Transfigured Wasteland: The Sculpture of Richard Stankiewicz

This is the first monograph on the art and life of Richard Stankiewicz (1922-1983), whose welded sculpture made of rusted iron and steel castoff materials played an important part in redefining art in New York in the 1950s. Although his work has been included in group exhibitions of Assemblage, Neo-Dada, and Abstract Expressionism, Stankiewicz's art has eluded conclusive critical identification. This elusiveness may be attributed to its persistent and subtly subversive stance toward the dominant artistic vocabularies of the decades in which it was produced, crucial decades in which the character of art and its audience changed radically. As is the case of several artists who figured significantly in the transition from the 1950s to the 60s, the full range of Stankiewicz's art has never received sustained critical attention, nor has his pioneering "junk sculpture" ever been viewed in the larger context of his thirty-year career. This study traces Stankiewicz's particular ambitions and apprehends his larger intentions in relation to the world of concerns in which they developed. A student of Hans Hofmann and Ossip Zadkine, Stankiewicz belonged to the second generation of the New York School. He based his art on Cubist structural principles and a Surrealist-inspired sense of fantasy. In addition to a determination to confront compelling formal challenges, he also inherited a vitalist philosophy of art from which all of his finest works derive their force as sculpture: throughout his career, he attempted to convey a "sense of presence" in his configurations and to vitalize the materials he used in them. In offering a detailed account of Stankiewicz's artistic evolution, this inquiry devotes considerable attention to the life history of the artist because there is no other published source of this information. Although it cannot claim to be a full-scale biography, this study makes available important information that may one day find its way into one. And while it is not a catalogue raisonne of the oeuvre, it is based on documentation and research that lays the groundwork for such a comprehensive volume.