One of the crossover artists was Ellsworth Kelly, whose Green Blue Red, 1964, a purely Op painting, was much admired."⁶⁰ Its exploitation of complementary color contrasts could not be simpler — or more effective. Two upright ellipses of solid blue and green divide into thirds a red background, which appears noticeably lighter in value in the empty center between them. On the other hand, Kelly's outlines are as taut and strong as any of the contemporary geometric abstractionists in or around the color field painters.

All Things Do Live in the Three, 1963, the picture that garnered so much praise at The Responsive Eye, is an Anuszkiewicz in search of harder edges. Its three faint diamonds are symmetrically arranged in an overall geometrical net of colored dots. The transition away from irregular shapes began in 1963 — 1964. Anuszkiewicz describes the process as, "the images in the paintings began to organize themselves into precise systematic structures with a square format, sometimes with small squares or dots juxtaposed over a field of color."⁶¹

The Fourth of the Three, 1963, and Sounding of the Bell, 1964, reveal a growing concern for balance and unity in his compositions. The central motif, almost invariably a square, is embedded in the overall, tightly unified, structure.

Sidney Janls Gallery: 1965-1975

Anuszkiewicz's work attracted the attention of gallery owner Sidney Janis, who took him on some months before the opening of The Responsive Eye in early 1965. The Janis stable of blue-chip artists was the best in New York: Albers, Gorky, de Kooning, Guston, Kline, Motherwell, Pollock and Rothko. Janis rushed him into the gallery's calendar, giving him a one-man show on November 11. 1965. The artist rose to the occasion by bringing thirty new paintings that were the first outpouring of his signature style.

They were images of a kind never previously seen, and hard to describe. One can imagine these paintings as the heraldry of an outer galaxy that worships the color red. The canvases are emblazoned with a single, central square or diamond, i.e. a square standing on a point. Sometimes this icon is red, as in The Edge of All Activity, 1965, other times green, Intensity, 1965, and not infrequently a pale sky blue, Iridescence, 1965. A verbal description of each of these canvases would underscore the variations in the laser like lines that either emanate from the center or stream into it. Both readings are valid. The power of the central emblem is almost overwhelming. "I think any time you put something right in the middle of the canvas it gives people a sort of contemplative experience drawing in and coming out. I know I've heard comments about Albers paintings being very religious and the same thing about mine. Really it's not religious, it's spiritual...But we all interpret things in our own way anyhow.⁶²

Iconic compositions of strong motifs, set off by strident complementary contrasts of red and green, blue and yellow — or the primaries red and blue — were a common denominator of the sixties avant-garde. Sidney Janis underscored this point a month later with an important exhibition, Pop and Op. Anuszkiewicz's pictures were hung alongside works by Albers. Kelly, Lichtenstein, Marisol, Oldenburg, Riley, Flosenquist, Samaras, Segal, Vasarely, Warhol and Wesselmann. These same artists and many others participated in a Pop and Op exhibition of their prints. The two-year show went to museums in sixteen cities around the country. The most enduring design of this decade came into being as the Museum of Modern Art's Christmas card for 1963: Flobert Indiana's LOVE combines definitively Kelly's hard edge contrasts. a Vasarely checkerboard grid, and Indiana's Pop love of letters.

The first solo Janis show was extraordinarily cohesive as a group and nearly sold out. It contained the first two canvases of a series, Sol I and Sol II, both of 1965. Anuszkiewicz decided to pursue this thread and in doing so established a pattern of working in series that he maintains to this day.