| Facts/Data
|
Birth
1930 (Erie, Pennsylvania)
Death
Lived/Active
New Jersey
© Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY See Details
Often Known For
op art illusion, collage, graphics
Discussion Board
Would you like to discuss this artist?
AskART Discussion Boards
(0 Active)
|
|
 |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  With a name synonymous with the Op Art movement, Richard Anuskiewicz
first achieved international fame when he was included in a 1965 survey
of "optical art" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today
he is recognized as one of the foremost colorists in American art,
creating huge large-scale canvases.
He was born in Erie,
Pennsylvania and trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1948 to
1953 and then with Josef Albers at Yale University where he earned an
M.F.A. degree in 1955. Albers stirred his interest in the effects
of color on perception but Anuszkiewicz did not actively pursue this
matter until the 1960s when he worked in repeated geometric patterns,
emanating in wave-like shapes from the center of the canvas.
In
the 1970s, much of his work looked like computer printouts and were
intended to investigate the effects of juxtaposed full intensity
colors. Unlike many Op-Art artists, his paintings are pleasing to
the eye with smooth surfaces, and they give the impression that the
design will continue beyond the framed edges.
In January 1999, a retrospective of his work was held at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida.
Source:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art | |
Biography from Rogallery.com:
|  A student of Josef Albers, 'Richard Anuszkiewicz shares Albers'
fascination with shapes and their relationships to color.
Considered a major force in the op art movement, Anuszkiewicz is
concerned with the optical changes that occur when different
high-intensity colors are applied to the same geometric
configurations. Each of his prints has its own rhythm and,
therefore, its own energy as part of a lyrical composition. He
has won many awards and has been a frequent exhibitor in museums
throughout the world.
His work is included in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art
in Washington, D.C., the Fogg Museum of Harvard University in
Cambridge, and the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of
Modern Art in New York.
Born in 1930 in Erie, Pennsylvania,
Richard Anuszkiewicz grew to love painting at a very early age.
He developed his education at various colleges including a B.F.A.
from
the Cleveland Institute of Art, a M.F.A from Yale University, studying
under the highly influential color theorist Josef Albers, and finally a
Bachelor of Science degree from Kent State University in Ohio.
In
1957 he moved to New York City where he soon received critical success
in various one-man exhibitions as well as acquisitions by the Museum of
Modern Art and inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual
Exhibition in
1963. By 1965, Anuszkiewicz had firmly
established himself as the Optical art movement leader by his inclusion
in an historically important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,
The Responsive Eye.
Op-art refers to the idea of" optical
illusion" or of creating the illusion of movement. "Op art is direct
and requires little previous knowledge of art. Children, as
Anuszkiewicz has noted, delight in it. Other viewers are aware of
formal structure, relationships, and complexities but are just as
delighted. This art appeals on as many levels as there are levels of
awareness and experience."
Working diligently from his Englewood, New Jersey studio, Richard
Anuszkiewicz has "expanded his art so that it no longer fits any
recognized category. Because of the mathematical precision of his
working methods and formats and his long-standing preoccupation with
the psychology and physiology of visual perception, Anuszkiewicz has
been labeled a 'scientific' painter... However, critics have discovered
the highly individual cadence of music and poetry and hints of the
seasons and atmosphere, of sunrise, twilight, and sunset."
"Color
is at once the most striking aspect of Richard Anuszkiewicz's art and
the most profound, often forming the basis for his compositions. 'Color
function becomes my subject matter,' he has said, 'and its performance
is my painting.' A major contemporary artist, Anuszkiewicz has
long been noted for the cool geometry of his compositions, his
impeccable technique, and, above all, the luminous evocative shimmer of
his colors."
As a result of a one-man show at The Contemporaries
in New York City in 1960, the Museum of Modern Art bought two of his
paintings, and he was off and running. More than 100 solo shows and
representation in almost three times that many group exhibitions
followed. Anuszkiewicz’s work is owned by close to 100 public,
and countless private and corporate, collections in the U.S. and
abroad; he has executed nearly a dozen large murals and public art
commissions and received several prestigious awards.
It was not
until Anuszkiewicz, who was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1930,
returned to the Midwest to take a degree in education at Kent State
University (where he later taught) that he really began the experiments
“with full-intensity complementary colors—blues on reds, greens on
reds” that set him on his own groundbreaking path.
