Art: Simple Form, Simple Color

At 23, Richard Anuszkiewicz was a colorless young man—technically speaking, that is. “I was painting still lifes that were getting greyer and greyer,” he recalls, still amazed at the helplessness he felt. The tonic he needed was the famous course given at Yale by Josef Albers, who has spent decades demonstrating what marvels colors can perform when left entirely on their own. As can be seen in seven Anuszkiewicz’ paintings on display in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (including those on the opposite page), the tonic worked.

Albers is best known for his squares within squares, which leave his colors entirely independent of anything but the simplest form. Anuszkiewicz, now 33, keeps an equally rigid control over his work, but he allows his colors to perform in far more complex settings. In 1960, he began a series of paintings that used only two colors—a “hot” one and a “cool” one. These he placed in patterns made up of almost identical little shapes that moved from background to foreground and vice versa according to how he colored them.

Breathing Canvas. In Plus Reversed, the two colors were put on in equal total area and in equal strength, so that the viewer is never quite sure which is the dominant one. The result is that the painting is full of movement that varies in tempo from second to second as two gaudy armies might move on a battlefield. Are the greens about to explode out of their oval and run the reds off the canvas? Or are the reds slowly strangling the surrounded greens? One part of the painting expands, another contracts, as if the whole canvas were breathing.

Knowledge and Disappearance is a virtuoso performance, with the lavender turning cool next to the red. Moreover, the pattern of alternating rectangles within rectangles has its own life. It recedes and then begins to emerge again as a pattern of simple rectangles. Anuszkiewicz’ colored geometry becomes a kind of crazy-quilt corridor into which the eye is drawn and held dizzily as in some enchanted funhouse.

Ghostly Shapes. In his most recent work, Anuszkiewicz often uses three or four colors and a simpler geometric motif. Each painting has its internal rhythm, which is measured like bars of music. One yellow and grey painting has a pattern of grids, some of which are quartered, some cut to sixteenths, and so on. In other paintings, stripes or threads of different colors run over a common background to form diamonds and squares that emerge not as solid forms but as ghostly shapes coming out of nowhere. Some have the misty delicacy of a rainbow; others glow like fluorescent light.

There is about this kind of painting a somewhat mechanical quality, which Anuszkiewicz himself is fully aware of. But the majority of his paintings are so subtle and sensitive that they divulge their secrets only gradually as the viewer looks. And fortunately, the world of color is one of such limitless arrangements and combinations that each painting has, almost automatically, the freshness and excitement of discovery.