Friedel Dzubas
Friedel Dzubas (1915 – 1994) was a prominent figure in the New York School, closely linked to the Color Field painting movement during the mid-twentieth century. He continued to create art until his passing. Dzubas was born in Berlin, Germany and studied under Paul Klee at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where he absorbed Klee’s innovative concepts of color.
In 1939, amidst the rise of Nazi Germany, Dzubas fled to the United States, initially settling in Chicago, where he worked as an illustrator and then relocated to New York City by the late 1940s. In New York, he formed friendships with leading contemporary painters, including Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler. Dzubas’s lyrical style evoked the contemplative landscapes of the 19th-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich. His work was featured in the influential 1964 exhibition “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” organized by Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Art critic Brian O’Dohery of The New York Times characterized his work as “a delightful rococo postscript to the baroque thunder of Abstract Expressionism.”
During the 1950s, Dzubas was integral to the Greenwich Village art scene and employed broad, painterly swirls reminiscent of “mind storms” and sea surges. In the following decade, he experimented with hard-edged blocks of color but eventually returned to a more spontaneous and expressive style, bridging contemporary American abstraction with European traditions. Dzubas began exhibiting his work in the 1950s, with his first solo show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1952, followed by exhibitions at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958 and French and Company in 1959. He continued to have numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Düsseldorf, Toronto, and beyond. Major retrospectives of his work were held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1974 and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1975. Dzubas also taught and lectured at various institutions, including Dartmouth College, the Institute of Humanistic Studies in Aspen, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University. His works are included in numerous public collections, such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many others. He received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1966 and 1968 and an award from the National Council on the Arts in 1968.
Dzubas additionally taught and lectured at various institutions, including Dartmouth College, the Institute of Humanistic Studies in Aspen, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University. His works are included in numerous public collections, such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, the Lowe Art Museum in Coral Gables, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Newark Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
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