Richard Anuszkiewicz, Near and Far Acuity, 1957

Richard Anuszkiewicz

Near and Far Acuity, 1957

Gouache and watercolor painting

Hand signed and dated 1957 by Richard Anuszkiewicz on the right front

Frame included

Anuszkiewicz' artworks from the late 1950s are rarely found on the market. This historic painting is one of the works that helped launch the artist's career. It was done in 1957 - the year the artist arrived in New York.

Near and Far Acuity has been removed from its original frame, and re-framed in an elegant wood frame with conservation materials and UV plexiglass. The original gallery label from The Contemporaries has been preserved and affixed to the new backing, and the collector who acquires this work will also be provided with a copy of the original receipt - signed by Karl Lunde (director of the Contemporaries and author of a major monograph on the artist).
Measurements:
Frame:
32 x 28 x 2 inches
Artwork:
21 x 25 inches

This work was first exhibited in the groundbreaking, and career-making 1960 exhibition at The Contemporaries gallery (New York, February 29, 1960 - March 19, 1960) and was featured in the exhibition catalogue, shown in the images here.
In his essay entitled "Richard Anuszkiewicz: Color Precisionist" by art historian John T. Spike, he writes, "In the spring of '57, Richard Anuszkiewicz left Ohio for good. "I was ready. I came to New York with a substantial amount of work. I was ready to go around to the galleries and I was prepared because I really had something. I had an idea. I had a series of paintings that showed this idea and I felt good about it and I felt now that's the only place for me to be." A friend helped him get a job touching up the plaster models of classical temples and statues in the Junior Museum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He took off six months the next year to travel around Europe in a Volkswagen, also seeing some places in North Africa. "When I came back, I remember taking my work around to the galleries and receiving interesting comments — positive comments from the various people. But Abstract Expressionism was very popular. 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". Leo Castelli considered him seriously but the gallery was developing a specialization in pop artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. "I can remember going to Martha Jackson and having her look at the work and she would put her hands straight out in front of her and block out parts of the painting with her hand and she'd say, mmm no rest areas." He finally caught on with The Contemporaries Gallery in the fall of 1959. The gallery at 992 Madison Avenue mainly represented new European talent. Karl Lunde, the gallery director, saw some of his canvases hanging in the office of the American Federation of Arts and was intrigued. Anuszkiewicz was given a solo show in March 1960. The turn out for the opening was promising, but there were no sales — not one — in the first two weeks. Anuszkiewicz's tightly controlled compositions were a radical break from the emotional performances of the Abstract Expressionists still in command of the New York school. The ice was finally broken on the last Saturday morning before the show closed. Alfred F. Barr Jr. walked in and bought Fluorescent Complement for the Museum of Modern Art. Other pictures were snapped up by private collectors, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller and author James Michener. Anuszkiewicz's first one-man show put him on the map. "These first paintings that I did were very interesting because of the vibrancy of the color and because of this strong complementary action that you got, fluorescent action and then the alter-image because you got a sort of movement, they actually seemed to move. I played that up by using a lot of small shapes... that would not sit still on the canvas."He was using only two colors at a time, pitting a "hot" one against a "cool" one of equal strength and letting the chips fall where they may — except the outcome is always an uneasy tie."

About Richard Anuszkiewicz:

"I'm interested in making something romantic out of a very, very mechanistic geometry. Geometry and color represent to me an idealized classical place that's very clear and very pure." -Richard Anuskiewicz

Richard Anuszkiewicz received his bachelor’s degree from Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio in 1953. He studied at Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut from 1953 to 1955, where he earned his Masters of Fine Arts. His works were included in the seminal 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art and along with Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley; he was considered a pioneer of the Optical Art Movement. Life magazine called him “The New Wizard of Op.”

While Anuszkiewicz is known for his important developments as an Op Artist, his paintings also call fourth other associations; mainly the rigorous color theory of his mentor Josef Albers. Anuszkiewicz activates the space around his vividly chromatic squares with diagonals radiating lines to suggest volumes of depth. His paintings explore the optical properties of color; challenging the eye of each viewer while investigating formal, structural and color effects

His work is included in many important public and private collections including The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, The Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC, Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO, Detroit Institute of Art, Denver, CO, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.