Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930 - 2020)

New Year's Eve Still Life, 1951, oil on board, signed and dated lower right, 29 x 24 inches, exhibited in Oils by Cleveland Artists, Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Kansas City, MO, February 3 -24, 1952, presented in a new frame

$9500

Before Pennsylvania-born Richard Anuszkiewicz became one of the country's leading proponents of Op Art, a title he rejected, the young artist was a well-exhibited and award-winning painter of the American Scene and Magic Realist-influenced still lifes while still a student at the Cleveland Art Institute. New Year's Eve Still Life attracted critical praise when it was shown at the Nelson Atkins Art Museum in 1952 as part of a group of thirty paintings by contemporary Cleveland artists. Under the heading "Texture a Topic," the art critic for The Kansas City Star recorded, "Richard Anuszkiewicz follows a super-realistic line in 'New Years Eve Still Life,' in which he analyzes with considerable skill the textures of a black umbrella, a satin ribbon, a paper hat, a coat hanger and a ruff of white maribu feathers." This was not Anuszkiewicz' first national recognition. In 1947, while still a high school student, he had won a significant award at the National Scholastic Art Competition for an "uncommonly proficient piece of work" likely inspired by Charles Burchfield's watercolors. Anuszkiewicz' natural talent and early success won him a four-year scholarship to the Cleveland Art Institute, where he entered the Cleveland Museum of Art's annual May shows and won multiple awards, including in 1951, the year he painted New Years Eve Still Life.

Much of his work in Cleveland focused on mastering the technical aspects of depicting surfaces but by the time of his departure, his concerns shifted to the relationships that colors have with one another. As one author wrote, "What interested him above all was the uses to which color could be put and the spatial organization that could be achieved without resorting to the surface-destroying devices of Renaissance perspective." In 1953, he won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, which Anuszkiewicz used to study with Josef Albers at Yale University, an experience which set an entirely new direction for his art as one of the pioneers of Op Art.

During his long career, Anuszkiewicz exhibited widely and was a mainstay of major museum exhibitions, including at the Corcoran Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, and Virginia Museum of Fine Art, among many others. His work was also included in the 1964 New York World's Fair and Expo '67 in Montreal. He was honored with solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and Carnegie Institute. In 1988, he was exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Anuszkiewicz' work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.