BRIDGING THE GAP
by Dan Cameron
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. If that reads like a formula for easy success, it might have seemed that way fifty years ago, when Dzubas was at the peak of his career, with regular exhibitions at top galleries like André Emmerich, which also represented such high-profile artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland. It was the height of the movement known variously as color-field painting, lyrical abstraction, or to use the critic Clement Greenberg’s coinage, post-painterly abstraction. Dzubas had become friends with Greenberg in 1948, subsequently in 1949 joined the 8th Street Club, whose members included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Ad Reinhardt, and shared a New York studio with Frankenthaler beginning in 1952. Despite his proximity to these titans of art history, he never attained the level of success as those peers, and his friend Greenberg never fully championed his work. Viewed from the more stylistically pluralist perspective of 2025, it is hard not to believe that the core of Dzubas’ falling short of his aspirations is that he became fully identified with a very influential movement to which his work never legitimately belonged.
It takes just a quick perusal of any American art magazine from the first half of the 1970s to start to appreciate the strong rhetorical grip that post-painterly abstraction had on the art discourse of its time. Rooted in experiments with staining and pouring techniques in the early 1950s by painters like Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, color-field’s critical and academic bona fides soon become rock solid, perhaps more so than any previous movement in American art. With the value of hindsight, color-field’s critical rigor and purism feels a bit like a reaction to the avant-garde experiments of the 1960s, which had given birth to Pop, Happenings and Conceptual Art. Those scruffy upstart movements would have been perceived at the time as a multi-front assault on the reductive principles of the Greenbergian status quo, which had dominated critical discourse starting in the late 1940s with Jackson Pollock’s first “drip” paintings, which had inspired Greenberg’s first (and most influential) ideas. The assault was successful — by the early 1980s, the color-field/lyrical abstraction movement was splintered into multiple camps and mostly relegated to the sidelines as neo-expressionist figuration took its place. Post-painterly abstraction didn’t disappear, as Dzubas’ 1983 retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum attests, but most of the painters associated, fairly or not, with the movement, such as Dzubas, were pushed to the
margins, until recent efforts at revisionist art history brought other modes of critiquing mid-century abstraction to the fore, with the result that we are able to freshly appraise these artists outside of that fairly confining framework.
For Dzubas, the awkwardness of not fitting into strictly defined categories was a lifelong state of being. The child of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, Friedel grew up in the years preceding Kristallnacht, as German race restrictions became increasingly onerous. The result was that instead of studying art, he apprenticed at a home decoration company, and instead of working as an artist, he spent his early twenties at an agricultural collective far from Berlin that was run by a Jewish charity whose mission was to prepare its charges for emigration to North and South America. In 1939, the 24-year-old arrived alone in Virginia as a war refugee, having left his immediate family behind in Germany, where they suffered the privations of war that he’d managed to escape. Dzubas, who lived in Chicago and Ohio before settling in New York in 1945, didn’t return to Berlin until twenty years later, by which time his new identity had settled into place: a U.S. citizen, a self-taught artist with a budding reputation, and a secular skeptic who nonetheless was deeply immersed in a branch of Catholic mysticism his maternal grandmother introduced him to as a boy, and which he was more deeply affected by during his ten-month return visit in 1959. The psychic impact of that trip to his native city can be discerned in his strongly Abstract Expressionist “Black Drawings” series (1959-1962), where half-concealed references to bombedout cities and ravaged human souls are difficult to miss.
Dzubas was by all accounts a hard worker, but it’s likely that the absence of formal training slowed his studio progress, so that while he exhibited alongside his betterknown contemporaries through the 1950s and 1960s, his fully characteristic style did not emerge until the early 1970s, by which time color-field had already begun to peak as a movement. Even so, he made friends quickly, and a crucial part of Dzubas’ artistic breakthrough came about through his long friendship with the innovative paint manufacturer Leonard Bocour, who invented an acrylic-based paint called Magna, which became the preferred medium for some painters of Dzubas’ generation, including Roy Lichtenstein and Barnett Newman (it was the only paint Morris Louis used). Instead of being water-based, Magna used pigment particles dispersed in acrylic resin using solvent, which among other effects made it fast-drying with a gloss finish that didn’t yellow.
What Magna enabled Dzubas to accomplish in painterly terms can be fully appreciated in a painting like Barrier (1983), which is composed of four long horizontal slabs of unbroken ochre, brown, moss-green and deep turquoise. The sheer physical presence of the field of pigment is offset by its contrast with an
underlying ground consisting of royal blue on the left and a smudged, cloudlike vista on the right. One of Dzubas’ greatest strengths as a painter was in his virtuosic handling of the edges of these lozenge-like shapes, which range from hard-edge to feathery, with every variation in between. Dzubas favored white gessoed grounds, which provide an almost illusionistic suggestion of depth, so that the large monochromatic shapes seem to float against a hazy field of sky, land, and water. The tension between hard and soft edges provides the major compositional dynamic for Remembrance (1989), a square canvas with seven distinct monochrome fields that either butt up against each other or dissipate into wisps of gaseous hues. Dzubas rarely mixed his paints, preferring to isolate each color within its designated sector of the composition, with the white underpainting and feathery brushwork lending a luminous glow. Most of the internal edges are soft to the point of immateriality, creating a heightened contrast with the inner borders that are rigid as a wall. Here the fields seem more dynamic, as if they are being swirled about by gusts of wind.
