In 1959, Friedel Dzubas became a US citizen and, in the same year, returned to Germany for the first time, two decades after his flight. His ten-month journey took him along the Danube from southern Germany to Austria, where he visited Baroque churches and spent a week at Melk Abbey. He stayed for an extended period in Würzburg to study Tiepolo’s frescoes in the Prince-Bishops’ Residence. At the end of his journey, he returned to East Berlin at the urging of his family, who had been living in poverty there since the outbreak of the war. During this period he subsequently produced a series of 21 so-called Black Paintings, which can be read both as an allegory of his migration experience and as an expression of his newly rediscovered affinity with the Christian faith.
One Times One from 1961 marks the end of this dark phase and is regarded as a key work of the early 1960s. In the same year of its completion, the painting was acquired by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, exemplifying a new understanding of paired-down, colour-field painting. Critics such as Clement Greenberg paid particular attention to this development: in a 1977 letter, he described it as ‘one of the best postwar items that the museum owns.’ [1] With the exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction, curated by Greenberg in 1964 at the Los Angeles County Museum, 31 artists were brought together—including Friedel Dzubas, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, and Kenneth Noland—who pursued a new clarity and openness in abstract painting. One Times One exemplifies Dzubas’ artistic rebirth, in which he leaves behind his gestural past and elevates colour to the central expressive force of his work.
Friedel Dzubas (1915–1994)
One Times One, 1961
Currently exhibited: Yes (Wolfgang Hollegha. Don't think, look!)
Material: Acrylic paint on canvas
Size: 214.4 x 177.5 cm
Inv-Nr.: B_336
Image rights: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Copyright: Estate of Friedel Dzubasc/o Yares Art, Patricia L Lewy, NY, New York
Keywords:
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection; Sotheby’s Italia Srl, Mailand, 2011
Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Die Natur der Kunst: Begegnungen mit der Natur vom 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart, Oct. 2010 – Febr. 2011, p. 229, no. 151 (illustrated in colour)
