Lithographs of Tadeusz Lapinski (1928-2016)
From the Collection of Stanley Naj
June 9 - July 27, 2022
Reception | June 23rd 12-3pm
We at the Julio Fine Arts Gallery of Loyola University Maryland are so pleased to be able to present this beautiful exhibition of Lithographs by Tadeusz Lapinski from the collection of Stanley Naj. It only takes a moment of speaking to Stanley to understand the depths of his passion for this artist, and I must say it is quite infectious. Lapinski, originally from Poland and eventually emigrating to the United States, settled in this area and was a longtime faculty member at University of Maryland, College Park. His work is a testament of both its time as well as Lapinski’s experimentation and skill in the technical boundaries of the medium of Lithography. We are excited and humbled to bring this work onto the walls of the gallery and hope you will be inspired to learn more about the man, the medium, and the history surrounding its making.
Megan Rook-Koepsel
Gallery Director, Julio Fine Arts Gallery
Loyola University Maryland
Carnival Lithograph, A/P; ca. 1985
Aurora Lithograph, A/P; ca. 1985
A Brief History of the Artist
Tadeusz Lapinski was born in Rawa Mazowiecka, Poland. As a child, he spent many hours, daily, at his grandfather's publishing enterprise. There, he learned to draw illustrations good enough to be printed in some of the publications.
During World War II, Tad’s family moved to Warsaw and, as a boy scout, he was involved in painting the "Fighting Poland" emblems on walls and sidewalks. He survived the five-year travail and continued his devotion to drawing by sketching ruins of bombed-out buildings and surviving historic structures throughout his high school years.
In 1952, he entered Warsaw University and graduated in 1956 with an MFA specializing in lithography. Thereafter, he worked out of his studio generating aquatints, lithographs, and paintings, and exhibiting in Bosnia, Macedonia, Croatia, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, and Poland. Yugoslavian authorities enticed him to become a director of a Modern Art Center.
New York's Printing Institute at Pratt invited Lapinski to participate in an artist-in-residence program. While attending, he exhibited at MOMA and Cleveland Museum of Modern Art, selling all his lithographs.
Completing his stint at Pratt, he went on to exhibit in Brazil, Great Britain, Norway, Holland, Sweden, France, Germany, Austria, China, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Peru, Uruguay, Chile, Slovenia, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaii.
His art can be found in such institutions as the National Gallery, the White House, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco Museum of Art, Museum of modern Art in Tokyo, Tianjin Museum in China and 200 other cultural centers.
He participated in over 220 exhibitions, most of them being one-man efforts, others with graduates of the Pratt program, and some with such distinguished artists as Joan Miro.
Amidst promoting his art, in 1972, Tadeusz Lapinski joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park. He spent some 40 years instructing in the art of color lithography and painting. Besides using multiple plates, Prof. Lapinski, introduced his own special technique which he called "a rainbow effect" in his artistic images, generating most unusual metaphors and powerful images.
B.W. Fine Arts Gallery and Franz Bader Gallery represented Prof. Lapinski in Washington DC, and The Kennedy Gallery and Weintraub Gallery exhibited his works in New York City.
During his lifetime, he accumulated over forty major awards, among them the Unesco Medal for Cultural Contributions, gold and silver medals in the Audubon Society competition, the gold medal in Venice printed arts competition, and others.
He transitioned to retirement, while continuing to create and exhibit, both in the U.S. and Europe.
Prof. Lapinski departed from us on September 14, 2016.
A Statement from the Collector
Collecting is just another version of exploring. Whether gathering what nature has created, in the form of crystals, or man has engineered in three-dimensions or imagined and recorded on some surface, it can be just as exciting and challenging as experiencing the joy of archeology or history in a formal setting.
In my childhood, watching a group of adults digging near the wall of a 12th century castle and eventually finding a large pot full of medieval coins inspired me to start my own coin collection. So, for the next six months or so I would trade all of my toys for anything that resembled an old coin. Seeing my excitement with the newly acquired coins, my grandmother and my aunt eventually found a small catalogue illustrated by an artist and displaying early coins of the regions of Western Poland called Lower Silesia and Pomerania. The book inspired me to frequent our meager town library and bookstores in the nearby large towns looking for affordable books about the history of the region, and Latin and German language dictionaries so I could make sense of the coins I possessed.
I arrived in the United States in 1961, and within four months of my stay in Chicago I began to explore the city and learn of the history of its residents. I discovered that the Polish American community was one of the largest ethnic groups among the 86 nationalities living there.
The second political migration of Poles to the United States was the result of the November 1831 uprising. In 1834, officers and cavalry soldiers deported by the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria arrived in New York. Some of them were writers, artists, poets, musicians, and composers. They translated an anthology of Polish poetry and drama, contributed over 680 articles to various literary magazines, and exhibited hundreds of art pieces in some of the most prestigious venues. I found myself in seventh heaven.
My excitement, however, was interrupted by the Vietnam War, and in 1970, I volunteered and found myself working in Ft. Meade as a linguist. During this time, I became aware of a New York artist named Tadeusz Lapinski who was considered to be the most accomplished and popular lithographers of the time. In 1973 he would be teaching at University of Maryland, College Park and would work there for the next 40 years.
Returning to Chicago, I went back to the University of Illinois to complete my studies in Slavic Linguistics, and eventually to my collecting. Between these two activities, I found someone who not just tolerated, but supported my collecting - my wife Elizabeth.
In the 1980's I donated eight of my collections to an institution in Poland specializing in the history of Polish emigration worldwide and placed a Prisoner of War collection of documents and art in Douglas, Wyoming, where the largest of our POW camps was built in 1942. German and Italian soldiers captured in Europe, who were imprisoned there, not only worked on local farms but the artists among them decorated the town's institutions and camps, offices and mess halls.
Lapinski rose in popularity, and I began to look for his work in New York and New Jersey auctions. Later, he appeared in galleries in Nevada, California, Louisiana and Florida. Some private collectors who did not want to break up their holdings offered their entire selections to me. My last acquisition came from a former Washington DC gallery owner. Today, my wife and I are the happy owners of some 700 works of Tadeusz Lapinski.