Friedel Dzubas: Paintings of the 1950s

Friedel DZUBAS Paintings of the 1950s

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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 Hill 1954–55, Oil on canvas 695/8 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)

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 modernist 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 abstractness, Dzubas’ paintings are about momentous events, cosmic 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 celebration 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 workthe 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 married to the classic,” Dzubas says wryly. His dual allegiance to both tradition and modernism is simply another of these characteristic 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’ personality may be, his work since the 1950’s has also been punctuated 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 3

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 impressed 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 indicate 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 before 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 probably 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, stylistically 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 clottedalthough 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 number 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 important, 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 extraordinary 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 4

left: In Case I Die 1949, Oil on cotton bed sheet 71 x 36 inches, 180.3 x 91.4 cm right: Untitled 1953, Oil on canvas 79 x 52 inches, 200.7 x 132.1 cm

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 unburdened, for the moment, and ready to explore images arguably more befitting an up to date American painter, ready to commit himself whole-heartedly to the present.

Karen Wilken Reprinted from “Friedel Dzubas Four Decades: 1950-1990” Andre Emmerich Gallery, 1991

above: Untitled #77 1954, Oil on canvas 69 x 71 inches, 175.3 x 180.3 cm right: Road Cross 1958, Oil on canvas 60 x 49Âź inches, 152.4 x 125.1 cm 6

Omen 1959, Oil on canvas 80 x 65 inches, 203.2 x 165.1 cm 8

Fallen Angel 1959, Oil on canvas 91 x 115 inches, 231.1 x 292.1 cm 11

Passage 1959, Oil on canvas 42 x 124 inches, 106.7 x 315 cm 12

Untitled 1959, Oil on canvas 90 x 76 inches, 228.6 x 193 cm 14

Polaris 1959, Oil on canvas 93½ x 47¾ inches, 237.5 x 121.3 cm 16

above: Stone Flower 1961, Oil on canvas 50 x 62 5/8 inches, 127 x 159.1 cm right: Agora 1959, Oil on linen, 7 3/4 x 24 inches 18

SELECTED CHRONOLOGY

1915 Born Friedebald Alfred Dzubas

1965,1981,1984,1993)

1939 Flees Germany to the United States on boat (via London and

lives and works until 1961

Dartmouth College, Visiting Artist

1949 Joins Eighth Street Club (other

The Whitney Annual

The Jewish Museum, New York,

The Corcoran Gallery of Art,

Black and White

de Kooning, Franz Kline, Ad

28th Biennial Exhibition

1950 Museum of Modern Art, New York, American Painters Under 35

York, Young American Artists

Museum of Art, Post Painterly

1951 Meets Helen Frankenthaler at

Abstraction (traveling)

Clement Greenberg’s apartment 1952 First One Man exhibition at Tibor

Europe at Kasmin Gallery,

de Nagy, New York

London

1952/53 Shared studio with Helen Frankenthaler

First One Man exhibition in

1965/66 Institute for Humanistic

1953 Sublets Esteban Vincente’s studio

Studies, Aspen, CO, Artist-in-

1954 Sublets Alex Katz’s studio

Residence

1955 Sublets Fairfield Porter’s house in

1966 Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Painting

East Hampton 1957 First exhibition at Leo Castelli

John Simon Guggenheim

First exhibition at Andre

Memorial Foundation Fellowship

Gallery, New York (1958,1959)

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The

Emmerich Gallery, New York

Whitney Annual

(1967,1968,1987,1989,1991)

1959 Becomes US citizen

1967 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Visiting Artist

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The

The Corcoran Gallery of Art,

1968 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship

Washington, DC, 26th Biennial Exhibition

Company, New York Sixty American Painters 1961 The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, Abstract Expressionists and Imagists

National Council on the Arts Fellowship

First exhibition at French and

1960 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,

Montreal, US Pavillion, Expo ’67, American Painting Now

Whitney Annual

University of Pennsylvania, Visiting Artist

1968/69 Sarah Lawrence College, Visiting Artist 1970 Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Color and Field: 1890–1970

FRIEDEL DZUBAS Paintings of the 1950s

(1972,1973)

March 18 – May 15, 2010

Abstract Painting in the 70s New York, Two Decades of

Opening reception Thursday March 18 6:00 – 8:00

American Painting

First exhibition at David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto

Jacobson Howard Gallery

(1974,1975,1976)

33 East 68th Street

1974 Houston, The Museum of

Musee Waldsee, Berlin,

1964 Los Angeles, Los Angeles County

the occasion of the exhibition

Rubin Gallery, New York

1973 Solomon R Guggenheim Museum,

Malerie der Gegenwart

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

This catalogue published on

1972 Boston, Museum of Fine Art,

Washington, DC,

Tworkov and Philip Pavia)

1971 First exhibition at Lawrence

1963 The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,

Reinhardt, Milton Resnick, Jack

NY, Visiting Artist

Visiting Artist

1948 Meets Jackson Pollack members included Willem

1970/73 Cornell University, Ithaca,

1962 University of South Florida,

Montreal) 1940 Moves to New York City where he

First exhibition at Robert Elkon Gallery, New York (1962,1963,

April 20 in Berlin, Germany

New York, NY 10065

Fine Arts, Friedel Dzubas: A

212-570-2362

Retrospective Exhibition

gallery@jacobsonhoward.com

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,

ISBN: 978-0-9842804-1-4 pages 6–18 photos by Ellen Page Wilson cover, pages 3–5 & 19 photos by Ali Elai, Camerarts Catalogue designed by ADT Cover: Polaris, detail 1959, page 17

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 19

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