Friedel liked the freedom to interpret both what he did and what he saw with the moment in mind...With Friedel’s painting the devil was in the details. If you compare closely a small sketch to a large painting, the large painting will have all the details that the small ones don’t. And it’s in those details that Friedel sought his identity.
Wes Frantz, Friedel Dzubas's studio assistant
Known for his distinguished acumen for collaboration and innovative printmaking techniques, Garner Tullis is regarded as one of the most prolific printers of the 20th century. Born in Cincinnati in 1939, Tullis’s fascination with print- and papermaking began in earnest while a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania. His non-conformist approach to papermaking led to a Fulbright Scholarship in Florence, where he studied the art of bronze casting and came to understand the importance of creative teamwork.
Upon his return to the United States in 1965 for a Carnegie Fellowship at Stanford University, Tullis formed close friendships with Arnoldo Pomodoro, Mark Di Suvero, and Peter Volkus, which provided welcome encouragement in the exploration of printmaking while Tullis was simultaneously working to introduce younger artists to the practice. With that end in mind, he opened the International Institute of Experimental Printmaking in Santa Cruz in 1972 and was able to place emphasis on two areas in which he excelled: papermaking and the communication ideas and the transfer of knowledge.
Over the course of his career, Tullis would work with over 200 artists (some multiple times) including Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Nolan, Dorothea Rockburne, Robert Ryman, Sean Scully, Emilio Vedova and Friedel Dzubas. The creation of monotype prints, his primary focus, appealed to both painters and sculptors and many times, the ideas born in Tullis’s atelier would go on to inform the practices of the artists once they had returned to their own studios. He continued to open a succession of workshops throughout California, New York, Philadelphia, and Italy while also holding teaching positions at Bennington College, California State College, Stanislaus, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Davis, and Harvard University. He was also the first recipient of the Ralph T. King Award for outstanding contributions to printmaking from the Print Club of Cleveland. Today, he is remembered for his groundbreaking printed works and the formative relationships that enabled their creation.
Out of this community comes a third thing, the art. If there weren't different people involved, there wouldn't be this magic.
Garner Tullis
Friedel Dzubas 1915–1994
Born in Berlin to a Jewish father and Catholic mother, Friedel Dzubas studied drawing as a young man but, owing to his status as a Mischling (a child of mixed-race parents) was denied the opportunity to go to university. Instead, at fifteen years old he was apprenticed to a wall decorations firm in his hometown. In 1939, Dzubas fled Nazi Germany and by the late 1940s had settled in New York, where he took jobs as a busboy, house painter, and deliveryman. Eventually settling on West Tenth Street, he worked as a book designer and became involved in the avant-garde artistic and literary circles. Dzubas was a self-taught painter—he had begun dabbling in watercolor in the 1940s creating what he called “neo-romantic” landscapes—and his trajectory toward this career would only strengthen when he met Clement Greenberg in 1948.
Greenberg introduced the budding artist to Jackson Pollock and Katherine Dreier and, in 1949, Dzubas became a member of the Abstract Expressionist group the Eight Street Club, whose members included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Ad Reinhardt. That same year, Dzubas began experimenting with soaking paint into sheets of canvas. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who poured or brushed acrylic paint onto raw canvas, Dzubas would go on to prime almost every painting he ever made.
Over the course of his nearly fifty-year long career, he created a unique style consisting of abstract, colorful shapes juxtaposed and overlapped to reveal the gessoed ground. He applied paint in a thin, texturally uniform manner and worked with oils until 1966, at which point he switched to Magna acrylics for the remainder of his career. Dzubas’s mesmerizing fields of varying hues were praised as examples of Post Painterly Abstraction and Color Field painting, and he is now celebrated as one of the pioneering figures of Color Field painting alongside Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland.
Dzubas received many teaching appointments and grants, including two Guggenheim fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship, and Artist-in-Residence appointments at the Institute for Humanistic Studies in Aspen, Dartmouth College, and Cornell University. He moved to Ithaca, New York in 1969 and taught at Cornell periodically until 1974 and from 1976 to 1993 he taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Dzubas was honored with numerous retrospectives at The Museum of Fine Art, Houston (1974); The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1975); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany (1977); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1983); a retrospective exhibition at André Emmerich Gallery, New York (1990); and the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1991). His work can be found in many significant private and public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
