Rudolf Baranik

Rudolf Baranik (1920–1998) was an artist, educator and writer.

Born in Lithuania, he immigrated to the United States in 1938. He was well known in the art world for his political advocacy,^[1] and was one of the first artists to organize protests against the war in Vietnam. Some of his best known works are the Napalm Elegies, a series of 30 antiwar paintings created between 1967 and 1974. His art was inspired by his sense of the gross inequities around the world,^[2] and he led virtually every progressive political movement within the New York art world from the 1960s to the mid-1990s.^[3] Significant exhibitions and awards include:1981 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, 1982 "Art Couples 1: May Stevens and Rudolf Baranik," P.S. 1, New York, NY, and 1966 Peace Tower. Baranik's art is included in many collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hirshhorn Museum.

Baranik died in Eldorado, New Mexico in 1998.

The paintings of Rudolf Baranik are increasingly thought to be among the most important works of the New York School painting of the 1960s and 1970s,^[4] with the late paintings in particular considered by American art critic, Donald Kuspit, "the true climax of fifty years of Western abstract painting."^[5]

References

1. "The New York Times," by Roberta Smith, March 15, 1998
2. Elizabeth Hess in Forward to Poetics and Politics in the Art of Rudolf Baranik, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997.
3. Museum of New Mexico, Museum of Fine Arts, "Idea Photographic: After Modernism," Artists, Rudolf Baranik, by Virginia Lee Lierz
4. David Craven, Poetics and Politics in the Art of Rudolf Baranik, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997.
5. "Rudolf Baranik: An Overview," by Donald Kuspit, a paper presented on the occasion of the memorial retrospective exhibition of Rudolf Baranik's art at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, November 2000.