RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ: OBITUARY

RICHARD  ANUSZKIEWICZ:  OBITUARY

Richard Anuszkiewicz: Obituary

This is a summary of the obituary of Richard Anuszkiewicz which was published in The Guardian newspaper on 30^th May 2020.  The author is Charles Darwent.

Richard Anuszkiewicz

Richard Anuszkiewicz was born 23^rd May 1930.  He grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, near to his contemporary Andy Warhol.  Like Warhol’s family, Richard Anuszkiewicz’s family ‘was working class, religious and came from Mitteleuropa’.   In 1947 Richard Anuszkiewicz won a National Scholastic Art award, and in the next year a full scholarship to the Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio.  He graduated from here in 1953 with a BA in Fine Arts.  Richard Anuszkiewicz then obtained a Master’s at Yale.

At Yale, Anuszkiewicz began painting seriously, and, as he put it ‘non-objectively’.  His chief tutor was Josef Albers, formerly of the Bauhaus.  After Yale, Anuszkiewicz, studied 1955-56 for a teaching degree at Kent State University, Ohio. 

In 1957 Anuszkiewicz moved ‘to a New York still in thrall to the abstract expressionists’.  In 1960 Anuszkiewicz was offered a show at the Contemporaries gallery on Madison Avenue.  After Alfred Barr – Director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – bought one of Anuszkiewicz’s works – Fluorescent Complement (1960) – the show became ‘an overnight success’. 

Fluorescent Complement (1960) is a work in which yellow/green discs of colour float on a background which is blue, but with a white central area.  The yellow/green discs move disconcertingly on the blue background, and in the white centre the yellow/green discs appear to erupt towards the viewer. 

‘By 1961 there was a waiting list for his eye-popping pictures’.  A MoMA exhibition in 1965 – The Responsive Eye – brought Anuszkiewicz’s work to a wider audience.  This exhibition ‘would define what had lately been dubbed op (optical) art'.  Anuszkiewicz and the British painter Bridget Riley were ‘the stars of the show’.  This 1965 exhibition was ‘the high point of his career’.  Darwent writes how Anuszkiewicz’s works were ‘hard to live with’: space and colour move constantly and ‘trip each other up’ with no resolution.

In the next two decades, Anuszkiewicz moved on to more mathematical works.  A number of exhibitions of Anuszkiewicz’s works were held in the years since 2013.  Unlike Riley, there was no resurgence of interest in Anuszkiewicz, but this did not seem to concern him. 

Richard Anuszkiewicz died on 19^th May 2020 at the age of 89.