Rudolf Baranik

Rudolf Baranik (September 10, 1920 – March 6, 1998) was an artist, educator, and writer.

Born in Lithuania, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, when his family sent him to live with a relative in Chicago.^[1][2] His parents were secular Jewish socialists and were killed by the Nazis during the Second World War.^[2] Baranik was well known in the art world for his political advocacy,^[3] 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,^[4] and he led virtually every progressive political movement within the New York art world from the 1960s to the mid-1990s.^[5] Significant exhibitions and awards include:

Baranik died in Eldorado, New Mexico in 1998.^[2]

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,^[6] with the late paintings in particular considered by American art critic, Donald Kuspit, "the true climax of fifty years of Western abstract painting."^[7]

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