Richard Anuszkiewicz

(Erie, Pennsylvania, 1930 - 2020, Englewood, New Jersey)

North America, American

Born to Polish immigrants in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1930, Richard Anuszkiewicz first studied art at Erie Technical High School under the painter Joseph Plavcan. He won a National Scholastic Art Award as a senior and received a full scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he studied from 1948 until 1953.1 He then went on to train with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, where he completed his master’s degree in fine arts in 1955.2 Next, he returned to Ohio and earned a bachelor’s degree in education at Kent State University. Moving to New York City in 1957, he got a job restoring and assembling models of classical sculpture and architecture for the Junior Museum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He tried to find a gallery to represent him, but dealers like Leo Castelli and Martha Jackson looked at his work and turned him down. The artist recalled that, while he was developing the style that would carry his career, “Everybody would say: ‘Oh, they are nice, but so hard to look at. They hurt my eyes.’”3

Anuszkiewicz soon became one of the originators and foremost exponents of Op Art, a worldwide trend in artmaking that gained momentum during the 1960s. Victor Vasarely in France and Bridget Riley in England were his primary international counterparts. He was also connected to a significant concentration of influential Op artists who were educated in Northeast Ohio, including Ed Mieczkowski and Julian Stanczak (the latter was also his roommate at Yale). All of these artists, inspired by a mix of intuition and scientific discoveries about human sight, created bold and dazzling perceptual effects through intricately dense patterns, contrasting and complementary colors, hard-edged abstraction, and other carefully calibrated visual effects. Considering this milieu in 1964, Life Magazine called Anuszkiewicz “The New Wizard of Op.” More recently, while reflecting on a New York City gallery show of the artist’s work in 2000, the New York Times critic Holland Cotter described Anuszkiewicz’s paintings this way: “The drama—and that feels like the right word—is in the subtle chemistry of complementary colors, which makes the geometry glow as if light were leaking out from behind it.” Anuszkiewicz exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Florence Biennale, and documenta, and his works are held in permanent collections around the world.

Anuszkiewicz summarized his approach to painting on the occasion of a 1963 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and the description continued to hold for many decades thereafter: “My work is of an experimental nature and has centered on an investigation into the effects of complementary colors of full intensity when juxtaposed and the optical changes that occur as a result, and the study of the dynamic effect of the whole under changing conditions of light, and the effect of light on color.” Despite his hard-edged style and rigorous approach, Anuszkiewicz also realized that the perceptual effects of his work could be rich and ineffable. He elsewhere said that he was “interested in making something romantic out of a very, very mechanistic geometry.4 

^{1 Jonathan Burdick, “The Unmistakable Anuszkiewicz,” Erie Reader, 16 December 2020, https://www.eriereader.com/article/the-unmistakable-anuszkiewicz.}

^{2 This biography has been drawn in significant part from a text available on Anuszkiewicz’s personal website: Richard Anuszkiewicz, “About,” http://www.richardanuszkiewicz.com/about.}

^{3 Jillian Steinhauer, “Richard Anuszkiewicz, Whose Op Art Caught Eyes in the ’60s, Dies at 89,” New York Times, 25 May 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/arts/richard-anuszkiewicz-dead.html.}

^{4 Steinhauer, “Richard Anuszkiewicz.”} 

http://www.richardanuszkiewicz.com/

View objects by this artist.