In 1964, a Life
magazine writer called him "The New Wizard of Op." More recently,
while reflecting on a New York City gallery show of Anuszkiewicz's from
2000, the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter described
Anuszkiewicz's paintings by stating, "The drama -- and that feels like
the right word -- is in the subtle chemistry of complementary colors,
which makes the geometry glow as if light were leaking out from behind
it." Anuszkiewicz has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Florence
Biennale and Documenta, and his works are in permanent collections
internationally. |
Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| American painter, printmaker and sculptor Richard Anuszkiewicz
(pronounced "Anna-skÈv-ich") was born of Polish parents in Erie,
Pennsylvania, in 1930. Although his use of bright colors may seem to
relate to Polish folk art, he really is a product of the American
environment. (1) He drew even as a small child and studied in his
vocational high school in Erie with a gifted teacher, Joseph
Plavan. It was Plavan taught him the Ostwald system of
complimentary colors and the spectrum prism.
Anuszkiewicz won several National Scholastic Magazine
competitions, regional scholarships and a national scholarship, which
enabled him to go to the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1948 until
1953. It was in Cleveland that Anuszkiewicz began to move away
from realism and into design and abstraction.
He won a Pulitzer scholarship in 1953, to study at the National Academy
of Design and then went on to study with Josef Albers at the Yale
University School of Art and Architecture where he received a Master of
Fine Arts in 1955. It was also while he was at Yale that he began
to study the psychology of perception and he began to develop his
theories on how the eye organizes visual material according to those
psychological laws. (2)
His early work resembled the Regionalists of the 1930s and 40s.
(3) In his paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s, he
depicted everyday city life. However, in 1955, while still a
student at Yale, he made a couple of studies that clearly revealed his
future interests in color and line.
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. These led in the early 1960s to asymmetric and
imperfectly geometric works and then to more rigidly structured
arrangements.
Anuskiewicz's first show in New York of what are now called "Op Art"
paintings occurred at The Contemporaries Gallery in 1960. The
Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased one of the paintings from
that exhibition. In 1963, Anuszkiewicz participated in shows at
the Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art and was
the subject of a complimentary article in Time magazine.
Following the publication of that article, Anuszkiewicz sold 17
paintings in one month. His first one-person show at the Sidney
Janis Gallery in New York was in 1965. According to Janis,
Anuszkiewicz was in such demand in the mid-1960s that the waiting list
of people wanting to buy his work was longer than Jackson Pollock's,
whom Janis also represented. Anuszkiewicz also participated that
year in the landmark show "The Responsive Eye" at the Museum of Modern
Art. By this time, Anuszkiewicz had firmly established himself as
the leader in the Optical Art movement.
Anuszkiewicz has acknowledged the importance of color in defining his
subject matter. (4)
He often incorporated geometrical networks of colored lines, thus
exploring the phenomenon of optical mixtures in these mature works,
with which he made his contribution to Optical art. Optical art
(or "Op art") refers to the idea of "optical illusion" or of creating
the illusion of movement. A pioneer in this non-representational
movement, Anuszkiewicz applied pigments directly to the canvas to mix
optically instead of blending them on the palette. 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.
Intensity of color coupled with a warm light condition cause a visually
vibrant composition, which, in turn, causes an afterimage to occur.
In his later works, he remained faithful to the approach he established
in the 1960s while developing more subtle color modulations and
sophisticated geometry.
Source:
(1). Karl Lunde, Anuszkiewicz (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977), 13-14.
(2) . Lunde, 2 James Gibson and Rudolf Arnheim were the faculty members that made an impression upon Anuszkiewicz.
(3). John Green, Art News, September 1979, 68.
(4). Szymon Bojko, “Richard Anuszkiewicz,” Contemporary Artists, 2nd Edition.
Submitted by Bitsy Winsdor and Tom Butler, Columbus Museum |
Biography from Boca Raton Museum of Art:
| Richard Anuszkiewicz, ( American Born Pennsylvania 1930 - )
A leading exponent of OpArt, Anuszkiewicz studied at Cleveland Institute of Art and then at Yale University under Josef Albers. Albers stimulated his interest in the effects of color on perception but it was not until about 1960 that he started to address this in his painting. Prior to studying with Albers, he had nine years of realism behind him. He became known for non-objective paints that vibrates and glow with complementary colors to a fluorescent effect, and has maintained a consistent style for more than three decades. Anuszkiewicz is still experimenting with the effects of such colors when juxtaposed and the optical changes that occur as a result, when using radiating expanses. He is also intrigued with manipulating opaque and transparent space with lines. The artist says, “I hope that my work s create a kind of distilled beauty. To me beauty is a very positive word. When you look at real flowers or the sunset or some intense color, as in a rainbow, it leaves you with a strong feeling, at least it does to me” Geometric works seem to pulsate with black and white shapes or the interaction of violent colors.
His works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, Florence Biennale amongst others where he received his latest recognition “The Lorenzo de Medici Career Award.”
Information provided by The Boca Raton Museum of Art. Catalina Torres (Intern) |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|