Richard Anuszkiewicz (American, 1930-2020) Color Screenprint. Title - Spectral 9 A Variable Multiple in Yellow. Signed Anuszkiewicz, 1969, edition 46/125, on Contemporary Collections Inc New York label on reverse. Measures 19.7 inches high, 19.7 inches wide. In good condition with a bit of surface grime. From the estate of the NY architect and artist Charles Morris Mount (1942-2002).

From Ro Gallery: A student of Josef Albers, Richard Anuszkiewicz shares Albers' fascination with shapes and their relationships to color. Considered a major force in the op art movement, Anuszkiewicz is concerned with the optical changes that occur when different high-intensity colors are applied to the same geometric configurations. Each of his prints has its own rhythm and, therefore, its own energy as part of a lyrical composition. He has won many awards and has been a frequent exhibitor in museums throughout the world. His work is included in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Fogg Museum of Harvard University in Cambridge, and the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Born in 1930 in Erie, Pennsylvania, Richard Anuszkiewicz grew to love painting at a very early age. He developed his education at various colleges including a B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art, a M.F.A from Yale University, studying under the highly influential color theorist Josef Albers, and finally a Bachelor of Science degree from Kent State University in Ohio. In 1957 he moved to New York City where he soon received critical success in various one-man exhibitions as well as acquisitions by the Museum of Modern Art and inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibition in 1963. By 1965, Anuszkiewicz had firmly established himself as the Optical art movement leader by his inclusion in an historically important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, The Responsive Eye. Op-art refers to the idea of optical illusion or of creating the illusion of movement. Op art is direct and requires little previous knowledge of art. Children, as Anuszkiewicz has noted, delight in it. Other viewers are aware of formal structure, relationships, and complexities but are just as delighted. This art appeals on as many levels as there are levels of awareness and experience. Working diligently from his Englewood, New Jersey studio, Richard Anuszkiewicz has expanded his art so that it no longer fits any recognized category. Because of the mathematical precision of his working methods and formats and his long-standing preoccupation with the psychology and physiology of visual perception, Anuszkiewicz has been labeled a scientific painter... However, critics have discovered the highly individual cadence of music and poetry and hints of the seasons and atmosphere, of sunrise, twilight, and sunset. Color is at once the most striking aspect of Richard Anuszkiewicz's art and the most profound, often forming the basis for his compositions. 'Color function becomes my subject matter,' he has said, 'and its performance is my painting.' A major contemporary artist, Anuszkiewicz has long been noted for the sophisticated geometry of his compositions, his impeccable technique, and, above all, the luminous and evocative shimmer of his colors. As a result of a one-man show at The Contemporaries in New York City in 1960, the Museum of Modern Art bought two of his paintings, and he was off and running. More than 100 solo shows and representation in almost three times that many group exhibitions followed. Anuszkiewicz's work is owned by close to 100 public, and countless private and corporate, collections in the U.S. and abroad; he has executed nearly a dozen large murals and public art commissions and received several prestigious awards. It was not until Anuszkiewicz, who was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1930, returned to the Midwest to take a degree in education at Kent State University (where he later taught) that he really began the experiments with full-intensity complementary colors: blues on reds, greens on reds that set him on his own groundbreaking path. In 1964, a Life magazine writer called him The New Wizard of Op. More recently, while reflecting on a New York City gallery show of Anuszkiewicz's from 2000, the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter described Anuszkiewicz's paintings by stating, The drama - and that feels like the right word - is in the subtle chemistry of complementary colors, which makes the geometry glow as if light were leaking out from behind it. Anuszkiewicz has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Florence Biennale and Documenta, and his works are in permanent collections internationally.

Obituary - Charles Morris Mount - November 12, 2002. Charles Morris Mount, who designed the new McDonald's in New York's Times Square, died on Friday at his weekend home in Mattituck, N.Y. He was 60 and lived in Manhattan. He had a heart attack while eating breakfast, said his partner, Harold Gordon. Mount designed nearly 300 restaurants in a career of more than 30 years — from haute cuisine to fast-food outlets — marked by bold theatricality and hard-headed practicality. The design of the new, 17,500-square-foot McDonald's aimed at replicating the nearby movie and Broadway theatres, seeking what Mount called - a backstage ambience, by exposing the building's original brickwork and using authentic theatrical lighting fixtures. The restaurant also features plasma televisions, Broadway memorabilia and 7500 light bulbs so bright that Mount joked they could cause sunburn. He liked using colors, he liked neon - he liked metal finishes, stainless steel, raw steel, said Jimmy Sneed, a Richmond, Va., restaurateur for whom Mount designed a restaurant called The Frog & The Redneck. Mount was born in Andalusia, Ala., and majored in interior design at Auburn University. After graduation, he went to Atlanta, where he worked in design until convinced that his opportunities would be greater in New York. He opened his own firm in the early 1970s. He became known as a rule-breaker with a distinctive style. Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic of The New York Times, said his 1995 redesign made the Gloucester House restaurant in Manhattan - a multimillion-dollar fun house of a restaurant. Another early job was designing restaurants for The American Cafe chain, which began in Washington, D.C. Mark Caraluzzi, who owned The American Cafe (and also employed Mount to design restaurants for his Bistro Bistro chain), said Mount put as much time into thinking about how it would function and flow, where people will walk, where they will fit. Mount also considered how long people would stay. For example, he said a chair in a fast-food restaurant must meet two requirements. First, it must pass the truck-driver test: drop it out of a second-story window and if it survived, it might last two years. Second, it must be uncomfortable enough so customers would get up and move on. It's not easy, he said. You want a chair that looks good, is sturdy and reasonably comfortable. But you don't want customers to spend the night.

Condition listed in description