The Colorful World of Friedel Dzubas

The Dixon Gallery and Gardens showcases an “A-List” Abstract Expressionist artist in the first major exhibition of his work in almost 40 years.

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Crouched before a blank canvas that stretched more than ten feet on the bare floor of his studio in New York City, Friedel Dzubas peered at the small sketch taped to the wall in front of him. After a few moments, he dipped a wide brush into the can of acrylic, a new product he had discovered called Magna. He pondered how to improve the effect he had created on the sketch, then carefully began to create a band of darkened purple across the top half of the canvas, a solid color close to the edge, fading out as it reached the center. Later, he would add bands of black, orange, and pale blue, with the colors simultaneously pulling away and yet blending into each other.

Days later, finished with the painting that he would title Nightroot, Dzubas carried it to the gallery that sold his artwork. He would paint in this fashion, off and on between stints as a visiting professor at half a dozen colleges and universities, for the rest of his life, enjoying a considerable measure of fame along with his contemporaries in the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement. He was praised in the art journals of the day, and his paintings were included in major exhibitions. By the time of his death in 1994, the powerful works of Dzubas, some of them painted on relatively small four-foot canvases, others stretching for ten feet or more, found homes in museums, galleries, and private collections throughout the country.

Over a 38-year period, more than 40 of his greatest works — one of the largest private collections of Friedel Dzubas in the world — had been acquired by an art connoisseur, philanthropist, and businessman well-known to Memphians. Ira A. Lipman, founder of the security firm Guardsmark, began collecting the art of Dzubas in 1980, when he came across the dramatic painting Reflex at the Audrey Strohl gallery in Memphis.* Lipman, who passed away in September, once wrote that he considered the artist “an indefatigable human being, who through his art wields persistent and persuadable powers.”

Earlier this year, the Lipman family’s entire collection was showcased in the book Friedel Dzubas: Our Collection, written by art historian Patrician L. Lewy and published by the Creative Content division of Contemporary Media. More than 30 works from that collection — including Nightroot — go on display October 27 through January 5, 2020, at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens. “Friedel Dzubas: The Ira A. Lipman Family Collection” is the first full-scale retrospective of the artist’s work since 1982, which was held at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

“Freidel Dzubas is an A-List Abstract Expressionist painter,” says Kevin Sharp, the Herbert S. Rhea Director of the Dixon. “He’s working in the same idiom as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and the Washington School in general — but in my opinion, he’s doing it better, and the beautiful thing about this exhibition is how it spans his entire career.”

Born in 1915 in the formative years of the German republic, Friedel Dzubas spent time as a young man learning book design and layout from an uncle, Wilhelm, a successful illustrator. Worried that the growing power of Adolf Hitler would block his attempts to work as an artist in Germany, Dzubas joined his uncle when he moved to London, and from there emigrated to the United States. He first began working at a farm in Virginia — a collective called the Hyde Farmlands that was designed to help Jewish immigrants from Germany assimilate to life in America — before making his way to Chicago, where he illustrated books for Ziff-Davis and other prominent publishers. As Lewy writes in Friedel Dzubas: Our Collection, “Dzubas’ passion to become a successful artist drove him to New York City, fast becoming the center of the art world. … [He] spent these first years absorbing the styles of the artists around him, … developing a distinctive voice that would characterize his production to the end of his life.”

He met the influential art critic Clement Greenberg, who introduced him to Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other prominent artists in the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dzubas began to develop his unique style, using whatever medium and material appealed to him. At one point, he created a series of works on cotton bedsheets. Displayed at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, these and other works quickly attracted the attention of the art world.

“Critics remarked on their painterliness and tactile appeal,” writes Lewy, noting that “one reviewer described them as formulating chaos into a total movement of restless detail and cloud-like battle, with a tranquility at center like a shaft of light that breaks through a banked storm.”

