Julian Stanczak was a foundational figure of American Op Art, the painter whose 1964 New York exhibition catalyzed the coinage of the term, and whose half-century body of optical, vibrating, color-saturated paintings explored the perceptual life of color with an unusual depth and discipline.
Julian Stanczak (November 5, 1928 – March 25, 2017) was a Polish-born American painter and printmaker, and one of the central figures of the Op Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Born in the village of Borownica in southeastern Poland, he was deported with his family in 1940 to a Soviet labor camp in Perm, Siberia, where the injury he sustained to his dominant right arm forced him to retrain himself to paint left-handed. He emigrated to the United States in 1950 and naturalized as a citizen, completed his BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1954, and went on to study with Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli at Yale (1954–56), where his roommate was the future Op artist Richard Anuszkiewicz.
His 1964 exhibition Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York is widely credited with prompting the coinage of the term "Op art", the label that would attach to a generation of American and European painters working with optical, perceptual, and vibratory effects. He taught painting at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1957 to 1964 and at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1964 to 1995, received the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1969 and an honorary doctorate from Case Western Reserve University in 2013, and his work entered more than sixty public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.