Anuszkiewicz Richard
(b Erie, PA, 23 May 1930). 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.). 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.). 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.). In his later
works he remained faithful to the approach he established in the
1960s while developing more subtle colour modulations and
sophisticated geometries. 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.
