Richard Anuszkiewicz

American painter, printmaker and sculptor. He trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, OH (1948–53), and under Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, CT (1953–5). In his paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s he depicted everyday city life, as in The Bridge (1950; artist’s priv. col., see Lunde, pl. 66). In 1957 he moved to New York, where from 1957 to 1958 he worked as a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and from 1959 to 1961 as a silver designer for Tiffany and Co. During this period he began to produce abstract paintings, using either organic or geometric repeated forms, as in Winter Recipe (1958; New York, Mr and Mrs David Evins priv. col., see Lunde, pl. 100). These led in the early 1960s to asymmetric and imperfectly geometric works, such as Fluorescent Complement (1960; New York, MOMA), and then to more rigidly structured arrangements, for example In the Fourth of Three (1963; New York, Whitney), which consists of blue and green squares on a red ground. He often incorporated geometrical networks of coloured lines, thus exploring the phenomenon of optical mixtures in these mature works, with which he made his contribution to Op art, as in Iridescence (1965; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.), although these sometimes extend only a little way in from the edge of the picture. The strong internal structure of each work is the result not of a rigid system, however, but of a trial-and-error approach to composition; from the early 1960s he applied these methods also to screenprints, lithographs and prints made by intaglio techniques, still within the terms of Op art. In the late 1960s he turned to sculpture, characteristically making painted wooden cubes, sometimes on a mirror base, as in Spiral (1967; artist’s priv. col., see Lunde, pl. 29). In his later works he remained faithful to the approach he established in the 1960s while developing more subtle colour modulations and sophisticated geometries (e.g. Deep Magenta Square, 1978; see also Colour interaction). These were extended into low relief, with a new monumentality, in the mid-1980s. His main concern continued to be with the perception of colours and with the exploration of a variety of effects