Richard Anuszkiewicz, whose Op Art drew attention in the 1960s, dies at 89

Richard Anuszkiewicz, a pioneer of Op Art in the United States before this perception-altering style was even named in the 1960s, died on May 19 at his home in Englewood, New Jersey, he was 89 years old.

His death was confirmed by his son, Adam, who did not specify a cause.

Mr. Anuszkiewicz (he said ah-noo-SHKEV-ich) has devoted his career to studying how some of the fundamental elements of art could be manipulated to create perceptual effects. His experiences with color led him to make paintings of geometric shapes that seem to vibrate and emanate from light.

And if his compositions are sharp, their repetition of shapes and lines and their complementary radiant hues evoke a kind of spirituality. I’m interested in making something romantic out of a very, very mechanistic geometry, it once said.

He was at the forefront of the Op Art movement in the United States, producing and showing his abstractions before the writers even found the term, short for optical art. Once they did, they quickly applied it to his work.

Covering the investigation into the blockbuster movement of the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, The Responsive Eye, Grace Glueck of the New York Times identified Mr. Anuszkiewicz as one of the brightest stars in the series and said he could already be called a former operations master.

However, many critics have dismissed this trend, viewing it as an empty spectacle. When the art world evolved, Mr. Anuszkiewicz found himself struggling with a label with mixed connotations. But that did not deter him. Although he had experimented with different forms and mediums, he never hesitated with his project.

Mr. Anuszkiewicz considered his process more conceptual than technical. He saw himself as a problem solver, starting with a mathematical idea and then manifesting his results in his work. We put too much emphasis on the hand, he said to an interviewer in 1970. You can never create a new art unless it is created by the human mind.

He had roots in modernism, having studied with Josef Albers at Yale. It was Mr. Albers who taught him that colors were not defined entities but rather that they looked and behaved differently depending on their context. Mr. Anuszkiewicz explained this lesson about the work of his life.

The image in my work has always been determined by what I wanted color to do, he says in a 1974 catalog. The color function becomes my subject and its performance is my painting.

Richard Joseph Anuszkiewicz was born on May 23, 1930 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to Adam and Victoria (Jankowski) Anuszkiewicz, both Polish immigrants. He was the couple’s only child but had five half-siblings from his mother’s previous marriage. Richard started drawing at an early age; his father, who worked in a stationery store, brought home paper tablets from which his son could draw. The nuns of the parish school encouraged his talents and, after enrolling in the technical high school of Erie, he studied art for several hours a day.

He then won a pair of regional and national art competitions, earning him scholarships to attend the Cleveland Institute of Art. He obtained his bachelor of fine arts there in 1953 as well as a Pulitzer travel grant. Instead of taking a trip, however, he invested in graduate studies at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture.

At the time, he painted alternative realistic scenes from Midwestern life, influenced by artists like Charles Burchfield. Going to Yale, where abstraction prevailed and where Mr. Albers was an intimidating and demanding force, was definitely a traumatic experience, said Anuszkiewicz in an interview for the Archives of American art in 1972.

Studying in New Haven, Connecticut, allowed him to visit New York. He was driving with his roommate and comrade Clevelander, Another future leader of Op Art, Julian Stanczak, to visit galleries and museums and see firsthand Paul Klee’s abstract expressionism and historic works of art.

Now that I was no longer fighting Albers’ strong image, I was able to fully accept all of this wonderful knowledge that I acquired without any prejudice, he said in an interview for the Guggenheim museum in New York in the 1970s, and instead of returning to realism, I went completely in the opposite direction.

He soon made more and more psychedelic abstractions from accumulations of small, fluid forms. Moving to New York in 1957, he obtained a work of restoration and assembly of models of classical sculpture and architecture for the Junior Museum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He tried to find a gallery, but dealers like Leo Castelli and Martha Jackson looked at his work and refused it.

Everyone said: Oh, they’re nice, but so hard to watch. They hurt my eyes, he said.

Finally, in 1959, the Galerie des Contemporains hired him and presented him with his first solo exhibition the following year. But when nothing was sold for two weeks, the owner wanted to withdraw the exhibit. One Saturday, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr Jr., came in and bought two paintings, one for MoMA and the other for Nelson A. Rockefeller, governor of New York at time. . For Anuszkiewicz, who was 30, sales have boosted his career.

In 1960, he married Sarah Feeney, a teacher. She survives him with their children, Adam, Stephanie and Christine, and six grandchildren. He moved to Englewood in 1967, creating a studio at his home.

During the 1960s, Mr. Anuszkiewicz gained momentum, finding the tools, such as acrylic paint and masking tape, to enable him to execute his increasingly precise vision. The Whitney Museum of American Art included it in the Geometric Abstraction in America exhibition in 1962, and the Museum of Modern Art did the same in 1963 to the Americans, which attracted the attention of the press, including an article in Time magazine.

He then designed Op Art gift wrap and even fur coats. By the time of MoMA The Responsive Eye in 1965, he had joined the artists’ stable at the prestigious Sidney Janis Gallery and, as he told Mrs. Glueck, there was a waiting list to buy his art.

Although the Op Art movement was short lived, Mr. Anuszkiewicz continued to exhibit in galleries and museums across the country and abroad. About 75 institutions own his work.

This work has become more classic and meditative over the decades by softening its palette; he placed squares then thin rectangles in the middle of his canvases with lines radiating from or around them. Her Translumina series included painted and shaped wooden constructions that seem to shine like neon lights. These have given way to spare sculptures which are feats of illusionism: they look like line drawings intersecting in space.

Mr. Anuszkiewicz received a Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, but continued to make art for years afterward. In 2013, at 82, he presented his first exhibition of new works in New York in more than a decade, at the Loretta Howard Gallery, which now represents him. As always, the tables built on what he had done before another round of permutations.

The ideas I work with are essentially timeless, he said in 1977. If you work on current topics, your work can get old and unimportant. Working with basic ideas will always be exciting, and if a color or shape is visually exciting in a deep sense, it will be the same in 10 or 20 years.