Op artist Julian Stanczak, was born in eastern Poland,
(Borownica), in 1928. He is recognized as a Polish-American painter/printmaker,
and currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio. As for his education, it came
after a long period of travel during and after WWII. Stanczak migrated from a
Siberian labor camp, where he lost the use of his right arm, and had to re-train
himself to paint with his left hand. He spent some time with the Polish
army-in-exile in Persia and then migrated to Africa where he lived in Uganda.
Later on, he moved to London and eventually came to the United States in
1950 where he started his artistic studies. Stanczak received his B.F.A. degree
from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1954, and then went to Yale
University to study with Josef Albers, where
he received his M.F.A. degree in 1956.
In
addition to being an artist, Stanczak taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati
1957–64, and he taught Painting for thirty years at the Cleveland
Institute of Art, 1964-1995. He once said… "
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."
How
many of us can be recognized as having an art movement named after our work?
Stanczak’s first major solo show in New York was held at the Martha Jackson Gallery(1964) and was aptly called Julian
Stanczak: Optical Paintings. It was the phrase that named the Op Art movement.
He was included in MOMA’s The Responsive Eye
exhibition, and later went on to make the surface of his paintings seem to
vibrate through wavy lines and complementing color palettes. Stanczak used
repeating forms to create an art of his experience; useding varying transparent
color ranges with a formal geometric grid. From his explorations he
continued to expand the dialog already begun with Josef Albers, Richard Anuskiewicz and Illinois
Op artist Hal Rogoff.
By
1966 Bridget Riley, Stanczak, Rogoff and Anuszkiewicz, were all creating color op art though Stanczak's compositions were the most complex of all of the color practitioners. Taking his cue
from Albers' book Interaction
of Color, Stanczak created various spatial experiences with color and geometry. Color has no simple systematized equivalent, but
it can derive from the electromagnetic scale in multi-dimensions that correspond to the magnitudes expressed in musical pitch energy. Stanczak arranged patterns upon
patterns so one would see them as them
as a series of transparent layered color screens.
The Origins of Op Art
Walter
Gropius’ Bauhaus alternative
school of Architecture and Applied Arts, with its disciplined style based on geometric
shapes of the cube, the rectangle and the circle was conceived with the idea of creating a educational community
of artists. When the Nazis shut down the school, many of its artists and
teachers fled Germany for Hungary and the United States. Victor Vasarely, long
considered the the ‘father’ of Op Art, trained at the Budapest school.
The
development of 20th c. art to separate itself from representational
imagery through de-emphasis of a traditional image or natural spatial concerns
as was found in Cubism and Abstract Expressionism propelled the idea of flat,
patterned optics and the move toward geometric shapes and Minimalism. Studies on the mathematical/scientific basis
of perception
(
how the eye and brain work together to perceive color, light, depth,
perspective, size, shape, and motion, and how their functional relationship - how the retina ‘sees’ patterns and the brain ‘interprets’
them) had been going on since the 1800s, had a resurgence in the 1950s and
1960s. Confusion between these two creates a visual stimuli and an optical ‘vibration’, like how some colors placed next to neutral greys appear to
create new colors, or an echo of another color, an after image, etc.
Op
Art can also be seen as having evolved from Kinetic Art . The use of repetition, pattern and line, often
in high contrast or complementary colors, was one way Op Artists used to create
this illusion of movement. The overall effect let the viewer see a vibration as the eye tried to separate the color complements. Image-wise, the
geometrically-based nature of Op Art is almost always non-representational.
However, despite this, Op artists made use of the traditional
perspective techniques to allow for an accurate
representation of the natural world in order to create the illusion of
depth/space.
Stanczak's contribution to the Op Art movement is significant and has worked from within the bounds of personal tragedy, to lock it firmly in the past and capably create a new illusion of one's perspective/perception. The tragedies of his early years in Siberia and the physical trauma of re-training himself to create with his left arm left its mark, but he did not let it dictate his ability to work, nor did it stop him from making work that is technically and mathematically perfect. His paintings and screenprints strongly align themselves with his peers and we can appreciate his antecedence at a time when younger artists like Paul Kuhn and Eve Leader are exploring the nuances of Neo-Geo abstraction.
Stanczak’s Selected Honors and Permanent Collections:
1966 - "New Talent" by Art in America magazine
1970 - "Outstanding American Educator", Educators of America
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Centrum Sztuki Studio im Stanislawa I. Witkiewicza, Warsaw, Poland
Corcoran Museum of Art Washington, DC
Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee Wisconsin
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, Massachusetts
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Tamayo Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England
