Richard Stankiewicz

(1922–83). Sculptor. Known for welded assemblages of scrap metal, in the 1950s he pioneered the use of found materials in sculpture. At first, his inventions made witty use of visual analogies between mechanical and anthropomorphic shapes. By the early 1960s, he more frequently emphasized purely formal qualities of his materials. Combining precedents in the sculpture of Picasso, Alexander Calder, and David Smith with the spirit of dada interventions and surrealist fantasies, his innovative work figured prominently in establishing the legitimacy of junk art. Born in Philadelphia, Richard Peter Stankiewicz moved with his family to Detroit. After working in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal depression-relief project, he served in the U.S. Navy from 1941until1947. He then moved to New York to study painting with Hans Hofmann. In 1950 he left for a year in Paris, where he studied briefly with painter Fernand Léger and then with sculptor Ossip Zadkine. While abroad he began producing abstract terra cottas, which evolved into linear, plaster-covered wire sculptures. The characteristic junk sculptures emerged not long after his return to New York in June 1951. Sometime during the following winter, while digging a garden space outside his studio building, he unearthed pieces of industrial detritus. After initially tossing them aside, he observed their aesthetic potential and bought a do-it-yourself book to learn welding. In 1953 he first showed the new work, which was almost immediately recognized for its originality but also, in the minds of many observers, for its shocking lack of taste and serious purpose. With time, his work gained appreciation for its formal logic, homage to urban civilization, psychological acuteness, and contribution to the period's rethinking of the intersection between art and life. Stankiewicz's popularity waned after the early 1960s, at least partly because the artist abandoned New York. In 1962 he moved permanently to rural Worthington in western Massachusetts. From 1967 until retirement in 1981, he taught at the State University of New York at Albany. On a 1969 visit to Australia, he adopted a cleaner and more structural approach in fifteen large sculptures made of steel. During the 1970s and early 1980s he used found and fabricated elements in sculptures that variously incorporate allusion and abstraction. He died at his home in Worthington.