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Friedel DZUBASPaintings of the 1950s

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Born and raised in Berlin, he recalls being impressed by the work of Munch and Van Gogh, as a student in the early 1930’s. (Dzubas fled Germany in 1939, arriving in the U.S. via London and Montreal.) These first encounters with mod-ernist art must have had some effect, but obviously there is no simple explanation for the character of Dzubas’ paintings. Yet whatever the cause, it’s apparent that nothing ever happens in his work solely for the sake of visual delight; instead, even the slightest incident appears charged and resonant. There’s always the suspicion that for all their unequivocal abstract-ness, Dzubas’ paintings are about momentous events, cos-mic forces and personal epiphanies. That, perhaps, is what prompted a colleague of mine to observe that they looked both old-fashioned and up to date, at the same time. Often their flickering surfaces and dramatic dark and light shifts seem to have as much affinity with, say, Baroque painting as with recent color abstraction. Sometimes Dzubas appears to marry the lushness of the grand manner to the austerity of modernism, reinventing 17th century narrative painting in late 20th century abstract terms, substituting floating color masses for gesticulating figures and inflections of surface and hue for chiaroscuro. Dzubas’ touch seems less a modernist celebra-tion of the physical properties of his medium than a reminder of the role of the hand in “old-fashioned” painting, a means, never an end in itself. The pools and swipes of pigment, the complex arrays of subtly varied color, the moody shifts from

bright to dark are orchestral, even operatic. I once heard a viewer say “Beethoven,” about one of Dzubas’ tempestuous block paintings. “Late Beethoven,” her companion specified.

Dzubas is well aware of the paradox inherent in his work- the surprising coexistence of what could be described as both formalist and non-formalist conceptions, without any apparent compromise of either. He often speaks of the two-sidedness of his pursuit. “I like doing the things I am told I should not be able to do,” he says, “even if I don’t succeed.” He says that he feels compelled equally towards full-throttle romanticism and towards restraint, towards pictures that give proof of what he calls his “dark side” and towards others that are pure lyricism and delicacy. “You embrace the romantic while getting mar-ried to the classic,” Dzubas says wryly. His dual allegiance to both tradition and modernism is simply another of these char-acteristic polarities and one that he accepts and, I suspect, encourages. It is difficult ultimately, to decide whether Dzubas is exploring modernist abstraction in terms of the legacy of the Old Masters, or carrying on Old Master traditions in a manner wholly informed by 20th century abstraction.

No matter how consistent the stamp of Dzubas’ personal-ity may be, his work since the 1950’s has also been punctu-ated by a series of apparently abrupt changes of approach. These disjunctions are often unwilled reflections of a natural evolution, but at other times, they seem the result of deliberate choices. Following his first — and successful — solo exhibition

It’s tempting to consider Dzubas’ European, specifically German origins and his early experience of expressionist art in relation to his American paintings.

above:Over the Hill1954–55, Oil on canvas695/8 x 106¼ inches, 176.8 x 269.9 cm

Friedal Dzubas, at the Leo Castelli Gallery May 12, 1959 (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)

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at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, in 1952, for example, Dzubas felt it necessary to stop painting for more than two years, in order to reevaluate what he was doing and what he wished to do. In part, this was prompted by upheavals in his domestic life, and in part, I suspect, by an increasing desire to come to terms with the influence of Jackson Pollock; Pollock and Dzubas had met in 1948, through Clement Greenberg, and became friends. At the time, Dzubas says, “I was close to Jackson and still im-pressed and oppressed by him. He was a powerful influence, like a fantastic possibility. I wasn’t really interested in what he was doing, but in the freedom he apparently presented.”

Like Helen Frankenthaler, with whom he shared a studio before the de Nagy show, Dzubas felt that Pollock could in-dicate a point of departure. Frankenthaler adopted Pollock’s stain method and full-arm gestures as the technical means for her earliest canvases, using them to produce ambiguous images that in no way resembled Pollock’s. Dzubas, similarly, took on the scale and the “freedom” of Pollock’s approach, but oddly, he emulated the look of staining without literally using the technique. The paintings that he produced both be-fore his exhibition at Tibor de Nagy and after the self-imposed two year hiatus, are made, in part, with thin washes, worked very wet, rather than with true stains. It’s a small point, but it’s indicative of Dzubas’ attitude toward the painter who prob-ably had the strongest influence on him in those formative years; Pollock’s example seems to have liberated something in Dzubas rather than to have provided a direct model, stylisti-cally or even technically.

