Friedel Dzubas (b. 1915, Berlin, Germany; d. 1994, Newton, Massachusetts) had no formal training in art. As a young man he was apprenticed to a Jewish wall-decorations firm in Berlin, and after emigrating to New York in 1939, needing to escape a precarious financial position and to support his German wife and son, he eventually became a commercial designer with the Ziff Davis Company in Chicago.In 1945, Dzubas returned to New York with his second wife, who would soon give birth to their two children, and worked as a book designer for thePhilosophical Library. In this period, he sublet a Connecticut farm, transforming a barn into studio space, and rented part of the farm to the critic Clement Greenberg and his son for the summer of 1948. Thus began a friendship, close yet fraught, that would last to the end of both men’s lives. AfterGreenberg brought Dzubas into the circle of painters he dubbed “Post-PainterlyAbstractionists,” the artist enjoyed a career supported by some of the most prestigious galleries of the time, including Leo Castelli, Robert Elkon, André Emmerich, and Lawrence Rubin. After Rubin became the director of the Knoedler Gallery, in 1974, Dzubas was the subject of annual one-person exhibitions there until 1986, when he returned to Emmerich. Throughout his career, several gallerists in the United States and Canada represented him concurrently, including John Berggruen, Leslie Feely, Loretta Howard, Margo Leavin, MeredithLong, Nicolas Rukaj, and David Mirvish. Monographic exhibitions were mounted by the Museum of Fine Art, Houston (1974), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1975),and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1983). Dzubas taught at Cornell University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and elsewhere. His paintings are held by private, public, and university museums worldwide, including the Ackland Art Museum at the University of NorthCarolina, Chapel Hill; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; theDavis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, KansasCity, Missouri; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Nassau CountyMuseum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University ArtGallery, New Haven. Dzubas has been the subject of several publications, most recently Patricia L Lewy’s Friedel Dzubas (Skira editore, 2019) and her Friedel Dzubas’s Last Judgement (Skira Editore, 2024).

By Dr. Patricia Lewy, PhD © 2025, all rights reserved.

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