I’m lucky that I get to live with a Julian Stanczak painting, bought by my father-in-law in 1968, when Op Art was really something. I saw a show on Stanczak in Chelsea a few years ago, and was blown away that he is still producing Op Art Out of Ohio. Now the D. Wigmore Gallery is having a show on Stanczak, his better-known Yale Art School classmate Richard Anuskiewicz, and several others from the Ohio school.
I love that Stanczak, at least in the 1960s, rarely reverted to the box-in-box motif popularized in airports by Victor Vasarely. His pictures were landscapes, albeit landscapes of shimmering shapes. The Times reviewed it today, and it seems well worth seeing, even if just for contrast, in a season when people are talking about Rothko’s reds and Johns’s stripes.
