Photograph: Andre Racz, Photo credit: Joe Pineiro.
Andre Racz, an artist and professor of painting and sculpture at Columbia for 32 years, died Sept. 29 at Englewood Hospital in New Jersey. He was 77 and lived in Demarest, N.J., and Vinalhaven, Maine.
He suffered a heart attack, his family said.
Racz joined the Columbia faculty in 1951 and led the graduate division of painting and sculpture in the School of the Arts twice, from 1964 to 1973 and from 1975 to 1977. He was named professor emeritus when he retired in 1983.
He exhibited widely in this country, Europe and South America and his paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture are represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, National Gallery, San Francisco Museum, National Library in Paris, Salzburg Museum in Austria and National Gallery of Australia.
A Guggenheim Fellow for printmaking in 1956 and a Fulbright research scholar in Chile in 1957, he received a Ford Foundation award in 1962, the Noyes first prize for intaglio from the Society of Graphic Artists in 1955, the Erickson prize for intaglio in 1953 and the purchase prize of the University of Kentucky in 1959.
Born in Cluj, Romania, in 1916, he graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1935, came to the United States in 1939 and became a naturalized citizen in 1948.
His drawings and prints illustrated several volumes of fiction and poetry, including a 1950 edition of Poemas de las Madres by Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet and winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize for literature.
Racz was widely admired as a teacher at Columbia, where he won the Bancroft Award for Distinguished Retiring Teachers in 1983. Students returned to his studio again and again to continue to study under him.
"Teaching is like gardening," he told an interviewer in 1983. "You put in a seed, but you don't walk away from it. Not if you expect something to grow. Doing art, the person learns about himself, becomes self- critical, makes decisions. Confidence develops."
He was married in 1962 to the former Claire Enge, who died in 1983. He is survived by three children from a previous marriage, Juan Andres, Maria Simone and Ana Constanza, all of Santiago, Chile, and a nephew, Andrei Racz of Manhattan.
