Background

Friedel Dzubas was born on April 20, 1915, in Berlin, Germany. He had brother Harry Dzubas of Konstanz, Germany.

Education

Friedel Dzubas studied at Prussian Academy of Arts from 1936 to 1939.

Career

Friedel Dzubas left Germany in 1939, moving to Chicago, where he found work as an illustrator. By the late 40's, he settled in New York City and became associated with some of the leading young painters of the time. Jackson Pollock was his close friend, and he shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler.

In 1948 he met Clement Greenberg who introduced him to Jackson Pollock and Katherine Dreier. That same year he participated in his first group exhibition at Weyhe Gallery. While Dzubas’ early paintings evoked Paul Klee and the Surrealist works of William Baziotes, by 1949 he was experimenting with soaking paint into sheets of canvas.

He had his first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1952. Several years later, the critic Stuart Preston, writing in The New York Times, admired his "airy explosions of shape and color," which could bring to mind storms and sea swirls. By the late 50's and early 60's, his art could also be described as "a sort of delightful rococo postscript to the baroque thunder of Abstract Expressionism," as the critic Brian O'Doherty put it in The Times.

During the mid-60's Dzubas painted hard-edged blocks of color. But he soon returned to a more expressive and improvisational manner that sought to bridge the contemporary concerns of American abstraction with his European past. He especially admired the Romantics, and his art was sometimes linked in its spirit to German Romanticism.

Dzubas exhibited at the Castelli, Knoedler and Emmerich galleries, among other places, and had retrospectives at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. He was included in an important Color Field survey in 1975 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

He was also a teacher and lecturer in several institutions. From 1976 to 1993 he taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Achievements

• Dzubas held over 60 solo exhibitions during his lifetime, obtaining numerous awards including two Guggenheim fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship, and Artist-in-Residence appointments at the Institute for Humanistic Studies in Aspen, Dartmouth College, and Cornell University.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Sacrifice

    1961

  • Omen

    1959

  • Stone Flower

    1961

  • Eagle Pass

  • Antigua

    1971

  • Below

  • Ascona

    1976

  • Purple Gate

    1975

  • Untitled

    1987

  • Untitled #77

    1954

  • Flowering #2

    1963

  • GTW-FD#6

    1987

  • Turning Point

    1983

  • Current

    1981

  • Aruba

    1969

  • Untitled

    1971

  • Eagle End

    1976

  • Sanctum

  • Untitled

    1953

  • Ghana

  • Madame X

  • Agmont

    1981

  • Polaris

    1959

  • Sartoris

    1963

  • Untitled

  • Yonder

    1979

  • Untitled

    1981

  • Red Flight

    1957

  • Spring Smell

    1988

  • East Journey

    1968

  • Untitled

    1974

  • Sudden

    1976

  • Untitled Abstraction

    1974

  • North Ledge

    1975

  • Hope Distant

    1987

  • Renewal

    1977

  • Distant Sea

    1958

  • Echo

  • Isis

  • Color Test

    1987

  • Lotus

    1962

  • Distant View

  • Road Cross

    1958

  • Untitled

  • Tundra II

    1962

  • Duo

  • Towards

  • Untitled

  • GTW #14

  • Rush

  • Blue Tide

  • Further Land

  • Lady Burn

  • Slate

  • Red Split

  • Bernina

  • Maelstream

  • Coat of Arms

  • Velot

  • Untitled

  • Entrance

  • Brimrock

  • Lone Blue

    1962

  • Hot Morning

  • Untitled

  • Over the Hill

    1953

  • Untitled

  • Durango

  • Untitled (EXP-FD-5-7)

  • Sounding

  • Red Heart

  • Blooming

  • San Bivar Signal

  • Cassia

  • Cyclop

  • Nebel

  • Ikarus

  • Aurora

    1977

  • Procession

    1971

  • Kay's Travel

    1959

  • Moonhunt

    1958

  • Key Largo

    1964

  • Untitled

  • Barrier

    1983

Membership

• It is an Abstract Expressionist group that included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Ad Reinhardt among others.

  Eight Street Club

  1949

Connections

Friedel Dzubas' four marriages ended in divorce. He had three children: Hannele Dzubas Brooks and Morgan Dzubas, and Adam Dzubas.

Spouse:

Dorothea Brasch

Spouse:

Mary Kelsey

Brother:

Harry Dzubas

Daughter:

Hannele Dzubas Brooks

Son:

Morgan Dzubas

Son:

Adam Dzubas

Friend:

Jackson Pollock

Friend:

Clement Greenberg

References

• Friedel Dzubas Friedel Dzubas presents the first scholarly monograph on the German-born American artist whose works display a mastery of color, light, and scale. Celebrated for his monumental, luminous color abstractions, Dzubas has nonetheless been marginalized by misclassification. Often grouped with Color Field artists of the mid-to later-twentieth century, this richly illustrated volume asserts the artist’s singular ties to historical painterly handling and pictorial structure—from the animating brush work of Titian to the light-filled, narrative frescoes by Giambattista Tiepolo. Even more, Dzubas’s abiding ambition to express pictorially his sources of spiritual inspiration in religious allegory and landscape marks his achievement as unique among his contemporaries.
• Friedel Dzubas: Critical Painting
• Friedel Dzubas: the Early Years
• Friedel Dzubas: Four Decades 1950-1990