Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930-2020) was one of the most important American painters of the second half of the twentieth century and an integral member of the Op Art movement, championing a visual style that made use of optical illusions to explore the perceptual behavior of color and form. Born on May 23, 1930 in Erie, Pennsylvania, he studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art before earning his Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art in 1955.

One of the foremost colorists in American art, Anuszkiewicz was mentored at Yale by Josef Albers, whose rigorous investigations into color theory and visual perception profoundly influenced the young artist's own lifelong interest in the effects of color on the eye. Beginning in the 1960s, Anuszkiewicz created canvases boasting repetitive geometric patterns in which precisely calibrated color relationships produced remarkable optical effects, drawing the viewer into an active experience of the picture surface. A number of high-profile exhibitions of his work at the Whitney during that decade sparked curatorial interest in his practice, and the Americans 1963 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, coupled with a Time Magazine article on the artist as well as MoMA's landmark 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye, cemented his status as one of the preeminent American Op artists, if not its leader.

Anuszkiewicz continued to produce work of exceptional refinement for more than five decades, receiving numerous honorary doctorates and honors including election to the National Academy of Design. His paintings are held in the permanent collections of major American museums, where they remain among the defining images of American postwar color abstraction.