A 30-piece painting by the late Julian Stanczak is being installed on a 20-foot-high by 16 1/4-foot-wide white wall in the two-story atrium of the renovated Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. The piece, titled, Proportional Mixing, 2011, is part of the artist’s Constellation series. The installation, five pieces high by six pieces across, was purchased through the John and Mildred Putnam Sculpture Collection, a compilation of 50-plus sculptures and other pieces of public art that enrich the campus and University Circle environment. Stanczak, who died in March, was a native of Poland who survived World War II as a child to become a world-renowned painter and pioneer in Optical Art, or “Op Art.” Stanczak moved to the United States in 1950 and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art and Master of Fine Arts from Yale University. In 1964, he became a professor of painting at Cleveland Institute of Art, a position he held until his retirement in 1995. Case Western Reserve University presented him an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters Degree in 2013.
Barbara Stanczak discusses one of her late husband Julian’s paintings with Grover “Cleve” Gilmore, dean of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. Photo by Daniel Robison.