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Lot Essay
An explosive visual essay in light and color conveyed through exquisitely nuanced hues – blues, greens, and earth tones – Virgin Dream presents Friedel Dzubas at the peak of his artistic power. Composing with color in elongated shapes and arraying them in striking complimentaries and contrasts, Dzubas disposes chroma in dynamic oppositions within an allover pictorial design: lightened colors contrast with dark; pigments saturate and whites dilute; warm colors clash with cooler tones. Lacking decisive contours, Dzubas’s color shapes, which he created using Magna, an acrylic resin developed by Sam Golden and Leonard Bocour, seem to be self-generating, enclosing chromatic energy on two or three sides, which then burst and dissolve through a technique he referred to as “feathering or washing out” (F. Dzubas, “Interview with C. Millard,” Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, 1983, p. 2). Shapes pushing forward from the picture plane and backing into its recesses pulsate in rhythmic tension. Movement is stirred by energetic brush strokes that harden and dissolve as the eye ranges over the canvas, alighting on close configurations as against a seeming bareness. Three vertical blue bands of varying tonalities–ultramarine, cobalt, Prussian blue–structure an overall framework for areas of green and raw umber to give play. These latter grow and spread upward seeming to pass beyond the framing edges, creating an expansive open feel. An internal admixture of yellow-green is centrally locked in by the strong blue-hued scaffolding and scumbled into the underlying gesso. Along the lower edge, darker earth tones in varying saturations anchor the overall design, emphasizing the dialogue between hue and shape, shading and light, and the veering and careening of color over an activated surface.
Dzubas’s worked within the aesthetic framework of modernism, surrounded by so-called color field painters who themselves began as second-generation Abstract Expressionists. The group of artists with which Dzubas associated during his career included Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler. Dzubas, in concert with these artists, moved away from the overt expressionistic gestures associated with Pollock and Willem de Kooning to evolve a painting style that emphasized the material nature of the medium. Staining pigment into raw canvas was a primary trend as was pouring paint, moving it around with sponge, squeegies, and brooms, and thinning the pigment with turpentine or water to create the vaunted “flatness” that would guarantee the works authenticity as high art during this period.
Without a formal artistic education, Dzubas relied for his training on the few years in the early 1930s when he was apprenticed to a wall decorations painter. Perhaps this explains his passion for the frescos of Giotto and the later Venetian school. His heightened sense of coloration with its high-keyed energy is evident in German Expressionism, which filled the great museums of Berlin. His aesthetic orientation toward large-scale works comes from both Pollock and later Venetians. His nearly sixty-foot long painting, Apocalypse cum Figuras, Crossing, 1975, commissioned by Lewis P. Cabot for the National Shawmut Bank in Boston, was the fullest expression of this ambition to realize his vision in mural-sized works. Pollock, in referring to his own “mural painting,” spoke for Dzubas’s mature aesthetic when in 1943 he said, “The direction that painting seems to be taking here is away from the easel, into some sort, some kind of wall-painting…I enjoy working big, and whenever I have a chance, I do it whether it’s practical or not” (J. Pollock, “Interview with William Wright,” rpt. in P. Karmel, Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, New York, 1999, p. 22). Dzubas’s compositional sense, however, was fired most imaginatively by the Venetian painting of the eighteenth century, specifically the transcendent ceiling frescos of Giambattista Tiepolo. The looseness of the brush stroke, the elevation upwards of Dzubas’s color shapes, the transparency of his coloration in counterpoint with deeper saturations, and the plotting of various hues for emphasis and rhythmic effects points to the depth of Tiepolo’s influence.
Virgin Dream displays Dzubas’s pictorial imagination fully: it is at once a sublime tableaux, a roiling artistic vision, and a painterly essay that describes an artistic sensibility that draws from the past in order to enrich both contemporary and future painting.
Patricia L Lewy PhD is Director of the Friedel Dzubas Estate Archives
Dzubas’s worked within the aesthetic framework of modernism, surrounded by so-called color field painters who themselves began as second-generation Abstract Expressionists. The group of artists with which Dzubas associated during his career included Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler. Dzubas, in concert with these artists, moved away from the overt expressionistic gestures associated with Pollock and Willem de Kooning to evolve a painting style that emphasized the material nature of the medium. Staining pigment into raw canvas was a primary trend as was pouring paint, moving it around with sponge, squeegies, and brooms, and thinning the pigment with turpentine or water to create the vaunted “flatness” that would guarantee the works authenticity as high art during this period.
Without a formal artistic education, Dzubas relied for his training on the few years in the early 1930s when he was apprenticed to a wall decorations painter. Perhaps this explains his passion for the frescos of Giotto and the later Venetian school. His heightened sense of coloration with its high-keyed energy is evident in German Expressionism, which filled the great museums of Berlin. His aesthetic orientation toward large-scale works comes from both Pollock and later Venetians. His nearly sixty-foot long painting, Apocalypse cum Figuras, Crossing, 1975, commissioned by Lewis P. Cabot for the National Shawmut Bank in Boston, was the fullest expression of this ambition to realize his vision in mural-sized works. Pollock, in referring to his own “mural painting,” spoke for Dzubas’s mature aesthetic when in 1943 he said, “The direction that painting seems to be taking here is away from the easel, into some sort, some kind of wall-painting…I enjoy working big, and whenever I have a chance, I do it whether it’s practical or not” (J. Pollock, “Interview with William Wright,” rpt. in P. Karmel, Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, New York, 1999, p. 22). Dzubas’s compositional sense, however, was fired most imaginatively by the Venetian painting of the eighteenth century, specifically the transcendent ceiling frescos of Giambattista Tiepolo. The looseness of the brush stroke, the elevation upwards of Dzubas’s color shapes, the transparency of his coloration in counterpoint with deeper saturations, and the plotting of various hues for emphasis and rhythmic effects points to the depth of Tiepolo’s influence.
Virgin Dream displays Dzubas’s pictorial imagination fully: it is at once a sublime tableaux, a roiling artistic vision, and a painterly essay that describes an artistic sensibility that draws from the past in order to enrich both contemporary and future painting.
Patricia L Lewy PhD is Director of the Friedel Dzubas Estate Archives