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Julian Stanczak
Born	(1928-11-05)November 5, 1928 Borownica, Poland
Died	March 25, 2017(2017-03-25) (aged 88)
Residence	Seven Hills, Ohio
Alma mater	Cleveland Institute of Art Yale University
Occupation	Painter
Spouse(s)	Barbara Stanczak

Julian Stanczak (November 5, 1928 – March 25, 2017) was a Polish-born American painter and printmaker. The artist lived and worked in Seven Hills, Ohio with his wife, the sculptor Barbara Stanczak.

Biography

Julian Stanczak was born in Borownica, 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, aged thirteen, Stanczak 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. In Africa, Stanczak learned to write and paint left-handed. He then spent some years in London, before moving to the United States in 1950. He settled in Cleveland, Ohio. He became a United States citizen in 1957, taught at the Cincinnati Academy of Art for 7 years.

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 then trained under Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli at the Yale University, School of Art and Architecture where he received his Master of Fine Arts in 1956.

Works

The Op Art movement was named after his first major show, Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings, held at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1964. His work was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye. In 1966 he 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, at the Cleveland Institute of Art, 1964-1995. He was named "Outstanding American Educator" by the Educators of America in 1970.^[2]

Style

Stanczak deployed 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 created large-scale series, consisting of square panels upon which he examined 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


• 
  Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida


• 
  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 Museum of Art, 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)

References

External links

• Julian Stanczak


• Julian Stanczak interviewed by Brian Sherwin- myartspace.com


• Geoform: An Interview with Artist Julian Stanczak, 2011