Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994) was a German-born American painter whose work bridged Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. The exhibition, The Slow Unfolding: Friedel Dzubas' Final Abstractions, opening on September 11, offers a unique opportunity to re-examine Dzubas's place in art history. The show focuses on the last decades of his career, a period that witnessed the full maturation of his lifelong dedication to color, materiality, and the discipline of creating. Many of these late works, which have not been publicly exhibited for decades, reveal the remarkable depth and complexity of an artist who often found himself on the fringes of the very art movements he helped to shape.
In the catalog essay, "BRIDGING THE GAP," curator and art writer Dan Cameron argues that Dzubas's work never truly belonged to the color-field movement he was so closely associated with. According to Cameron, this is because Dzubas's work is far from the reductive, purist style that defined the movement.
"If the name Friedel Dzubas is unfamiliar to some viewers today, ironically that’s due in part to the Berlin-born American painter possessing both the curse and the blessing to always be in the right place at exactly the right time, and as often as not with exactly the right people," Cameron writes. Despite his proximity to titans of art history, like Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland, Dzubas never attained the same level of success, in part because his work "never legitimately belonged" to the influential movement.
Cameron also explores how Dzubas often featured strong contrasts and divisions, which could be interpreted as a reflection of his own personal struggles. "The more time one spends contemplating Friedel Dzubas’ work and pondering his unique life story, the more insistently the theme of a split identity appears," Cameron writes, noting that Dzubas was the child of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, who fled Germany in 1939 as a war refugee. This experience, along with the lack of formal training, led him to develop a hybrid painterly language all his own.
The essay highlights how Dzubas's use of a specific paint, Magna, enabled him to achieve "virtuosic handling of the edges of these lozenge-like shapes, which range from hard-edge to feathery, with every variation in between." Cameron sees a connection to the German Romantic landscape tradition in Dzubas's work, which "most viewers...have little trouble making" and finds a "continual oscillation between these two genres."
In the end, Cameron suggests that Dzubas's true legacy may lie not in his association with the color-field painters, but in his status as a "true American original." His work, which was once seen as a flawed attempt at color-field painting, is now being celebrated for its complexity, its emotional depth, and its refusal to be categorized. "There is virtually nothing simple or reductive about Dzubas’ paintings," Cameron concludes. "On the contrary, their complexity is rooted in aspects of his life story and spiritual beliefs that remained mostly hidden during his lifetime."
