Friedel Dzubas’s Last Judgment

Rediscovered after twenty-five years, the nearly sixty-foot mural painting by the German American artist Friedel Dzubas (1915¿94) was considered a masterpiece of religious depiction in its time. Crossing/Apocalypsis cum Figuras (1975) renders the Last Judgment from the Book of Revelation as a vast modernist abstract tab_x0002_leau unmatched in scale and impact. Commissioned as the focal point of the lobby entrance to the Shawmut National Bank of Boston, its placement signaled the founda_x0002_tional principle of the building¿s design firm, The Architecture Collaborative (TAC). Incorporated in 1945 under the aegis of Walter Gropius (1883¿1969), TAC worked as ¿a group of equals,¿ in Gropius¿s words, who would ¿bring our pragmatic requests and our spiritual desires into interplay.¿ Friedel Dzubas¿s Last Judgement: A Masterpiece of Modernist Abstraction considers this monumental mural painting, Crossing/Apocalypsis cum Figuras, as a testament to Dzubas¿s single-minded ambition within the context of secularized modernist painting at the time. Dzubas¿s process of composition is tracked in never-before-seen documen_x0002_tary photography while his magnum opus is re-framed in light of the complex sources of his hidden, if deeply resonant religious convictions.