Artist: Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas - Untitled 1984

Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994), together with his contemporaries of the 1950’s and 60’s, altered the direction of American painting. Separately and together, Dzubas and his fellow artists -- among them, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella -- pioneered a new kind of painting. They adopted new materials and new techniques of expression; they moved away from recognizable imagery and explored different ways of developing color relationships on the painted surface.

Dzubas, a German-born painter immigrated to the United States in 1939 at the very beginning of abstract expressionism. Although Friedel Dzubas embraced the freedom of American painting, he never fully abandoned the painstaking precision or romanticism of his European training. Dzubas moved to Boston in 1976 and until 1983 taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He exhibited regularly in Boston and New York museums and galleries and was the subject of a 1983 retrospective at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum.

An amazing richness of color and a strong sense of space and balance mark the paintings. They effectively meld several artistic strains -- the lushness of European baroque, the vividness of expressionist color, and the severity of American abstract expressionism. Friedel Dzubas was born in 1915 and died in 1994. During his lifetime he produced a body of work that, from the perspective of time, today is again being valued for its beauty and historical significance.