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Primary Contrast

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Art © Richard Anuszkiewicz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY


Primary Contrast

1965
acrylic on canvas
60 1/4 in. x 60 1/4 in. (153.04 cm x 153.04 cm)
Gift of the Saul O. Sidore Memorial Foundation, 1965.5

Richard Anuszkiewicz
American
1930–2020

Furthering the color experiments of Josef Albers (q.v.), Richard Anuszkiewicz contributed significantly to the Op Art movement of the 1960s. Born in 1930 in Erie, Pennsylvania, Anuszkiewicz won his first significant art awards while still in high school. He afterward attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he earned the degree of BFA in 1953. With the aid of a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship awarded by the National Academy of Design, Anuszkiewicz earned his MFA under Josef Albers at Yale University. After earning a BSEd at Kent State University, the artist moved to New York City. There he pursued his painting and printmaking while holding various positions as an art restorer, silver designer, and instructor.

Although Anuszkiewicz was initially influenced by Abstract Expressionism, he soon began to explore geometric formats and color relationships in the manner of Albers. Other artists were pursuing similar objectives, and in 1965, Anuszkiewicz was included in the seminal Op Art exhibition, The Responsive Eye, mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Utilizing a vocabulary of squares, diamonds, rectangles, and linear elements, Anuszkiewicz's Op Art work ranges from visually complex compositions painted in strident complementary colors to simpler and more soothing arrangements. In recent years, Anuszkiewicz has turned to sculpture, creating reductive painted pieces suggestive of colored lines in space. The artist has won many awards over the course of his career, and in 1999 he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida.

Rendered in Anuszkiewicz's favored medium of acrylic on canvas, Primary Contrast is a fine example of the complex and visually stimulating paintings that brought the artist to prominence during the mid-1960s. The composition consists of overlapping diamonds and squares; some are solid, while others are rendered via radiating patterns of perfectly straight lines. The predominant colors -red, green and blue- are all of intense saturation and equal value.

Although Anuszkiewicz consciously follows in Albers's footsteps as a color theorist fond of using rectangular forms, his paintings are strikingly different. Where the work of Albers is restrained, cool, and contemplative, Anuszkiewicz forces the viewer to confront the impact of color on the eye. His already brilliant reds and greens become more so when placed side by side: as complementary colors, they appear more dazzling when seen in close proximity to one another. By employing overlapping ray patterns in his painting, Anuszkiewicz furthers the effects of red and green by increasing the intervals between the colors. The resulting effect is immediate, unavoidable, and almost painful.

Primary Contrast was presented to the Currier Museum of Art in 1965 by the Saul O. Sidore Memorial Foundation.

VSD


REFERENCES

William C. Seitz. The Responsive Eye. Ex. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1965.

"Richard Anuszkiewicz: Primary Contrast." Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin, July-August 1966, n.p.

Richard Anuszkiewicz: Prints and Multiples, 1964-79, with a Checklist of Major Prints, Posters & Multiples. Ex. cat. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 1979.


Exhibition
1986 Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, "Masterpieces from the Currier Gallery of Art." Sept. 11 - Nov. 2.

1994 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Novices Collect: Selections from the Sam and May Gruber Collection." Sept. 10 - Dec. 4, cat. no. 1.

2017 Currier Museum of Art. "Seeing Red in the Collection" June 23, 2017 - Jan. 2018

Provenance
Artist
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, NY
Gift to Currier Gallery of Art, 1965


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