While the Abstract Expressionist generation of the mid-1940s through the 1950s hitched its identity and its name to the example of the German and Austrian Expressionists who flourished between the World Wars, one looks mostly in vain to find historical references made to the German Romantic painters of the previous century, for whom landscape provided the quintessential subject matter. Painters like Casper David Friedrich or Arnold Böcklin saw in the unspoiled landscape an outer reflection of the human soul with all its torments, a markedly distinct interpretation from the pastoral idealism of the Hudson River School.
This observation is relevant in Dzubas’ case because most viewers of his work today have little trouble making the connection between his work and the Romantic landscape tradition. The title of the large canvas Dawn (1984-85) seems to explicitly refer to the roseate light peering through the dense, cloud-like configurations at the top of the painting, from where it is easy to make out forms resembling rocks, vegetation, and water. Although what Dzubas seems to have attempted in this work, a way of splitting the difference between landscape and abstraction, seems entirely tenable by contemporary standards, it was not so in the early 1980s, when the border between representational and non-representational art was still being rigorously policed. Without knowing the work’s provenance, it’s possible to conjecture that its state of continual oscillation between these two genres, making it especially contemporary to our eyes, may well have been disqualifying within the genre everybody supposed he was working in.
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.
Vocationally thwarted in his youth and endangered in early adulthood by Nazi policy towards German “mischling” — children of mixed Jewish and Catholic heritage — Dzubas seems to have never been able to reconcile the two identities, to the point where certain paintings began to organize themselves around the motif of a chasm or rupture. His painting Cleavage (1990, not exhibited), made towards the end of his life, has been discussed at length by his biographer, Patricia L. Lewy, in terms of Dzubas making the fractures in his identity visually explicit to the viewer in an effort to heal them. In effect, two distinct painterly approaches, explored within the same composition, are separated by a large area of white between them, which functions simultaneously as a type of negative space preventing the two forms of painting from touching, as well as a blank zone that the eye skips over in an effort to bind the two across a field of pure, colors light.
A similar effect is generated by the vertical painting Strange Encounter (1985), in which a slightly angled tear between separate compartments cuts diagonally from the top left to the bottom right. The left half is filled with expressively rendered forms in earthy tones that hint at a truncated landscape, while the right half is dominated by a deep crimson field that covers most of the surface, leaving gaps at the top and bottom that create a spatial ambiguity in the sense of an implied glimpse of perspectival distance that recedes into the background. The most dramatic contrast between the two vertical sections lies in the left half’s implied close-up perspective vs. the right half’s possibly aerial glimpse of a faraway point on the horizon. This contrast is further reinforced by a sense that the forms on the left are cascading downward, while those on the right seems to be soaring towards the sky. In other words, the two vertical halves, while complementary, never overlap or interact visually, leaving the viewer to bring them together by force of will or imagination.
If we accept as a starting premise the principle that half a century is a sufficient amount of time for an art movement to have receded enough in history to be more accurately evaluated for its ongoing influence, a couple of key points
Cleavage, 1990, Magna (acrylic) on canvas,
101 3/16 x 43 11/16 inches, private collection, © 2021 Estate of Friedel Dzubas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
emerge. One is that the critical pillars which long supported Clement Greenberg’s theories about the application of reductionist principles to reduce painting to its essential ingredients are not the tools we use today to determine which artists’ bodies of work retain, lose, or increase their relevance within the very different set of criteria by which abstract painting has come to be evaluated. A second point, which relates to the first, is that an artist such as Friedel Dzubas, who tried, but never fully succeeded, in having his work held up alongside the standard-bearers of color-field painting, might be better contextualized as belonging instead to a more maverick tradition within American painting, wherein artists who never fully conformed to a strict set of stylistic guidelines during their own time wound up developing a hybrid painterly language of their own. There is virtually nothing simple or reductive about Dzubas’ paintings. On the contrary, their complexity is rooted in aspects of his life story and spiritual beliefs that remained mostly hidden during his lifetime, arguably because they had no place in the critical discourse in which his works were immersed. What Dzubas appears to have sought most of all is that his work be able to stand its own alongside the giants of his generation, and enjoy the sense of protection that went with being part of a collective stylistic identity. But what he achieved was potentially far greater than belonging to any movement, since decades later we are still pondering the deeper meanings beneath Dzubas’ images and gestures, the enigma of his bifurcated psyche, and the unresolved conflicts he experienced with those whose approval he sought the most. Despite what occasionally feels like his best efforts to be part of a much-lauded group of his contemporaries, Friedel Dzubas’ work comes across to us today as the product of a true American original.
DAN CAMERON is a New York City based curator and art writer.
43 x 43 inches
Untitled, c. 1980
Magna on canvas
Dawn, 1984-85
Magna on canvas
96 x 96 inches
Monotype on handmade paper 34 x 34 1/2 inches
Untitled, 1981
Untitled, 1981
Hand-painted monotype on pulp 30 x 24 3/4 inches
Untitled, 1985
Acrylic on paper
30 x 24 1/2 inches
Untitled, 1981
Monotype print on handmade paper 25 x 30 inches
Untitled, 1988
40 x 40 inches
Magna on canvas
Strange Encounter, 1985
Magna on canvas
92 x 37 inches
31 1/2 x 52 1/4 inches
Untitled, c. 1980
Magna on canvas
Barrier, 1983
on canvas 49 x 111 inches
Magna
72 x 72 inches
Remembrance, 1989
Magna on canvas
SELECT PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida
Museum of Reinhard Ernst, Wiesbaden, Germany
Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia
Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
Fort Wayne Art Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York
