In Plus Reversed, plus signs, rounded ones in green, gradually thin out in rings across a red background until the gaps are larger than the pluses, which seem to 'reverse' from green to red. "One part of the painting expands, another contracts, as if the whole canvas were breathing."³²

The Contemporaries advertised the show in the London-based Burlington Magazine with a picture, Winter Recipe, 1958, which in black and white looked like something swarming under a microscope (or maybe a pot of rice). The work was exciting for its potential and the feeling, a critic wrote, "of having arrived in Oz, and having arrived as an artist... and nothing conveys both freshness and openness to outside space more than photographs from that time showing Anuszkiewicz shepherding his fledglings on rooftops in New York."³³

The New York papers received the show with some perplexity, but not hostility. A sea change was in the air. Stuart Preston, reviewer for the New York Times, wrote of "Scientific experimentation..." reaching a point "where color relationships of the most startling character and with the most unexpected optical consequences can be established."³⁴ These early abstractions, though tightly controlled, have a sprawling energy that makes them "a reasoned equivalence for the freewheeling dynamism of the so-called Action Painters"³⁵ Fortified by his sales, and with a second show already slated for the coming year, Anuszkiewicz quit his day job and married Elizabeth (Sally) Feeney, a schoolteacher. They have now been married 50 years.

The Contemporaries handled Albers' prints. His pupil bought a lithograph from Albers' first Tamarind series, which his teacher signed and inscribed, some soft edges for Richard Anuszkiewicz.³⁶ It was a playful dig at the hard-edge style Albers had learned of, and said he approved, back in the days that Richard was taking his work around to show to galleries. At the end of 1960, Fluorescent Complement was exhibited along with Alfred Barr's other recent acquisitions at MOMA. The show included a large picture by Vasarely, a sign that Barr was tacitly championing the counter-reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Anuszkiewicz was impressed by the older master's work, and realized that they were on parallel tracks. A major difference between their work, he said, was that Vasarely composed his paintings in patterns of light and dark, while his were planned arrangements of colors."³⁷

His second solo show at The Contemporaries in 1961 added to his momentum. The pictures were selling and the critics were impressed."³⁸ The gallery's windows on Madison Avenue at 77th street were lit all night, providing an excellent showcase for the new paintings. It was an exciting time to be in New York: the newspapers ran almost daily reviews of contemporary shows. Critics were given license to be critical, even dismissive. Curators from MOMA, the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums, were constantly out, doing the rounds. Everybody, including artists and collectors, met everybody else at the non-stop exhibition openings. In the young high-tech presidency of John F. Kennedy, the art scene shifted from the sawdusted floors of the Cedar Bar way downtown to the track-lit steel and glass storefronts of mid-town Manhattan.

Something that was different from today was the involvement of museums and private galleries in the organization of trend-setting group shows of first-rate talent. The next year he was invited into the Pennsylvania Academy of Design annual in January and included in "Geometric Abstraction in America", which opened in March at the Whitney Museum of American Art and travelled to Boston and St Louis. A Marsden Hartley of 1916 was the earliest of the sixty-eight paintings in the historical survey. Among the many contemporaries represented, Alexander Calder, Albers, Ellsworth Kelly and Anuszkiewicz were singled out in the New York Times, which noted provocatively that "Geometrical art... stands for a repudiation of naturalism and for... a quest for maximum objectivity... As can well be seen here this style is largely dependent on the intuition, taste and purely personal creativity of individuals."³⁹ In November, 1962, the MOMA announced that it had begun work on a major show that would "document the development from impressionism" to the contemporary trend towards "a primarily visual emphasis."⁴⁰