Figure 1, Center Red, Friedel Dzubas, 1964, oil on canvas, 46 “1/8x 46” 1/8, University Art Museum, Colorado State University, Gift of John and Kimiko Powers, 2006.118. |
Center Red, 1964
The benchmarks of Dzubas` art are easy to spot in Center Red: large, rounded rectangles, chromatic passages and layers of canvas cemented to canvas.
A big flat red rounded rectangular shape stands behind two horizontal lines, one black on top and a light blue at the bottom. The red shape is almost stuck inside the canvas while the other two colors sit on top of it masking the red out. The colors are thick and flat, no shades of red or blue or black but an intense and decided pigment. All elements that Greenberg would have appreciated, together with what he describes as openness and clarity, the use of broad area of unmodulated color in a great variety of manners and a wide reach of color based abstraction.1
In the introductory essay for the Post Painterly Abstraction exhibition Clement Greenberg stressed features of the new art style: interest in the self reflective nature of the paintings, the flatness, the shape of the support and the material, and finally the interest in simple forms.2 All those characteristics are present in Center Red.
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Dzubas’ interest in the material, the pigments and the colors is very clear. In 1965, one year after Center Red (Fig. 1), Dzubas definitely switched from oil painting to oil-based acrylics known as magna3 pigments. Opaque, but possessed of a velvety sheen, the magna further defined the artist’s visual investigations into color.4 In his interview with Charles Millard, he was very precise about the date in which he switched from oil to acrylic (1965), so we have to assume that in Center Red he was not able to achieve the level of manipulation of the colors and the forms he wanted. In the same interview, Dzubas says that “Oil became extremely mobile on a prime surface, and the mobility was too seductive. I had laid off watercolor for the same reason.”5
We can also see how Center Red is characterized by bright, flat, colliding forms that emphasize the surface of the canvas, like Greenberg theorized. In his interview with Charles Millard, Dzubas says:
In clearing the canvas of all-unessential, I was more and more reduced to a few, simple, meaningful forms and these forms were the content of my message. Color came more and more into play, and I discovered that what I can reach emotionally and express by color is infinite.6
He reduces his paintings to a few, simple, meaningful forms that contained passages of intense color expressing an emotional range, and Center Red has all these features.
Greenberg theorized that as art seeks self-definition and determines its own uniqueness, it becomes more pure, more reductive in its means. More is eliminated—subject matter, content, figuration, illusionism, narrative—and art becomes independent, detached, and non-objective, that is, abstract.
Figure 2, Friedel Dzubas, Duo, 1965, oil on canvas, 92“x 46", Robert Elkon Gallery, New York. |
Content becomes completely dissolved into form. Greenberg, in looking back selectively at the history of art, presented a map of progress and evolution of painting, away from representation and toward purity, abstraction, reductiveness; to flatness, to pure color, to simple forms that reflected the shape of the surface.7 This is exactly what we see in Center Red.
From the same time period, and with the same characteristics of Center Red, we can cite the work Reunion (Fig. 2), characterized by hard edge shapes and bright colors, and especially Duo (Fig. 3). Both are still painted with oil painting, hence right before he switched to acrylic paint. In these works, Dzubas reduces his elements to few elongated shapes that run from side to side or from top to bottom.8 In Center Red and Duo, the center area is greatly enlarged and presented with either horizontal or vertical format, squeezed between two smaller areas.In comparison with a painting like Between, where Dzubas filled out the canvas so that the work has less and less empty/white space, Center Red and Duo have still some white canvas not touched by any color, mostly at the top and the bottom of the painting. This aspect of leaving some white canvas around the main color shape was following the Dzubas’ recipe according to which in a painting sometimes the most important activities take place right on the edge. He is trying to underline the shape of the support in order to achieve a more contained energy in his pieces; an aspect that Greenberg included in his definition of the Post Painterly Abstraction style.9
In Center Red the bold red color almost occupies all the canvas, the color is not framing the canvas anymore, and the canvas is the stain of the color. The materials in Center Red read in its flat expanse, saturated color, and intervals of form exactly like Greenberg theorized; but the way the blank canvas is standing in front of Dzubas becomes filled with colors. |
He will continue along these lines in his late work from the 1970s, where the canvas disappears completely under brushes of color, like in Pilon (Figure 3). The hard edges too are disappearing during that time, and the paintings start to evoke a more figurative subject matter, a landscape.
Dzubas is following tendencies of all Post Painterly Abstractionists, but at the same time he is struggling with some of the languages used by them. Like Greenberg theorized in the essay “Post Painterly Abstraction”, Dzubas (even in Center Red) stresses the contrasts of pure hue rather than contrasts of light and dark, or shines thick paint and tactile effect interests of optical clarity.10 The geometrical forms in Post Painterly Abstraction are trued and faired edges simply because these call less attention to themselves as drawing, this way also getting out of the way of color.
In terms of scale, Dzubas’ paintings are usually very big. On his relationship with dimensions he asserted:
I like really to work on a large scale. I can’t do it always…to paint abstract pictures small is more difficult – successfully so- is more difficult that to paint abstract pictures at a larger. Physically comfortable size… I’m not Mondrian… it has much to do with the impulse and spontaneity, and the acting-out impulse…so the surface receives the activity.
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Figure 3, Friedel Dzubas, Pilon, 1974, Magna on canvas, 96" x 96". Collection of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA. |
Now, when I work large – when I work anything – I have been trying recently to start painting without knowing what I want to paint. And then, sort of go with the storm, so to speak, and instead of leading the storm I go with it. I conquer it going with it.11
Like all other Post Painterly Abstractionists, he himself valued a big, sometimes huge canvas. By 1949, Dzubas was painting relatively large-scale pictures, but it is during the 60s that he devoted himself to the largest canvases he had yet produced.12 Center Red can be considered a midsize painting though, (46” 1/8in x 46” 1/8 in); in a way it is like every time Dzubas is able to follow the Post Painterly Abstraction rules for some of his work, but still he chooses to diverge a little bit from them in other.
1 Karen Wilkin, and Carl Belz, Color as a Field, American Painting 1950-1975, 41.
2 Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction,1964.
3 Magna is the brand name of an acrylic resin paint, developed by Leonard Bocour and sold by Bocour Artist Colors, Inc. in 1947. It is very different from modern acrylic paint, as it is composed of pigments ground in an acrylic resin brought into emulsion through the use of solvents. Bocour Artist Colors developed a "true" acrylic paint in 1960 named Aqua-Tec. Modern acrylic paint is water soluble, while Magna is miscible with turpentine or mineral spirits, though both can dry rapidly to a matte or glossy finish. It was used by artists such as Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, and Roy Lichtenstein.
7 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: an Anthology of Changing Ideas. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2003): 777.
9 Barbara Rose, 2009, 19.
10 Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction, 1964, 4.
11 Barbara Rose, 2009, 20.
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