This all happened that year at Kent, 1955 to 1956"²³. He was painting full-time, far more than he had In New Haven. Concentric, 1956, is an expressionist composition seen through the eyes of a budding Op artist. The canvas is speckled with dots and dashes like colored lights. "Subject matter is something that has to come from within you, and everybody has to find it for himself."²⁴

Alter finishing up at Kent State, he painted houses through the summer and saved his money. When September came, he quit: "my friends went to teach and I rented an apartment in Cleveland and I painted. I painted all that fall. By then my first things were evolving, the first things I exhibited at The Contemporaries. And for the first time I discovered what a full complementary will do... When you put a red on a blue, you have this kind of fluorescent effect... that people say hurts your eye, that kind of thing. I started doing these first very vibrant paintings, just with these very strong colors and I discovered that if you're working for the maximum effect there are ways of achieving that and under different light conditions... So I started doing those first paintings and I worked I think right through the winter and by late winter and early spring I came to New York. It was 1957."²⁵

New York City: 1957-1965

In the spring of '57, Richard Anuszkiewicz left Ohio for good. "I was ready. I came to New York with a substantial amount of work. I was ready to go around to the galleries and I was prepared because I really had something. I had an idea. I had a series of paintings that showed this idea and I felt good about it and I felt now that's the only place for me to be."²⁶ A friend helped him get a job touching up the plaster models of classical temples and statues in the Junior Museum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He took off six months the next year to travel around Europe in a Volkswagen, also seeing some places in North Africa. "When I came back, I remember taking my work around to the galleries and receiving interesting comments — positive comments from the various people. But Abstract Expressionism was very popular. My things were very hard-edged, very strong in color — a use of color that nobody was using. Everybody would say. 'Oh, they are nice, but so hard to look at. They hurt my eyes"²⁷

Leo Castelli considered him seriously but the gallery was developing a specialization in pop artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.²⁸ "I can remember going to Martha Jackson and having her look at the work and she would put her hands straight out in front of her and block out parts of the painting with her hand and she'd say, mmm no rest areas."²⁹ He finally caught on with The Contemporaries Gallery in the fall of 1959. The gallery at 992 Madison Avenue mainly represented new European talent. Karl Lunde, the gallery director, saw some of his canvases hanging in the office of the American Federation of Arts and was intrigued.

Anuszkiewicz was given a solo show in March 1960. The turn out for the opening was promising, but there were no sales — not one — in the first two weeks. Anuszkiewicz's tightly controlled compositions were a radical break from the emotional performances of the Abstract Expressionists still in command of the New York school. The ice was finally broken on the last Saturday morning before the show closed. Alfred F. Barr Jr. walked in and bought Fluorescent Complement for the Museum of Modern Art. Other pictures were snapped up by private collectors, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller and author James Michener (Plus Reversed, 1960). Anuszkiewicz's first one-man show put him on the map.³⁰

"These first paintings that I did were very interesting because of the vibrancy of the color and because of this strong complementary action that you got, fluorescent action and then the alter-image because you got a sort of movement, they actually seemed to move. I played that up by using a lot of small shapes...that would not sit still on the canvas."³¹ He was using only two colors at a time, pitting a "hot" one against a "cool" one of equal strength and letting the chips fall where they may — except the outcome is always an uneasy tie.