Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994)

FRIEDEL DZUBAS (German/American 1915-1994)

BIOGRAPHY
� Born in 1915 in Berlin, Germany; died 1994 in U.S.A.
� Teacher at: Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (1962); Institute of Humanistic Studies (1965-66); University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1968-69); Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (1969-70s)
� In the 1930s in Germany, fought against the rise of Nazism and was a member of the Young Communists
� Left Berlin for London, England in 1939, and immigrated to the United States in 1940
� In New York, Dzubas was a friend of Clement Greenberg, who in turn introduced him to Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionist artists. Dzubas was a great admirer of Greenberg's theories on modern painting
� A member of the Societe Anonyme, he was a close contact of Katherine Dreier and designed their first catalogue in 1950
� Shared his New York studio with Helen Frankenthaler
� Along with Sam Francis and Helen Frankenthaler, an important artist of the Color-field painting movement
� Guggenheim Fellowship, 1966 and 1968
� National Council on the Arts Award, 1968

STUDIED
� Some biographical sources say that he was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin from 1931-1934, while others say that he was an autodidact

EXHIBITED
� Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
� Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
� Galerie French & Co., New York
� Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
� Post Painterly Abstraction, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
� Form, Color, Image, Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan
� American Painting Now, American Pavilion, Expo 1967, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
� Color and Field, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Cleveland Museum and Dayton Art Institute, Ohio
� Abstract Painting in the 70s, Boston Museum of Fine Art, Massachusetts
� Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

MUSEUMS AND COLLECTIONS
� Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
� 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

Associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionism, Dzubas was a proponent of color-field painting. (Working in New York City in the 1950s, Dzubas was close to other color-field painters Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, the latter sharing a studio with Dzubas in 1952-1953). The worked surfaces and "all-overness� of his painted canvases suggest that surfaceness is not an attribute of color but rather that color is a property of surfaces. (That is, it is not that flatness is a definable characteristic of color but the opposite: color is characteristic of flat surfaces.) He exhibited a preference for clear, discrete, and contrasting areas of hue in thin layers. In the 1970s, he began filling surfaces with large, rounded rectangular patches of loosely painted multi-colored strokes (as if painted with a huge brush). Positioned in loose right angles, the patches vary in size, direction, and color in order to generate contours and color changes, in effect, providing pictorial "drama." Working with a quick-drying Magna paint, Dzubas shaded the color patches according to lateral extension (as opposed to being modeled in relation to contour) as a way of asserting the flatness of the canvas. Forms both define and enliven the surface; in this work, the perpetual roll of the circular format is anchored by verticals and horizontals.