Shirley Goldfarb: An American Painter in Paris

Richard Anuszkiewicz featured in the February 2021 issue of Art & Antiques Magazine. As John Dorfman writes:

The term “Op Art” was invented by a critic, not an artist, and the movement to which it was applied—if movement it was—came and went within a span of about five years in the mid- to late 1960s. But the work of Richard Anuszkiewicz, who was hailed as one of Op’s two greatest practitioners, lives on, a unique contribution to abstract art and to our understanding of the way color affects the human eye, mind, and spirit.

Video of Joel Perlman's "Dreadnought" at the NCMA

Abstract Expressionism, also known as The New York School and sometimes referred to as Action School painting, is the "language of emotions" as Mark Rothko famously said. There was a new emphasis on paint itself as an expressive medium. For this generation of Post WWII painters, the canvas is acted upon, like a skirmish, as the critic Harold Rosenberg might have envisioned. The tension within the painting makes the work successful. They felt that painting should not be easy, they were responding to a crisis, often an existential crisis. They sought to break free of the past and create something new and heroic.