CLEVELAND, Ohio - Ed Mieczkowski, one of the city's leading 20th century artists, and a co-founder of the Anonima group of geometric abstractionists here in the 1960s, died Friday in Newport Beach, CA, at age 87.
After being hospitalized earlier this month, Mieczkowski decided to enter Hospice care after experiencing multiple organ failures, said Diana J. Meinhold, trustee of the artist's trust.
Grafton Nunes, president of the Cleveland Institute of Art, said admirers of the artist and his work responded quickly Monday morning when he shared news of Mieczkowski's death on his facebook page.
"Without question, Ed was the most influential artist who lived in Cleveland during the second half of the twentieth Century," retired Cleveland gallerist William Busta wrote in response to Nunes's announcement.
"Leading by example with an exhaustive and spectacular studio practice; actively participating in and invigorating art organizations; maintaining relationships with former students and continuing to mentor them after graduation; and always, always, showing up," Busta added. "Damn good poet as well."
Ellen O'Malley of Bethelehem, PA, one of the artist's four children, said: "He was a force of nature. He was a character. He influenced quite a few people."
The career
Mieczkowski taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1959 to 1998, influencing generations of students.
His work ranged from eye-tingling abstractions that emphasized color and pattern to create illusions of radiant light that buzzed on the retina.
He also worked in a more Constructivist mode, painting jazzy images with dense, layered thickets of lines and sharp, angular bars of color.
The artist was part of a circle of mid-century geometric abstractionists active in Ohio that included Julian Stanczak, and whose works were celebrated in the 2007 exhibition "Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s," held at the Columbus Museum of Art.
Like Stanczak, Mieczkowski participated in the pivotal 1965 exhibition "The Responsive Eye" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which launched Op Art.
Mieczkowski co-founded the Anonima group in 1960 in Cleveland with painters Ernst Benkert and Francis Hewitt.
Making art history in Cleveland
A website dedicated to the collaborative, organized by Hewitt's son, the contemporary artist Corin Hewitt, says their works were "propelled by their rejection of the cult of the individual ego and automatic style of the Abstract Expressionists."
The website said they "worked collaboratively on grid-based, spatially fluctuating drawings and paintings that were precise investigations of the scientific phenomena and psychology of optical perception."
The website also pointed out that Anonima works were "accompanied by writings: proposals, projects and manifestos - socialist in nature - which the artists considered essential to the experience and understanding of their work.
"Their drawings, paintings and writings, which had much in common with the positions of artist Ad Reinhardt, and with the Russian Constructivists..."
Corin Hewitt said Monday he created the Anonima website to share knowledge about the group, which disbanded in 1971.
"He had a poetic and omnivorous mind," Hewitt said of Mieczkowski. "His interests were unorthodox and wide-ranging, and his output was incredibly prodigious."
As a member of Anonima, "he brought a level of mechanical precision to the groups thinking that was was very specific," Hewitt said. "He had a kind of brilliance to him, and was also a very complex person."
A life in art
Born in Pittsburgh on Nov. 26, 1929, Mieczkowski received a bachelor of fine arts degree in Painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1957, and a master of fine arts in painting and printmaking from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1959.
In a November, 2012 interview posted on the Geoform.net website, Mieczkowski described the Cleveland Institute of Art in the 1950s as "made up of conservative artists who were interested in Regionalism. They didn't even accept Cubism. It was a pretty backward place."
"Initially I worked realistically," Mieczkowski said, "but after several years, I did move on to experiment with abstraction."
Around that time, O'Malley said, Mieczkowski married the former Lois Knowles. Together, they had four children, who survive the artist. In addition to O'Malley, they are: Norman Mieczkowski of Lorain, O, Teo Mieczkowski of Olmsted Falls, and Joli Mieczkowski, of New York, NY.
After a brief splash of national attention from participating in the MOMA show, Mieczkowski labored on in relative obscurity in Cleveland, much like his fellow faculty member, Op Artist Julian Stanczak.
A second act
And, like Stanczak, whom critics and collectors rediscovered in the late 1990s, Mieczkowski too experienced a personal renaissance late in his career.
After retiring from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Mieczkowski, who had divorced Knowles, was remarried to former actress Chloe Pollock, whom he met in Los Angeles in 1998.
He said the two met after he gave a speech about his work at the Laguna Beach Art Museum, and she thrust her card into his hand, saying she hadn't understood a word he'd said.
In a 2006 interview with The Plain Dealer, Mieczkowski said he had signed an agreement with LewAllen Contemporary, a gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., that mounted a 40-year retrospective of his work.
The artist said that within a year, the gallery had sold more than a half-dozen of his works at prices up to $45,000, which he said he never could have achieved in Cleveland.
A year later, Mieczkowski had a large show at the Tregoning & Co. Gallery in Cleveland.
"I cherished my long friendship with Ed," art dealer William Tregoning said in a statement provided to the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Tregoning said he considered "the major exhibition of his art that T&Co opened in our new galleries on 78th Street exactly 10 years ago this month, to be one of the great hallmarks of my professional career."
Meinhold said that Mieczkowski continued to work regularly until Pollock's death in April 2016.
"He didn't paint very much from the time that Chloe passed," Meinhold said. "He would sketch some of the time, but frankly I think he lost his motivation. Chloe was such a dynamic person, and it wasn't the same for him."
Meinhold said that Mieszkowski would be buried at Good Shepherd Cemetery in Huntington Beach, CA. A memorial service will be held there Thursday at 2 p.m., she said.
She said she'd always remember Mieczkowski's sense of humor.
"Ed always loved a good joke and he loved it when he could make the joke," she said. After he broke his leg in April, he had it set in "this horrendously bright neon fuchsia cast. He got lots of attention."