Richard Anuszkiewicz in 2016. Photograph: Estate of Richard Anuszkiewicz
“People thought that I always wanted to shock the eye,” he once told the New York Times. “I didn’t want to shock the eye. I wanted to use colors together that had never been used together before. I’m still doing what I was doing, but in greater depth.”
Richard Anuszkiewicz is one of the masters of color in modern American art. His oeuvre has developed and evolved over a sixty-year period, but at the root of his approach certain key principles remain, most vitally the capacity of the eye to 'mix' complementary colors presented separately on the canvas. After training with the great Bauhaus artist and teacher Josef Albers at Yale, Anuszkiewicz carried the legacies of geometrical abstraction and tonal harmony a step further than his mentor by experimenting with an unprecedented range of color contrasts.
The term Op art, short for optical art, had yet to be coined when Anuszkiewicz began his formal experiments into the effects of vibrant color and geometry on the human eye in the 1950s. It was a lifelong project for the artist, and throughout his career he assembled increasingly hypnotic compositions with a mix of mathematical precision and poetry.
The works he was creating by the early 1960s seemed to bring pigment alive on the canvas, making it vibrate, hum, or float in front of the picture surface. Combining these qualities with the illusory, architectonic and trompe-l'oeil effects of Op Art - a movement Anuszkiewicz helped to define and which, in its suggestion of visual movement, was an offshoot of Kinetic Art - generated a body of work which at once sat within various traditions and had a warmth and spiritual energy entirely its own.