Richard Anuszkiewicz Op Art Enamel Bowl, Made for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden American, 1976

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Description

Richard Anuszkiewicz Op Art Enamel Bowl, Made for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
American, 1976

Richard Anuszkiewicz (American, 1930–2020), … Read more Richard Anuszkiewicz Op Art Enamel Bowl, Made for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
American, 1976

Richard Anuszkiewicz (American, 1930–2020), one of the defining figures of Op Art, designed this enameled metal bowl in 1976 for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., where it was issued in a small edition of undisclosed size. It carries into three dimensions the color experiments of his canvases.

The deep, round-bottomed bowl is enameled on the exterior in a saturated red-orange. A band of cool color encircles the rim, stepping around the circumference in blocks that graduate from green through teal and sky blue to periwinkle, and from it a fringe of narrow vertical bars descends into the orange, alternately long and short in an irregular rhythm, each bar taking the color of the band above it. Set against its complement at full intensity, the blue seems to flicker where it meets the orange and the orange to glow, the optical vibration on which Anuszkiewicz built his reputation. The interior is enameled in a plain pale blue, a quiet counterweight to the exterior.

Shown on its own on a coffee table, console or open shelf, the bowl reads as a small piece of sculpture. Its orange and blue sit comfortably in mid-century and contemporary rooms alike and answer geometric abstraction hung nearby.

Dimensions
Height: 5½ inches (14 cm)
Diameter: 8⅜ inches (21.3 cm)

Marks
Signed “ANUSZKIEWICZ.” in white capitals, fired into the enamel on the underside.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good.

References
Dorothy C. Miller, ed., Americans 1963 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1963), artist’s statement.
“Op Art,” Life, December 11, 1964.
William C. Seitz, The Responsive Eye (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965).

Historical Context
Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, Anuszkiewicz trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art and then under Josef Albers at Yale, where he took his MFA in 1955, and Albers’s teaching on the interaction of color became the foundation of his career. In his statement for the Museum of Modern Art’s Americans 1963 he described his work as an investigation into “the effects of complementary colors of full intensity when juxtaposed,” and in 1964 Life magazine called him “one of the new wizards of Op.” He was among the leading American artists in MoMA’s landmark exhibition The Responsive Eye in 1965. Where Bridget Riley first made her name with black-and-white canvases, Anuszkiewicz worked from the outset in high-intensity color.

The Hirshhorn opened on the National Mall in October 1974, and this bowl, made two years later, is an uncommon excursion by the artist into a functional object. Its orange and blue are complementary opposites, and their juxtaposition puts his 1963 statement into practice on a curved surface.

(Ref: NY9271-plcr) See less