Dzubas made extensive use of large canvases, bright colors, washes, open fields of white gesso, and other techniques that came to define his style. As Sharp points out, his work is distinctive because “his paintings are so meticulously crafted. The way he paints, there’s no turning back.” Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dzubas often made a small, preliminary sketch of exactly what he hoped to achieve, though sometimes modifying it to suit his purposes once he began to paint on the much larger canvas. As a result, says Sharp, “We are used to thinking of Abstract Expressionist painting like the works of Jackson Pollock, but Dzubas was more careful in his ‘mark making.’ There’s a kind of confidence in the way he paints that I find incredibly impressive.”

Julie Pierotti, the Dixon’s Martha S. Robinson Curator, agrees, noting, “There’s a tendency to think that all abstract painting is just random and spur-of-the-moment. But you can tell by looking at Dzubas’ paintings that everything is very carefully planned and very careful.”

A close look at most of his paintings reveals no overpainting, no “correcting” of the final design. In the mid-1960s, Dzubas had discovered a newly developed acrylic paint called Magna. “Its characteristics appealed to Dzubas,” writes Lewy. “It dried quickly to a matte finish; it held its highly loaded pigment over time, creating a rich and bright optical effect; paint could be applied thinly without losing this intensity of hue; and most importantly, it encouraged wet-on-wet painting, and with this technique, spontaneous painterly effects could be achieved before the paint dried.” Dzubas himself once remarked that Magna “didn’t let itself be pushed around. It was resistant.”

“The thing that I love most about his work —this notion that the process is actually the work of art, and the finished painting being more or less the result of that process. That’s pure expression.” — Kevin Sharp

The artist drew his inspiration from multiple sources: nature (Arch, 1963, or Condor (For Ned), 1966), Christianity (Lazarus, 1959), Greek mythology (Cyclops II, 1985), journeys (Kay’s Travel, 1959), urban scenes (Night Ferry, 1975), and myriads. During his career, he worked with several important dealers for the sale and promotion of his work, chief among them the Robert Elkon Gallery, the André Emmerich Gallery, and the Lawrence Rubin Gallery, all located in New York City. He worked from large, light-filled studios at different locations in the metropolis, but as his fame grew, in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, he would from time to time leave New York entirely, to serve as artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College, the University of South Florida, Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1978, he accepted a position advising art students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a role he continued until 1990.

Over a career that spanned some 40 years, he refined his style, and even his format, for a while working with perfectly square three-foot canvases, and then stretching his paintings onto canvases measuring as large as 6 by 12 feet. Even though the works themselves are carefully designed and crafted, Dzubas explained the passion behind his art to students during a workshop in 1979:

“You take that red, and you take account of its dynamic, of the experience, of it at this moment. You place it there: a loose movement, we hope, an unpretentious movement, naturally, because honesty is dependent on looking unpretentious, yes? … Once you have the first thing down, you have heart ….”

This “painting process” is, Sharp says, “the thing that I love most about his work — this notion that the process is actually the work of art, and the finished painting being more or less the result of that process. That’s pure expression.”

The works of Friedel Dzubas were featured in countless shows and exhibitions, beginning with a pen-and-ink drawing that was accepted into the “47th Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity” in 1949, and continuing throughout his lifetime. Two major presentations of his work took place at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1974, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1976. However, the only full-scale retrospective was held in 1982 at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. — until now, when “Friedel Dzubas: The Ira A. Lipman Family Collection” goes on display at the Dixon.

Sitting in his office overlooking the Dixon gardens, Kevin Sharp holds a copy of Friedel Dzubas: Our Collection. “To give you the background of how all this got started, it was this publication,” he says. “Josh Lipman [Ira Lipman’s oldest son] told me about the book project. I was among the first in Memphis to see a copy of it. And that’s really all it took to know that I wanted to show this work at the Dixon.”

