Revised biography reveals Friedel Dzubas's hidden Jewish heritage and complex relationship with Clement Greenberg

A revised 2019 monograph by Patricia L. Lewy offers a comprehensive reassessment of painter Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994), challenging his conventional categorization as a Color Field artist. The book reveals Dzubas concealed his Jewish heritage throughout his life, having been born to a Catholic mother and Jewish father in Nazi Germany. He fled Berlin in 1939, aided by Jewish organizations that trained him on a farm in Silesia before he immigrated to America. Despite a close friendship with critic Clement Greenberg dating to 1948, Greenberg only wrote about Dzubas in 1977, contributing to the artist's relative obscurity compared to peers like Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. Lewy argues Dzubas developed his distinctive style of solid color bands feathering into airy glows in 1972 while teaching at Cornell University. His work is held in institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns his 1972 painting 'Fan Tan'. The 390-page illustrated volume, published by Skira, corrects errors from its first edition but lacks an index. Lewy, a Mozart scholar turned art historian, positions Dzubas as an independent figure influenced more by German art traditions than French ones.