Hear the Curator (2007-96)

Hear the Curator (2007-96) At eight by twenty-four feet, Wende is the largest canvas at Princeton and among the biggest paintings produced by Friedel Dzubas, an artist renowned for his outsized, lyrical abstractions. Born in Berlin, Dzubas fled the Nazi regime in 1939, arriving in Chicago at the age of twenty-four and eventually moving to New York, where he became associated with the Abstract Expressionists. In 1951 his work was included in the groundbreaking Ninth Street Show, which introduced to the general public such New York School artists as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, heralding a new era of American art. Dzubas was subsequently affiliated with Color Field painting, a type of abstraction characterized by large areas of solid color. Wende, which dates from the 1970s, typifies the monumental scale of his later work, incorporating both the gestural expressionism of the artist’s youth and the broad expanses of color characteristic of his maturity. The English translation of the German word “Wende” is “change,” a title that aptly expresses the transformational nature of Dzubas’s oeuvre over time as well as its encapsulation in this picture.