Arts and Design

Richard Anuszkiewicz obituary


One Friday evening in 1953, Richard Anuszkiewicz, who has died aged 89, was painting in his cubicle at the Yale School of Art when a white-haired figure appeared silently at his side. This was Josef Albers, the ex-Bauhaus master who was then chairman of the school’s painting department. Albers was famed for the brutality of his Friday night critiques, or “crits”. Ex-GIs, back from Korea, would emerge from them with tears running down their faces. “You never really knew whether he was going to tear you down or build you up in a crit,” Anuszkiewicz recalled in an interview in 1996. “You had your suspicions, though.”

When the German paled in front of Anuszkiewicz’s painting – of a butcher in a gory apron, in the gritty, New York Ashcan school style – the 23-year-old student feared the worst. Instead, Albers croaked, “Ach, boy, you don’t mind if I don’t look at it. I can’t stand blood,” and stalked off. This was the more unexpected because figure painting was one of many genres for which Albers had no time. The worst sin, though, was to paint like Albers. He was then three years into the series Homage to the Square. Students who painted squares would receive the rebuke, “That’s my shape! Go get your own.”

“Albers shook up my whole way of thinking,” Anuszkiewicz would later say. “It took me a couple of years to get myself reassembled.” It was only after leaving Yale in 1955 that he would feel free to develop the style for which he became known. This, to his ex-teacher’s annoyance, would for a decade involve the painting of squares.

Grand Midnight Palace, 1989, from Anuszkiewicz’s Translumina series.



Grand Midnight Palace, 1989, from Anuszkiewicz’s Translumina series. Photograph: Estate of Richard Anuszkiewicz

Anuszkiewicz was born in the rust-belt town of Erie, Pennsylvania, not far from his contemporary, Andy Warhol. Like Warhol’s, his family was working class, religious and came from Mitteleuropa. Richard’s Polish-born father, Adam, was a machinist in a paper mill; his mother, Victoria (nee Jankowski), a widow who already had five children. Richard would be the only child of their marriage.

The nuns at the local Catholic parish school noticed, and encouraged, his precocious talent for drawing. In 1947, Anuszkiewicz won a National Scholastic Art award, followed the next year by a full scholarship to the Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, from where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1953. That year as well, he was given a Pulitzer travel fellowship. Rather than using this to go to Europe, Anuszkiewicz put it towards a master’s under Albers at Yale.

It was while studying for a teaching degree at Kent State University in Ohio (1955-56) that he began to paint seriously and, as he put it, “non-objectively”. Gone were the realist scenes of midwestern life. “For the first time I discovered what a full complementary will do,” Anuszkiewicz recalled. “When you put a red on a blue, you have this kind of fluorescent effect.” In 1957, he moved to a New York still in thrall to the abstract expressionists. Dealers were unimpressed by the young out-of-towner’s optical discoveries. “Everybody would say: ‘Oh, they are nice, but so hard to look at,’” Anuszkiewicz remembered. “‘They hurt my eyes.’”

His luck changed when he showed his work to Karl Lunde, the scholarly owner of the Contemporaries gallery on Madison Avenue, who offered Anuszkiewicz a show in March 1960. Initially a flop, this became an overnight success when Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, walked in and bought a work called Fluorescent Complement (1960), showing it with other MoMA acquisitions later that year. By 1961, there was a waiting list for his eye-popping pictures.

Marriage of Warm and Cool, 1991.



Marriage of Warm and Cool, 1991. Photograph: Estate of Richard Anuszkiewicz

It was a MoMA exhibition called The Responsive Eye that brought his work to a broader public. Opening in February 1965, this would define what had lately been dubbed op (optical) art. The two stars of the show were Anuszkiewicz and a British painter called Bridget Riley. “Anuszkiewicz,” wrote the critic of the New York Times, “might already be called an op old master … a virtuoso technician whose sizzling colours arranged in symmetrical bands, stripes and squares almost jump from canvas to eye.” Time magazine ran a profile of the artist alongside a full-page illustration of his painting Plus Reversed (1960). Life magazine anointed Anuszkiewicz “the new wizard of op”.

The Responsive Eye would prove to be the high point of his career. Although successful on its own terms, Anuszkiewicz’s work was hard to live with. A painting such as Principle of Unity (1966), based, like Albers’, on the square, disconcerts by refusing to settle. No sooner has the eye located a colour in space than space and colour switch about, foreground becoming background and vice versa. The dazzling interaction of complementaries leaves afterimages on the viewer’s retina, so that the timing of psychological perception – a subject in which Anuszkiewicz took a keen interest – is called into question. The colours in Albers’ Homages help each other along; the colours in works such as the ones in Anuszkiewicz’s Translumina series (1986-2001) trip each other up.

Richard Anuszkiewicz in 1968.



Richard Anuszkiewicz in 1968. Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

This discomfiture was reflected in sales. In 1965, his annus mirabilis, Anuszkiewicz had been taken on by Sidney Janis, a gallerist whose stable included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and, inevitably, Albers. By 1976, Janis’s tastes had moved on from op and Anuszkiewicz left for the less blue-chip Andrew Crispo.

In the 1970s and 80s, his work grew more mathematical, the fields of luminescent colour in the Spectral series being divided up by calibrated lines. In the decade after that, Anuszkiewicz’s paintings turned architectural. An early job touching up plaster models of classical temples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York now showed itself in the thin strips of wood that he glued to columnar shapes on canvases in the Translumina series. Later still, wood was replaced by laser-cut aluminium, followed by a series called For Mondrian (2000) made of painted steel.

Plus Reversed, 1960.



Plus Reversed, 1960. Photograph: Museum of Art, University of Austin, Texas

For all its visibility, though, Anuszkiewicz’s work faded from the public eye. When the gallerist Loretta Howard gave him an exhibition in 2013, it was his first in New York for more than a decade; more followed, the most recent this year. Although Anuszkiewicz’s career was not to enjoy the late second flowering of Riley’s. If this was a source of dismay, it did not show. Asked, in old age, about his cash-strapped upbringing, Anuszkiewicz replied, “I really had a very happy childhood … I had companionship, affection, all the good things.” This contentment carried on into later life.

In 1960 he married Sally (Elizabeth) Feeney, a schoolteacher. In 1967, the couple moved to suburban Englewood, New Jersey, where they raised their three children, Adam, Stephanie and Christine, and where Anuszkiewicz painted from home. Sally and his children survive him.

Richard Joseph Anuszkiewicz, artist, born 23 May 1930; died 19 May 2020



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.