Richard Anuszkiewicz, An Op-Art Pioneer Who Pushed Geometric Abstraction to Illusory Ends, Has Died at 89

Richard Anuszkiewicz, an American painter whose meticulous,
mathematical approach to color and composition made him one of
Op-Art’s biggest stars, died at his home in Englewood, New Jersey
on May 19—just four days before his 90th birthday.

The artist’s son confirmed the news to the New York Times. A
cause of death was not provided.

Anuszkiewicz rose to prominence in the early 1960s as part of a
group of artists, including Julian Stanczak and Bridget Riley, that
pushed the minimal geometric forms color field to more illusory
ends, creating paintings that played on perception. The artist was
included in the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Responsive Eye,” the
1965 exhibition now considered to be the capstone of the Op-Art
movement. At the time, critic Grace Glueck suggested Anuszkiewicz
“might already be called an op old master.”

“I’m interested in making something romantic out of a very, very
mechanistic geometry,” Anuskiewicz once said. “Geometry and color
represent to me an idealized classical place that’s very clear and
very pure.”

Anuszkiewicz was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1930, the son of
Polish immigrants. A talented artist at a young age, he won
scholarships to the Cleveland Institute of Art. After graduating in
1953, he furthered his pursuits at the Yale University School of
Art and Architecture, where he studied with Josef Albers—a
relationship that would come to loom large in Anuszkiewicz’s
career. It was Albers who, a couple of years after Anuszkiewicz’s
graduation from Yale, inspired the young artist to move away from
the kind of drab realism he had, until that point, dabbled in, and
to instead experiment with the limits of color and formal
abstraction.

“[Albers] shook up my whole way of thinking and it took me a
couple of years to get myself reassembled,” Anuszkiewicz said in a
1970 interview.

After returning to Ohio to earn a degree in education from Kent
State University, Anuszkiewicz moved to New York in 1957, where his
work was received with mixed responses from gallerists.

“Abstract Expressionism was very popular,” he once said. “My
things were very hard-edged, very strong in color—a use of color
that nobody was using. Everybody would say, ‘Oh, they are nice, but
so hard to look at. They hurt my eyes.’”

When he did secure his first gallery show in 1959, a lack of
sales during the initial weeks found the owner threatening to take
the exhibition down before Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s founding
director, purchased two paintings, including one for the museum’s
collection.

After that, Anuszkiewicz’s career took off. He was included in
major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA
before the “The Responsive Eye” opened in ‘65, and he had his first
career survey at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1966. Though many
of his Op-Art contemporaries experimented with other styles,
Anuszkiewicz remained dedicated to the exploration of line and
color for his entire life, favoring a more intellectual approach to
his work.

“We put too much emphasis on the hand,” he said in 1970. “And
the mind is something that can never be replaced. You can never
create any new art unless it’s created by the human mind.”

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Geometric Abstraction to Illusory Ends, Has Died at 89 appeared
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