Artist of the day: Artist of the day, March 17, 2020: Wojciech Fangor, a Polish painter, graphic artist, and sculptor (#944)

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Artist of the day, March 17, 2020: Wojciech Fangor, a Polish painter, graphic artist, and sculptor (#944)

Wojciech Fangor (1922 –2015) was a Polish painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and co-creator of the Polish School of Posters.

After the outbreak of World War II, he joined his mother and sister at a family home in Klarysew, about 10 miles southeast of Warsaw, and took private art lessons. After the war, he was granted a diploma in absentia from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he later taught, and for a time painted in a figurative style that reflected his interest in Cubism, French Impressionism, and German Expressionism.

After Socialist Realism became Poland’s official style in 1949, Mr. Fangor turned out paintings with a political message, notably “Korean Mother,” which depicted a small Korean boy grieving over the body of his mother, killed by American bombs, and “Lenin in Poronin.” In the arresting “Figures,” he placed two stalwart proletarian workers, a man, and a woman, next to a coolly glamorous Western woman, with bright-red manicured nails, wearing oversize sunglasses and a chic dress emblazoned with the words “London,” “Wall Street,” “Miami” and “Coca-Cola.”

Dissatisfied with painting as a propaganda medium, he became a founding member of the Polish Poster School, known for its bold, modernist design, and created hundreds of film posters. In the new atmosphere of artistic freedom that took hold in the Soviet bloc after Stalin’s death, Mr. Fangor began experimenting with abstraction, using oil on primed canvas, rather than acrylic

He achieved national fame with a 1958 installation at the New Culture Salon in Warsaw, “Study of Space.” Staged in collaboration with the architect Stanislaw Zamecznik and the designer Oskar Hansen, it put 20 of his optical paintings on display. A more ambitious version of the installation, called “Color in Space,” was shown in Amsterdam at the Stedelijk Museum the following year.

In 1961, MoMA included one of his paintings in the exhibition “15 Polish Painters,” and a year later he toured colleges and art schools in the United States on a grant.

After teaching in West Berlin and in Britain, he emigrated to the United States in 1966 and soon began showing at the Galerie Chalette on the Upper East Side. He also taught art at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J. By the time that Guggenheim show, however, interest in Op Art was waning, and his career went into decline.

In the 1970s, he began incorporating images from television into his work, breaking them into pixel-like dots of color. He later included fragments of scenes, characters, and objects drawn from famous paintings or popular magazines in his work.

In 1999, Mr. Fangor returned to Poland, where he set up a studio in an old mill in Bledow, near Warsaw, and enjoyed a career resurgence.

He created graphic design for the new metro line in Warsaw, whose first segment opened in March, and in 2012 he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the National Museum in Krakow.

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