Friedel Dzubas (April 20, 1915 in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

– December 10, 1994 in

Auburndale, Massachusetts Auburndale is one of the thirteen villages within the city of Newton in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It lies at the western end of Newton near the intersection of interstate highways 90 and 95. It is bisected by the Massachu ...

) was a German-born American

abstract painter Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19t ...

Life and work

Friedel Dzubas studied art in his native land before fleeing

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

in 1939 and settling in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. In

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

during the early 1950s, he shared a studio with fellow abstract painter

Helen Frankenthaler Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s u ...

. He began exhibiting his

Abstract expressionist Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...

paintings at this time. His work was included in the

Ninth Street Show The 9th Street Art Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture is the official title artist Franz Kline hand-lettered onto the poster he designed for the Ninth Street Show (May 21-June 10, 1951).

in New York City in 1951, and in group exhibitions at the Leo Castelli gallery, the Stable Gallery, and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery among others. After the

annual invitational exhibitions were held at the Stable Gallery throughout the 1950s. The poster of the second New York Painting and Sculpture Annual at The Stable Gallery in 1953, included an introduction by

Clement Greenberg Clement Greenberg () (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994), occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formali ...

: In the 1960s he became associated with Color field painting and

Lyrical Abstraction Lyrical abstraction is either of two related but distinct trends in Post-war Modernist painting: ''European Abstraction Lyrique'' born in Paris, the French art critic Jean José Marchand being credited with coining its name in 1947, considered ...

. He was included in ''

Post-painterly abstraction Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toront ...

'' a 1964 exhibition curated by

. Dzubas was a friend of Clement Greenberg, who in turn introduced him to

Jackson Pollock Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his " drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a hor ...

and other artists. His large work (up to wide) became more fluid. During the last three decades of his career, Dzubas had more than sixty solo exhibitions around the world. He was represented by the

André Emmerich André Emmerich (October 11, 1924 – September 25, 2007) was a German-born American gallerist who specialized in the color field school and pre-Columbian art while also taking on artists such as David Hockney and John D. Graham. Early life and ...

gallery and Knoedler Contemporary Arts in New York for more than thirty years. His works were exhibited at galleries including the

Anita Shapolsky Gallery The Anita Shapolsky Gallery is an art gallery that was founded in 1982 by Anita Shapolsky. It is currently located at 152 East 65th Street, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in New York City. The gallery specializes in 1950s and 1960s abstract e ...

and the Jacobson Howard Gallery in New York City. In 1976 he settled in

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...

, but also painted and lived in New York City, where his paintings were regularly exhibited.

Technique

Dzubas used Magna paint, an acrylic paint favored by many of the artist's peers over oil paint, from 1966 onward. The artist would apply thick layers of color over washes, scrubbing the paint into the unprimed canvas. Dzubas used staining, brushing and other ways of applying color. His paintings were generally large in size and scale, but he made many very small paintings as well.

Teaching

He was a teacher and lecturer at: * 1962 Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; * 1965–66, Institute of Humanistic Studies, Aspen (now Aspen Institute); * 1968–69, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; * 1969–1970s, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; he had the longest relationship with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he taught from 1976 to 1983.

Selected Museum collections

*Whitney Museum of American Art, New York *Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim Museum, New York *San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California *Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York *Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut *Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. *Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida *Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia *Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts *Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri *Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey *Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey *Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York *Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York *Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York *Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon *Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas *Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts *Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York *Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida

Awards

* 1966 Guggenheim Fellowship, * 1968 Guggenheim Fellowship * 1968 National Council on the Arts Award

References

External links

Estate of Friedel DzubasBiography for Friedel Dzubas
at Art Net * Marika Herskovic
''New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists,''
(New York School Press, 2000.) . p. 16; p. 36; pp. 122–125 {{DEFAULTSORT:Dzubas, Friedel 1915 births 1994 deaths Abstract painters Artists from New York (state) 20th-century American painters American male painters American contemporary painters 20th-century American male artists