Born in Berlin to a Jewish father and Catholic mother, Friedel Dzubas studied drawing as a young man but, owing to his status as a Mischling (a child of mixed-race parents) was denied the opportunity to go to university. Instead, at fifteen years old he was apprenticed to a wall decorations firm in his hometown. In 1939, Dzubas fled Nazi Germany and by the late 1940s had settled in New York, where he took jobs as a busboy, house painter, and deliveryman. Eventually settling on West Tenth Street, he worked as a book designer and became involved in the avant-garde artistic and literary circles. Dzubas was a self-taught painter—he had begun dabbling in watercolor in the 1940s creating what he called “neo-romantic” landscapes—and his trajectory toward this career would only strengthen when he met Clement Greenberg in 1948.
Greenberg introduced the budding artist to Jackson Pollock and Katherine Dreier and, in 1949, Dzubas became a member of the Abstract Expressionist group the Eight Street Club, whose members included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Ad Reinhardt. That same year, Dzubas began experimenting with soaking paint into sheets of canvas. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who poured or brushed acrylic paint onto raw canvas, Dzubas would go on to prime almost every painting he ever made.
Over the course of his nearly fifty-year long career, he created a unique style consisting of abstract, colorful shapes juxtaposed and overlapped to reveal the gessoed ground. He applied paint in a thin, texturally uniform manner and worked with oils until 1966, at which point he switched to Magna acrylics for the remainder of his career. Dzubas’s mesmerizing fields of varying hues were praised as examples of Post Painterly Abstraction and Color Field painting, and he is now celebrated as one of the pioneering figures of Color Field painting alongside Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland.
Dzubas received many teaching appointments and grants, including two Guggenheim fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship, and Artist-in-Residence appointments at the Institute for Humanistic Studies in Aspen, Dartmouth College, and Cornell University. He moved to Ithaca, New York in 1969 and taught at Cornell periodically until 1974 and from 1976 to 1993 he taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Dzubas was honored with numerous retrospectives at The Museum of Fine Art, Houston (1974); The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1975); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany (1977); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1983); a retrospective exhibition at André Emmerich Gallery, New York (1990); and the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1991). His work can be found in many significant private and public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
