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Friedel Dzubas Grade, 1981 acrylic on canvas 96 x 96 in. My feelings and responses to what I saw were way in advance of my ability to do. The ability to do is a rather delicate, organic thing. It cannot be willed. It cannot be pushed, by force, to mature. It takes its own good time, and the best thing one can do about it is keep oneself aware, work, and be patient. I think for a young artist to be patient, with all the compassion, with all the fever that he has, is very important. Rilke talks about that in his letters to a young poet, how important it is to ask all the questions but not to expect any answers. Because if you ask the questions, you eventually will live the questions, and they will answer themselves.1 Friedel Dzubas, 1982 In 1981 Friedel Dzubas had been painting in his mature style for almost twenty years, having found answers to many of the questions he had been asking of Modern art since he began to paint at the age of twelve. Dzubas led a remarkable life on the way to artistic maturity. In 1939 he fled Nazi Germany just five days before Hitler invaded Poland. Nine years later he answered art critic Clement Greenberg's anonymous advertisement for a summer roommate. It was the height of the Abstract Expressionist Movement in New York, and through Greenberg young Dzubas met Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.2 Later, in the early 1950s, Dzubas shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler, associating with some of the younger generation of abstract painters in New York including Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland. Dzubas' mature paintings since the 1960s assimilate his early interest in German Romanticism and Expressionism into post-war American abstraction. It is thus not surprising that many critics, including Barbara Rose, have noted how Dzubas' paintings appear to be at once old-fashioned and contemporary: "In the long run, Dzubas, who dared to look back to the European tradition, as well as forward to a new style of abstraction that synthesized elements from the past, may be seen as the heroic, durable, non-conformist."3 In Grade Dzubas continued to explore the paradox of accommodating old master stylistic and technical traditions within an abstract composition. He abandoned oil paint for Magna acrylic in 1965 when he found he could achieve with a brevity of gesture the brilliance and luminosity of oil paint applied in thin veils of color. He could thus effect the richness and variation of traditional glazed tones using a more expressive, immediate process. By the early 1980s, Dzubas abandoned his preliminary preparations of sketching and priming, thereby inviting spontaneity and accident into his painting process. Although he typically coated his canvas with a gesso primer before painting, he began to apply it so thinly that the pigment was almost immediately absorbed into the ground, making it impossible for him to revise and rework his compositions. Dzubas' change in technique reveals a thoroughly modernist sensibility: "I like that risk," he explained. "I think, to a certain degree, I have to make it mechanically difficult and unreliable for myself. If I can predict the effect too much, then I probably am not supposed to be doing it. I function better if my footing is not too sure, so to speak."4 The rich, velvety hues of Grade's reds, greens, and blues appear radiant in places. Dzubas heightened his color drama -- a drama characterized as quintessentially Baroque by some critics-- by varying the density of his paint.5 His rectangular forms appear to ebb and flow in an orchestrated movement across the surface of the picture plane. Megan Bahr
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