The Painting Report: Richard Anuszkiewicz
Monument Valley, 1970, Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 48 in., Private Collection.
Richard Anuszkiewicz a pioneering practitioner of OpArt (Optical Art) died on May 19th, 2020 at his home in N.J., he was 89. Born in 1930 in Erie PA, Anuszkiewicz was a student of the great German/American color theorist, Josef Albers. His studies with Albers set the stage for his life long exploration of the contextual relationships of color. Through this lens Anuszkiewicz explored light, chroma, and line, creating sophisticated but playful work. “Color function becomes my subject matter, and its performance is my painting.”
The Contemporaries gallery in NYC hosted his first solo show in 1960. The founding director of MoMA, Alfred Barr Jr. purchased two of his paintings, which ignited his career. Anuszkiewicz was included in The Whitney Museum Of American Art’s show titled “Geometric Abstraction in American” in 1962.
Critics dismissed his work as empty spectacle, but Anuszkiewicz was not deterred. He moved forward, continuing to create hard-edged abstract interactions of color that often used complementary hues that installed a radiant quality to his work. He was concerned with mathematical ideas and not the expressiveness of the artist’s hand. “I’m interested in making something romantic out of a very mechanistic geometry.” As his career progressed his palette softened, exploring more nuanced color relationships.
Splendor Of Red, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 in., The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
One of my favorite Anuszkiewicz paintings is Splendor Of Red, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 in, 1965. The painting depicts a red square turned on its axis. Lines radiate out from the square to the painting’s edge, as if the square were the sun. The red of the painting is juxtaposed against a cool pale grayish blue. This contrast makes the red square radiate with light and emphasizes the red’s cooler qualities. As the radiant lines extend further from the central square, red begins to overtake the areas of grayish blue as the red lines thicken. This transition creates a second larger red square which punctuates the paintings third zone. Here in this third zone, Anuszkiewicz’s adds orange to the lines radiating out to the edge of the canvas. This orange adds a warming effect, counteracting the coolness of the grayish blue.
Using the square, radiant lines, and three colors, Anuszkiewicz creates a dazzling image that uses geometry to explore the cool and warm qualities of red. What makes the painting so interesting is the fact that the three colors remain static (there is no variation within each color). It is shifting line thickness that creates an optical experience. Our eye mixes each color and the static red shifts from cool to warm based on the changing color relationships around it. For me his paintings continue Albers’ tradition and acts as exciting entry points into the world of color.
You can explore Anuszkiewicz and his work further using the following links.