Dzubas’ canvases of the 1950s are cursive and edgy. They often exploit intense contrasts of dark and light, and of color and surface and as a result, their hallucinatory images often appear to be in constant flux. Loose, spiky drawing seems to happen as we watch. Dzubas notes that these paintings were based fairly directly on his own interior imagery, on dreams and obsessions, presented in wholly non-specific, abstract terms. “I was reading everything of Freud I could get my hands on then,” he comments. “That’s what I was thinking about.” When Dzubas began to work again, after the break, his paintings were often clearer, less layered and less clotted- although they lost none of their ferocity — as though Dzubas, by making these pictures, had in some way made peace with the demons that provoked them. “I would have gone crazy,” he says of those pictures today, “if I had not had this absolute and abstract outlet for what I was feeling.”

For Dzubas, the end of the 1950’s was marked by a num-ber of milestones; in 1959, he became an American citizen and he gave up the freelance design work with which he had supported himself, in order to paint full time. Just as impor-tant, in December of that year, he returned to Europe for the first time since 1939. On this trip, he became fascinated by German and Austrian Baroque architecture, by the extraor-dinary church interiors of carved and modeled plaster where every surface is embellished and articulated. On his return to the U.S., he produced a small group of remarkable black

paintings, obsessive layers of drawing that expand to fill the canvas edge to edge. These ominous mottled fields seems at once to sum up Dzubas’ response to both art history and his own, to his recollections of the Europe he had left and the transformed continent that he revisited as an “American;” perhaps they even sum up, as well, his response to Baroque architecture They appear, too, to be his definitive statement about Pollock: freely drawn, “hand made” commentaries on the notions of all-overness and repetition stated so expressively in the American artist’s work. Dzubas abandoned the series fairly quickly, as though having found images for his feelings about the past and possibly even about his past, he was un-burdened, for the moment, and ready to explore images argu-ably more befitting an up to date American painter, ready to commit himself whole-heartedly to the present.

Karen WilkenReprinted from “Friedel Dzubas Four Decades: 1950-1990”

Andre Emmerich Gallery, 1991

left:In Case I Die1949, Oil on cotton bed sheet71 x 36 inches, 180.3 x 91.4 cm

right:Untitled1953, Oil on canvas79 x 52 inches, 200.7 x 132.1 cm

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above:Untitled #771954, Oil on canvas69 x 71 inches, 175.3 x 180.3 cm

right:Road Cross1958, Oil on canvas60 x 49¼ inches, 152.4 x 125.1 cm

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Omen1959, Oil on canvas80 x 65 inches, 203.2 x 165.1 cm

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Fallen Angel1959, Oil on canvas91 x 115 inches, 231.1 x 292.1 cm

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Passage1959, Oil on canvas42 x 124 inches, 106.7 x 315 cm

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Untitled1959, Oil on canvas90 x 76 inches, 228.6 x 193 cm

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Polaris1959, Oil on canvas93½ x 47¾ inches, 237.5 x 121.3 cm

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above:Stone Flower1961, Oil on canvas50 x 625/8 inches, 127 x 159.1 cm

right:Agora1959, Oil on linen, 73/4 x 24 inches

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1915 Born Friedebald Alfred Dzubas

April 20 in Berlin, Germany

1939 Flees Germany to the United

States on boat (via London and

Montreal)

1940 Moves to New York City where he

lives and works until 1961

1948 Meets Jackson Pollack

1949 Joins Eighth Street Club (other

members included Willem

de Kooning, Franz Kline, Ad

Reinhardt, Milton Resnick, Jack

Tworkov and Philip Pavia)

