No matter how sound the rules are, a high degree of personal sensitivity (or intuition) must be involved.

Since these paintings strike me as fine indeed, I am left with only one possible conclusion, which is that Mr. Anuszkiewicz, in spite of what appears to be a totally impersonal, hyper methodical way of working, is a sensitive artist.

The resultant vibrations of color against color are not the eye-shattering kind produced by some optical art (including some of Mr. Anuszkiewiczs) and the paintings, if I had not made it clear, are really beautiful.

The shimmering surfaces of paintings like Grand Spectra, 1968, consisting of six rows of six squares and Prisma, 6' x 9', of the same year, two stacked rows of three squares each, qualify them as an Op artist's corrective to the coldness of Minimalism. Anuszkiewicz appreciated the structure, order and clarity of the new style, but instinctively dematerialized the minimalist grid. After this show, Janis had difficulty in keeping Anuszkiewicz's new work in stock. "There was more of a waiting list for me than for Jackson Pollock."⁶⁷

Anuszkiewicz responded respectfully to post-Pop & Op developments in contemporary art Egan. with his One Hundred and Twenty One Squares, 1969. Since the work consists of a 10 x 12 grid, the title's extra square pays respectful homage to one of Sol Lewitt's: Wall Floor Piece (Three Squares) of 1966 was a conceptual installation of a square wooden frame which, when placed on the floor, invokes the squares in and around it. As two mathematically-inclined contemporaries, Anuszkiewicz and Lewitt frequently sound alike: "I think the idea, which again is — I feel — one of the most important things in a work, usually takes more time than the execution" is Anuszkiewicz speaking, for example.⁶⁸ When Lewitt says, "In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all planning and decisions are made beforehand. The execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art,⁶⁹ the sole objection by Anuszkiewicz would be to 'perfunctory' execution, The techniques he perfected for laying down on canvas pristine lines and fields — not to mention the laborious color mixing under controlled light — require more skill than most other painters care to apply. Theoretically, since Anuszkiewiczs works after the late sixties are as precisely planned on a mathematical basis as Lewitt's, their ideas could be distilled into the kinds of 'instructions' Lewitt made for his wall drawings, which by the way require considerable skill to perform.

In 1970 Anuszkiewicz evolved his compositions from modules to series, and from squares to rectangles He called these new works Portals. He found the upright format conducive to his desire to work with a more expansive range of colors. The result was revealed in a chapter of unprecedented lyricism in his distinctive style. Trinity, 1970, is a triptych of three Portals enclosed by a deep blue border, The multiple outlines of each Portal progress inward to end in an incandescent vertical yellow slit. This motif was the seed that would generate the Temple series in the next decade.

In 1972, Paul Cummings asked him about the "very soft" colors of " the Portals. Anuszkiewicz's reply placed this change in context:

In the last show the image remained constant, I worked with maybe five bands that worked into the center, five bands that worked all the way around that were made up of lines on a square or on a vertical and the only difference was color. I went into wide ranges of different colors that I never used before and that was the real difference in that show. It was almost an about-face from some of the earlier work.⁷⁰

Maybe I will return again back to solids — but I mean here is almost a complete opposite of the very hard, very flat areas of straight complementary colors, playing one against the other, the ones that I used that were first called 'eye shattering' by the critics and hard to look at — you know, shattering the optic nerve kind of thing.