Julian Stanczak

Julian Stanczak was born in Borownica, Poland in 1928.[1] In 1940, at the beginning of World War II, Stanczak and his family were forced into a Soviet labor camp in Perm, Siberia, where his right arm is seriously injured; he had been right-handed. In 1942, Stanczak and his family managed to escape the camp.[2] Aged sixteen, Stanczak decided to join the Polish Armed Forces in the West to receive food rations and medical help, becoming separated from his parents, sister, and brother. Realizing that he would permanently lose use of his right arm, Stanczak deserted.[2] He then traveled to a refugee camp in Tehran where he joined his mother and siblings; his father had by that time gone missing. The family was then transported to a Polish refugee camp in Masindi, British Uganda.[2] Stanczak remained there for six years and received his first art lessons during that period. He would later acknowledge that the time in Uganda had an important visual and artistic influence on his work; in particular, he was inspired by the colorful and vibrant local fabrics, indigenous music, and local landscape, which he described as "dazzling display".[3]^: 3

In 1948, Stanczak and the family moved to England where he enrolled at the Borough Polytechnic to study art.[3]^: 3 They moved to the United States in 1950 permanently relocating to Cleveland, Ohio, where Stanczak would spend the rest of his life and career.[1] 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, where he was roommates with Richard Anuszkiewicz who would later become one of the key artists associated with Op Art. Stanczak was awarded a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1956.[1] Albers, a recognized teacher at the Bauhaus and an influential figure in color theory, served as an important influence for Stanczak and his "work modeled the perceptual practices" of Stanczak.[4] In 1955, Stanczak's paintings of "an abstracted linear pattern" were included in an annual exhibition of new art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he was awarded an honorary mention.[5]^: 78 He became a United States citizen in 1957, taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati for 7 years.[1]

The term op art was first coined by the American Minimalist artist Donald Judd in a review for Arts Magazine of Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings held at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1964.[1] Critic Burton Wasserman would later describe the exhibition as a "demonstration of lean plastic purity".[6]^: 16 Stanczak's work was later included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye curated by William C. Seitz. Although the show was poorly received by the critics, it proved popular with the general public and helped establish Op art as a movement while many participating artists received substantial market recognition.[1] Stanczak, however, preferred to call his style "perceptual art" rather than "optical".[3]^: 8 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 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."[7]

In addition to being an artist, Stanczak was also a teacher, having worked at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1957 to 1964 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. He lived and worked in Ohio with his wife, sculptor Barbara Stanczak, until his death in 2017.[1]