Friedel Dzubas

This publication presents a new perspective on the German American painter Friedel Dzubas’ (1915–94) rendering of his 60-foot-long abstract mural originally commissioned in 1975 for the Shawmut National Bank of Boston. Beyond pure color field painting, chronicled in never-before-seen documentary photographs, Dzubas’ Last Judgment is presented here as a public expression of religious conviction.

Friedel Dzubas presents the first scholarly monograph on the German-born American artist whose works display a mastery of color, light, and scale.

Celebrated for his monumental, luminous color abstractions, Dzubas has nonetheless been marginalized by misclassification. Often grouped with Color Field artists of the mid-to later-twentieth century, this richly illustrated volume asserts the artist’s singular ties to historical painterly handling and pictorial structure—from the animating brush work of Titian to the light-filled, narrative frescoes by Giambattista Tiepolo. Even more, Dzubas’s abiding ambition to express pictorially his sources of spiritual inspiration in religious allegory and landscape marks his achievement as unique among his contemporaries.