a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, curated by William Seitz. This exhibition paved the way for the emergence of Op Art as a distinct movement in its own right, and brought immense recognition and commercial success for the participating artists, including Stanczak.

The 1960s and and 70s proved to be the critical high-water mark of Stanczak's career, as he enjoyed more than 30 solo exhibitions and participated in even more group shows during this period. He also continued to teach, returning to his adopted hometown of Cleveland in 1964, where he would serve as a professor of painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art until his retirement in 1995.

As the popularity of Op Art began to fade toward the end of the 1970s, Stanczak continued to expand his painterly practice, further exploring color theory and experimenting with scale and new media through ambitious public commissions.

With a legacy as one of the central figures of a major 20th-century art movement, Stanczak's work can be found in many public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York; the Cleveland Institute of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Brooklyn Museum; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; SFMoMA, San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and many more.

Julian Stanczak died at his home in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, OH in 2017.

Source: The Stanczak Foundation