MBFA

Richard Anuszkiewicz studied with Josef Albers at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture. Soon after, he moved to New York in 1957 and began to focus heavily on abstraction. During his first one-man show at the Contemporaries Gallery in 1960, Alfred Barr purchased a painting for the Museum of Modern Art. Subsequently, his participation in The Museum of Modern Art’s The Responsive Eye helped secure his position as a leader of the “Op Art” movement during the 1960s.

In this painting, Anuszkiewicz’ interest in color theory can be seen, especially in his choice of complimentary colors red and green. The angular lines seem to emanate from and converge towards the center diamond, or tilted square. The visual effects that the artist seeks to create can only be realized through the active optical participation of the viewer, as is true in the work of Monet, Seurat, and Signac, other artists who concentrated on the interaction of color.

Anuszkiewicz himself remarked, “My interest in the contributions of the Impressionists, Neoimpressionists, and Josef Albers (with whom I studied from 1953 to 1955), is at least in part responsible for my involvement with color…I would like to point out that the image in my work has always been determined by what I wanted the color to do. Color function becomes my subject matter and its performance is my painting.” (Color Function Painting: The Art of Josef Albers. Julian Stanczak and Richard Anuszkiewicz, Wake Forest University Fine Arts Gallery, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1996)