Sharp met with Lipman to view the collection. “After Kevin first saw the artwork in person, he came back and said, ‘You are not going to believe this,’” says Pierotti. Sharp was so excited about presenting the show, he says, that “we walked around with a tape measure and figured out the maximum number of works that we can fit into the Dixon.” Three of the larger works are even going on display in the Catmur Foyer, normally not used for changing exhibitions.

“We are incredibly grateful to the Lipman family for this opportunity,” says Sharp. “We are thrilled and honored that they have entrusted us with their collection.”

Pierotti hopes the exhibition will focus more attention on the legacy of Friedel Dzubas: “The work is such high quality that I hope it’s the beginning of more exhibitions on this artist.”

“I think it’s going to be a show you’ll want to come back and see again and again. Everyone who sees it is going to be blown away by it.” — Julie Pierotti

The paintings will be arranged chronologically, as much as possible, with almost every gallery at the Dixon devoted to Dzubas, with the exception of a concurrent exhibition featuring other abstract expressionists (see sidebar on page 45). “It’s really interesting to see the subtle changes in his style from the early work in the 1950s into the work that he makes in the late 1980s,” says Pierotti. “Those from the 1950s have a lot of energy and tension in them, a lot going on, while some from the 1960s and 1970s have more of a quieter presence.

“There’s something about that experience of walking through an exhibition like this,” she continues, “and tracing the artist’s career that can really teach you about the artist, and really make an impression on you. In fact, it kind of chokes you up, to let it wash over you a little bit at a time. I think it’s going to be a show you’ll want to come back and see again and again. Everyone who sees it is going to be blown away by it.”

Based on interviews with critics, Dzubas would have enjoyed creating that experience for his viewers. In that 1979 workshop, he explained it this way:

“To experience high art all you need is a hunger for larger experiences than we in our lonely souls feel; a larger thing touching us, and at that moment we become the larger thing, that instant: That’s the way it is. We are touched by something outside of ourselves that is larger, and we are equally as large. It’s a great feeling; it’s a little ecstasy.”

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Helen Frankenthaler

February’s Turn, 1979. Acrylic on canvas. 48 1/8 x 108 1/4 inches. The Haskell Collection. ©2018 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Mark Rothko

Untitled, 1968. Oil on paper mounted on canvas. 39 3/8 x 25 inches. The Haskell Collection. © 2018 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Willem de Kooning

Woman II, 1961. Acrylic on canvas. 48 1/8 x 108 1/4 inches. The Haskell Collection. © 2018 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Also on display at the Dixon at the same time as the Dzubas exhibition will be “Abstract Expressionism: A Social Revolution.” Drawn from a private collection in Jacksonville, Florida, this exhibition will showcase seminal works by 25 “big-name” artists such as Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffman, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, and others prominent in that movement.

“These works challenged the institutional status-quo and altered the course of art history,” says Kristen Rambo, the Dixon’s digital communications associate. “They abandoned narrative painting, focusing instead on the relationships between color, gesture, and texture.”

Each show is designed to complement the other, says Dixon Director Kevin Sharp. “You have a broad survey of abstract painting in ‘A Social Revolution’ and then you have the Dzubas exhibition that really focuses on one artist who did this across a fairly long career.”

Remembering Ira A. Lipman

In 1985, Ira Lipman was one of several partners who formed what would become Contemporary Media, Inc., Memphis magazine’s parent company. In addition to his business acumen as founder and long-time president of Guardsmark, the Memphis-based security firm, he was a passionate advocate for civil rights, as well as a lover of history and the arts.

As a teenager, Lipman attended Little Rock Central High School, where he assisted NBC news reporter John Chancellor with his coverage of the 1957 integration by the Little Rock Nine and the crisis that followed. The two became lifelong friends, and in 1995 Lipman created the John Chancellor Award for distinguished journalism, now presented annually at Columbia, where that university in 2018 established the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights. A fierce defender of the First Amendment, his influence was profound for all who worked here at Memphis magazine and our other publications.

Mr. Lipman passed away on September 16, 2019. We mourn his family’s loss, and our own. 

— Kenneth Neill