1950 Museum of Modern Art, New

York, American Painters Under 35

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

York, Young American Artists

1951 Meets Helen Frankenthaler at

Clement Greenberg’s apartment

1952 First One Man exhibition at Tibor

de Nagy, New York

1952/53 Shared studio with Helen

Frankenthaler

1953 Sublets Esteban Vincente’s studio

1954 Sublets Alex Katz’s studio

1955 Sublets Fairfield Porter’s house in

East Hampton

1957 First exhibition at Leo Castelli

Gallery, New York (1958,1959)

The Whitney Museum of

American Art, New York, The

Whitney Annual

1959 Becomes US citizen

The Whitney Museum of

American Art, New York, The

Whitney Annual

The Corcoran Gallery of Art,

Washington, DC,

26th Biennial Exhibition

First exhibition at French and

Company, New York

1960 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,

Sixty American Painters

1961 The Solomon R Guggenheim

Museum, New York, Abstract

Expressionists and Imagists

First exhibition at Robert Elkon

Gallery, New York (1962,1963,

1965,1981,1984,1993)

1962 University of South Florida,

Visiting Artist

Dartmouth College, Visiting Artist

1963 The Whitney Museum of

American Art, New York,

The Whitney Annual

The Jewish Museum, New York,

Black and White

The Corcoran Gallery of Art,

Washington, DC,

28th Biennial Exhibition

Musee Waldsee, Berlin,

Malerie der Gegenwart

1964 Los Angeles, Los Angeles County

Museum of Art, Post Painterly

Abstraction (traveling)

First One Man exhibition in

Europe at Kasmin Gallery,

London

1965/66 Institute for Humanistic

Studies, Aspen, CO, Artist-in-

Residence

1966 Guggenheim Fellowship for

Creative Painting

John Simon Guggenheim

Memorial Foundation Fellowship

First exhibition at Andre

Emmerich Gallery, New York

(1967,1968,1987,1989,1991)

1967 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY,

Visiting Artist

Montreal, US Pavillion, Expo ’67,

American Painting Now

1968 John Simon Guggenheim

Memorial Foundation Fellowship

National Council on the Arts

Fellowship

University of Pennsylvania,

Visiting Artist

1968/69 Sarah Lawrence College,

Visiting Artist

1970 Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery,

Color and Field: 1890–1970

1970/73 Cornell University, Ithaca,

NY, Visiting Artist

1971 First exhibition at Lawrence

Rubin Gallery, New York

(1972,1973)

1972 Boston, Museum of Fine Art,

Abstract Painting in the 70s

1973 Solomon R Guggenheim Museum,

New York, Two Decades of

American Painting

First exhibition at David

Mirvish Gallery, Toronto

(1974,1975,1976)

1974 Houston, The Museum of

Fine Arts, Friedel Dzubas: A

Retrospective Exhibition

First exhibition at Knoedler and

Company, New York

(1975–1986)

1976–83 School of the Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston, Visiting Artist

1976 Worked in private studio in

Cambridge, MA, lived in

Newton, MA

1977 Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld,

Germany, Friedel Dzubas:

Gemalde

1980 Brockton Art Center, Brockton,

MA, Aspects of the Seventies:

Painterly Abstraction

1981 National Academy of Arts and

Letters, New York, Exhibition of

Work by Newly Elected Members

and Recipients of Honors

and Letters

1983 Washington, DC, Hirshhorn

Museum and Sculpture Garden,

Smithsonian Institution,

Friedel Dzubas

1987 Nassau County Museum of Fine

Art, Rosyln, NY, Friedel Dzubas

1988 Rose Art Museum, Waltham,

MA, Brandeis University,

Friedel Dzubas

1994 Died December 10,

Auburndale, MA

This catalogue published on

the occasion of the exhibition

FRIEDEL DZUBAS

Paintings of the 1950s

March 18 – May 15, 2010

Opening reception

Thursday March 18

6:00 – 8:00

Jacobson Howard Gallery

33 East 68th Street

New York, NY 10065

212-570-2362

gallery@jacobsonhoward.com

ISBN: 978-0-9842804-1-4pages 6–18

photos by Ellen Page Wilsoncover, pages 3–5 & 19

photos by Ali Elai, Camerarts Catalogue designed by ADT

Cover: Polaris, detail 1959, page 17

SELECTED CHRONOLOGY

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