Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas (1915–1994) was a German-born American painter key to the development of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Born in Berlin to a Catholic mother and Jewish father, Dzubas studied at the Prussian Academy of Arts and briefly under Paul Klee at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf before fleeing Nazi Germany for the United States in 1939. Dzubas quickly integrated into the New York art scene, participating in the seminal 1951 “9th Street Show” and joining the Artists’ Club on East 8th Street. In 1953, he shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler, experimenting with raw canvas and stain-painting techniques.

Throughout his career, Dzubas moved from the gestural language of Abstract Expressionism toward increasingly open, luminous compositions with a heightened sense of space and scale. His evolution was accompanied by ongoing dialogue with other artists of the Color Field movement, including Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Morris Louis. Though best known as a master colorist recognized for sweeping, vibrant stains of paint, his career included crucial experimental periods. Notable among these is his A Black Series (1960-1962), a stark, achromatic body of work created after returning to Europe to face long-repressed memories of his family and the Holocaust. In 1964, Dzubas was featured in Greenberg’s landmark exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction, organized for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Dzubas exhibited widely throughout his life at major galleries and institutions, including Leo Castelli, Timor de Nagy, Robert Ellon, and French & Co., with major retrospectives such as the one held at the Hirshhorn Museum in 1983. He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1966 and 1968, as well as a grant from the National Council on the Arts in 1968. Today, his work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among other major institutions in the United States.